An organisation with which I am working wishes to sponsor a member of staff to undertake a degree. They would like to tie this employee to the organisation for 2 years after qualification. I have raised concerns that this is MAY be in breach of Human rights legislation and also an unlawful restraint of trade.
Does anyone have a definitive answer please?
David Marshall
3 Responses
agreement of payment
I’m not sure about the Human Rights angle, but in companies I’ve worked if you left the company within a certain amount of time, you were asked to refund the cost of the training. Perhaps the issue will be whether two years is too long.
It should be okay
I checked our policy with our legal team recently and they said it was okay – providing you (1) make it VERY clear up front, (2) that it is ‘fair’ (e.g. not 10 years – but difficult to define what ‘fair’ is) and (3) the course is not a course that you MAKE staff to complete (unless a professional qualification such as ACCA for an accountant role).
We get people to pay back pro-rata over two years (one year of completing the course and one year after successfully completing the course). If the course is a two year course then they sign up to two contracts – one for each year.
We have successfully clawed back monies from some recent leavers under this policy.
Annah
Variations on a theme
My own experiences mirror pretty much the first 2 responses, the 1 difference being that in one organisation we tied people in for 12 months after completion, and in another for 0 months as we deemed to be getting benefit from the training as they were doing it, but equally this was for a 2 yr MSc and it was paid in installments so the risk to the employer was minimised.
A personal view though is that I can’t help thinking “what is wrong within the organisation that causes people generally to not want to stay despite being given the training?”
But I guess that’s another debate!