I'm looking for some advice :-)
The College I work for are all about developing staff, we are quite happy to fund any programme, as long as we can see how it will benefit the College and our students. so although we are happy to financially support staff with their study's, I'm wondering about other support we could give. Today a member of staff asked what our study leave allowance is.
I have checked with our HR department and we do apparently have some guidelines around this. Staff are allowed to take half a day for every exam they have to sit and half a day study leave per exam.
My question is....
Is this enough? Is there a better way we could be doing things? Does anyone work for a company that has a similar policy in place? if so, what is your allowance?
I appreciate it,
thanks.
Replies
we fund a number of further education programmes for employees from HNC through to Masters. Our expectation is that as we fund the programme they show some commitment by doing some of the study in their own time.
If programmes involve residency and block release employees are expected to take leave.
However managers in our business use their discretion, in some cases this may mean an employee being allowed a day but has to make the hours back
Hi Tony,
We have a policy in my company whereby if the subject the individual is studying is directly linked to their role and will enhance that persons capabilities, we allow 5 study days per year. This is in addition to the leave required for exams. We do however, state in our L&D policy that if the person has to re-sit, they have to take that time as holiday.
We also operate a system whereby if a person needs more hours to complete their study, we are flexible in how they work their required full time hours. For example, we have 2 employees who are studying open university courses and they work compressed hours over four days so that they can have one day per week as study leave.
Hope this is useful.
Debbie Firth
It's quite an interesting take on government guidelines when it comes to Training and Study
I'm at a big Uni. Our guidelines leave it to department heads with some direction to consider examination, assessment and study methods and a recommended annual maximum of 8 days.
Hi Toni
We allow 1 study leave day per exam plus the day of the exam as paid leave - but for you I'd say it really depends on what the course is and how much work is involved for the employee, as the wide range of courses you offer probably varies a lot more than here.
If you're funding the course, it's in your organisation's best interests that people pass first time, thereby offering a quick return on investment for you and meaning people spend less time out of the office in the long run. And I'm sure any additional support you can give will be appreciated and (hopefully) repaid with loyalty (ie employee retention). It's not always easy though for smaller firms to be as generous. I'm sure there are firms out their more generous than ours, but we wholeheartedly believe in developing our staff and would review the policy if it became apparent that it wasn't enough.
We are only as good as our people :-)
I'm also interested to see what others come back with, in case we are being really stingy!
Sam.