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2 Employee and additional training

Emma | 0 Posts

12 Mar, 2019 15:11

We have an employee who is employed as an Operator in our factory, but has expressed a desire to move in to an Engineering role. He has previously studied some engineering qualifications, but not to the level that we would require to employ him as an Engineer. He has shown potential and in the interests of supporting him we agreed to enrol him on an Engineering Apprenticeship course at a local college and allow him to attend one day a week.

Due to the shifts he works, this day sometimes falls on his working day and we allow him time off work or if it falls on one of his days off then he attends in his own time.

Currently, we are then allwoing him to work within our Engineering team one day a week so that he can get some experience, but he is claiming overtime for this as he believes that the day at college forms part of his contracted working hours.

His manager is now asking if we can ask him to work back the hours when he is at college (either in his contracted role as an operator or in Engineering) but not pay him overtime for these hours as we currently do as he feels he owes us the hours.

I think the lines have been blurred a little here withthe arrangement that was set up, but my view is that he is employed as an Operator first and this training is additional to his role and therefore he should work his contracted hours and carry out the training in additional hours. He has opted out of the WTD.

Any advice would be appreciated.

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Teresa | 0 Posts

12 Mar, 2019 15:47

Are you using the Apprenticeship Levy to cover the cost of the training you are providing him with? if so then you do have to provide him with paid time off one day a week (technically it is 20% of the working week, but if someone works 5 days a week on average, it works out at a day) to enable him to undertake that training. That is an apprenticeship levy rule so if you want his day at college to be effectively unpaid, you cannot use the apprenticeship levy to fund the training.

If you aren't using the apprenticeship levy to fund the training, you can require him to work the time back, however I don't really see it as a beneficial approach - ultimately by letting him do the training in work time the organisation gets a motivated, skilled engineer at the end of it. if you make him do the training in his own time, you are probably going to end up with a resentful/un-engaged skilled engineer, who will probably be off to a competitor as soon as they can
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David | 0 Posts

12 Mar, 2019 18:15

In reply to Teresa:
Everything Teresa says - and why not be as supportive as possible if your employer stands to get someone good and potentially unlikely to move on following training into a skill-shortage occupation presumably at lower or at worst equal overall cost - given their prior learning and experience - than that of training school leavers?

Of course the employee wishing to retrain can reasonably be expected to make some pay and conditions sacrifices as an investment in their personal development, but surely it's possible to come to an amicable compromise?
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