More and more companies are opening schools for employees / PressFoto

Some companies, including Capital One Financial, SAP AG and DaVita, send new hires to boot camp-like courses where they learn programming, nursing or customer service skills. The company pays the trainees during the training, which can last anywhere from six weeks to a year, but they don’t work full-time until they graduate. The result is workers who are fully prepared to go to work. The companies also say the training programs are cheaper than hiring more experienced workers who may not be right for the job. Workers sometimes earn slightly more than minimum wage while they’re in school.

Why is it so hard to get employees to learn online?

Management / Education

DaVita, which provides care to patients with kidney disease, launched a paid internship program for newly graduated nurses in 2014. More than 6,000 health care workers complete the training each year. It reduces turnover and cuts the time it takes for staff to get up to speed from 12.7 weeks to 10 weeks, says DaVita spokesman Dave Heurman.

Capital One launched a developer academy in July for 60 new hires who are fresh out of college. They will spend six months in the bank’s classrooms. Capital One employees teach courses on cloud computing and app development. The academy’s students are also assigned a mentor to help them understand the company’s culture.

Diego Jimenez, 25, graduated from the University of California with a degree in IT management. He went to Capital One’s academy to learn how to code; without a degree in programming, he says, other employers wouldn’t hire him. The daily 9 a.m.-to-5 classes, coding labs, and teamwork on projects, Jimenez says, allow him to apply his knowledge to the company’s problems. “Most of my classmates went into the workforce expecting to either sink or swim on day one. I work in an environment similar to what I was used to in college,” he says. Many companies skimp on training for entry-level employees, figuring the investment won’t pay off if those people decide to change careers, says Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Costs are rising

US employers spent $1,229 per person on training employees in 2015, up from 2014, according to the Association for Talent Development.

Every year, German giant SAP invites university graduates from around the world to Silicon Valley for nine months of training in sales techniques for SAP products and services. This year, more than 20,000 applications were received for 322 spots at the sales academy, according to SAP’s chief training officer, Jenny Dearborn. The academy accounts for a significant portion of SAP’s $230 million in annual training budget. But Dearborn believes the program is worth it: 90 percent of the roughly 1,000 people who have completed it are still with the company, and their productivity is as high or equal to that of other employees. “Most people don’t become great salespeople by the time they graduate,” Dearborn says.

Translated by Nadezhda Belichenko

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