[Gllug] Graduates paying for IT training before employment

Alasdair G Kergon agk at lug.org.uk
Sun Aug 24 15:11:57 UTC 2003


[Forwarded protecting anonymity]

Has anyone come across this sort of thing before?

Alasdair


----- Forwarded message -----

Subject: Urgent: Need advice on an unusual job offer.

X graduated from uni and has been looking for work. Recently he went to
an interview at a company called ICS.

http://www.icslondon.com/ 

They put out a request for IT consultants (some of whom might be
trainees) who were graduates. Now, considering that X has just got
out of Uni with a degree in sport science, he's not exactly
able to hit the ground running. What the company have basically said to
him is that they'll put him on some of of their training courses (***at
his own expense***) and then once he's done those and passed the exam,
then they'll offer him a job at roughly 24k. I'm not sure what all the
courses he's doing are, but I know that it adds up to about 3 months of
academic training and a 3 months placement. As far as the academic
courses go, I don't know what all of them are, but I do know that they
include these two:

http://www.icslondon.com/training/mcse.asp
http://www.icslondon.com/training/mcsd.asp

The issue:

As you may notice, as far as money goes, we're not exactly talking
about peanuts here, and basically our concerns are that if you're
going to take someone on as an employee, it's a bit fishy to require
themselves to be trained at their own expense, don't you think? My
position is that the courses may well be useful and will result in X
being well qualified in the field, but it's a lotta dosh to fork
out, and basically, given the amount you're paying for training, and
then the amount that they pay you as salary, you probably won't do much
better than breakeven after the first year, and that's negating the fact
that one is not taking one's entire salary just to pay off the training
costs.

What ICS have said to X is that they will train him for 6 months (so
there may be more courses in addition to the ones I mentioned, and a 3
month placement is included in this period) and then guarantee him a job
afterwards at 24K.

We now see that the training is OK but expensive.  However, I am trying
to get a feel for how unusual it is for a company to ask for someone to
pay for their training up front and then employ them afterwards,
provided they have succeeded in the training.  

I am wondering whether this is a sign of the times.  Now that there are
no jobs for life and there is no such thing as job security, only skills
security do IT sector companies do much less training themselves for
their employees/ potential employees?  We have to remember that it was
not a graduate training scheme ad which he replied to - the job merely
said they were looking for IT consultants, including some trainees, who
needed to be graduates.  


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