This is a template for a contractual Agreement between your company and an employee embarking on a training initiative that exceeds a company-determined cost ceiling.
You have been approached by a high potential employee to fund an educational program that exceeds training budget? Knowledge gained would benefit current and future company projects? What do you do?
Get the employee to sign a Training Reimbursement Agreement. The Agreement allows you to be supportive of your employee's educational goal without compromising the company's financial position. Some programs like an MBA can be very costly. At the very least, you want to be able to recoup all or part of the costs in the event the employee leaves the company either midway or after completing the course.
In a Training Reimbursement Agreement, all parties involved agree in writing the total approved budget for the course and the name of the approved course. To encourage employees to stay with the company, repayment fees are usually in sliding scale. So, payback fees decrease the longer an employee stays with the company after completion of the course. There's placeholders in the Agreement prompting input of important information which includes name of the person monitoring reimbursements, minimum grade required for continued payment of the course fee and course duration.
Of course, providing a sliding scale repayment fee only is not enough to motivate an employee to stay. High potential employees are attracted to companies that have rock solid career development program, challenging assignments and effective performance reviews. They thrive on feedbacks and are constantly looking for new challenges. To help you achieve that, check out our Performance Reviews and Training and Development Kits.
This template is used to set out terms and conditions related to company payment of training expenses. It also describe the minimum anticipated period of time that the employee must remain with the company before a portion of the training cost is recovered and protects the company’s investment in the employee’s training.
You may have an ambitious employee with exceptional talent who's asking you to fund all or part of an expensive educational program, such as an MBA or graduate certificate. That's great and you may want to support it, but somehow you have to protect your company's interests as well. Putting an agreement like this in place ensures the employee commits to stay with your company for a pre-determined period of time following training completion, and must reimburse some portion of the training costs if leaving earlier.
Employees you've invested heavily in could leave and work for your competitor as soon as they've earned the degree or certification you paid for.