Training and Equity

In Brittany Ballenstedt's story yesterday on workforce challenges, I was struck by the comments of Jeffrey Risinger, chief human capital officer at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He said the SEC sets aside a certain amount of funding each year to develop its people. Managers keep "ledgers" on every employee to keep track of how much training the agency has invested in them and how much it would cost to lose them.

"If we've invested in our employees, then the risk of losing them is a liability," Risinger said. "The balance of that -- the ones that we've retained -- is our equity."

I can understand not wanting to lose employees after you've put a lot of time, effort and money into training them, but what if the training didn't take? If an employee is still not up to par even after receiving training (and aren't poor performers the ones who tend to get a lot of training in an effort to improve their performance?) it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to hold on to them just to protect your training investment. Conversely, if someone has excelled even without having received a lot of formal training, doesn't an agency have even more "equity" in them?