Controlling How? Measure, So You Can Manage

We shall begin this chapter with a little numbers game: recent studies have shown that Central European companies are investing €1,000 on average into the development of each and every employee per year (IW, 2009). In terms of the overall payroll, this accounts for 3.6 % of the salaries and wages paid out to employees (Kabst, Meifert, Wehner, & Kötter, 2009). Companies with more than 500 employees are, on average, investing €600,000 into qualification in any given year (CVTS, 2005). In Germany alone, we assume qualification spending to be at around €27 billion (IW, 2009). Recognising the fact that human capital is the greatest asset for an economy without ready access to major natural riches, this seems money well spent. However, we must then consider that only every second company tracks the success of its qualification efforts in any systematic sense—most often, in a very rough-and-ready manner—(Kabst et al., 2009; Kötter & Kurz, 2011). Thus, every second company cannot say whether the €1,000 spent on every single employee was indeed a worthwhile investment. This is an astonishing fact, given that more critical researchers have suggested that only 15 % of what people learn in training is ever actually used in their work (e.g. Robinson & Robinson, 2008). In other words: piles of cash are spent on qualification without anybody checking their success and without the buyer of the training knowing whether he is getting what he wanted for his money.