The economic evaluation of operator training

Companies tend to make changes in their training methods in an economic vacuum: little attention is paid to evaluating the benefits to be derived from a change in relation to the costs involved. In this article operator training is treated as an investment, and the cost of the investment and the returns on the investment are analysed to demonstrate how individual firms can approach the question of evaluating the benefits of training. There may even be cases, the author points out, where the ‘sitting next to Nellie’ approach is the best economic proposition.