Because it would be very easy to abuse. It would be oh-so-easy to give an employee training worth $200k - in the company's estimate - and then force them to stick around for years.
"But nobody made them agree to that!"
Sure, and nobody makes anyone take on a bad loan from a shady car dealership, or a bad mortgage sold by the same people who tanked the economy, etc., etc.
And to amplify your point just a bit, if the alternative is losing your healthcare and possibly going homeless, what does "agreeing" even mean anymore?
50+k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but the first set of training should have paid for itself before you’re offering the next.
Why not?
> 50k of training over a 40 year career requires salary bumps for retention, but is hardly a major risk.
"Pay 50k for training and then pay a salary bump" is more expensive than "just pay a salary bump to the person the competitor was a sucker enough to pay 50k to train", so how does that work?
Nope. Keeping the same person for 40 years saves far more than 50k of onboarding costs over that timeframe. Employee churn is really expensive but if it’s not coming out of your budget middle management doesn’t care.
Companies do all kinds of objectively dumb things due to poor incentives.
How does that change the number from the perspective of the employee?
The problem is not how to get an employee to stay for 40 years. The problem is, the employee who has just received $50k in training will take whichever job pays more, so the employer who paid the $50k has to offer the same salary as the one who didn't. And then who is going to pay the $50k when they could get the employee that someone else paid the money to train, for the same salary?
No, you generally need more than 1 set of training over 40 years.
Bob’s been with you for 6 years but you’re about to make him redundant and pay unemployment insurance. Meanwhile you’re looking at 10k of onboarding costs for a new role. Suddenly 10k or possibly significantly more worth of training is saving you money and getting you an employee who is dependable and already knows the business. Yet you almost never see this happening because it’s just got to be cheaper to get someone else to pay for training.
As to stealing employees from companies that just did 5-15k or whatever worth of training, they have onboarding costs and on top of that need to offer more money to get someone to swap jobs. Convincing people to swap jobs is really expensive unless the other company is paying significantly under market rates so don’t do that after you just trained someone.
And...why are people immediately quitting to work somewhere else? Your idea of addressing the problem is by saddling employees with debt and forcing them into literal wage slavery rather than fixing the problem of companies not paying people enough to stay.
A way to fix that would be to e.g. issue student loans for the training and then forgive them over time if the employee continues working there. But that's rather disfavored by the tax code when forgiving the loans is considered taxable income, and you would have people screaming about "abusive" companies sticking you with $200k in debt if you quit right after they give you $200k worth of training.