Agree? the most important investment of a company is to improve the skills of its employees
Companies have always been making major investment, some may prefer to invest on promoting reputation, others may prefer to improve employees’professional skills. In my perspective, I don’t agree that the most important investment is to improve employees’ skills because such investment can be very costly; the employees may not seek permanent job in the company and the company should invest on improving its own reputation.
To begin with, investment on improving professional skills of the employees will cost a great deal of money, and many companies simply don’t have that much fund to support it. My uncle used to work in a real estate company and he said that five years ago in that company, every new employee had to take a 2 year training before becoming an official member of the company. The training included basic business courses and other practical skills. However, after several years the CEO began to consider such training a bad policy-it cost the company more than two million dollars a year to fund the the training, and many employees said that the training courses are unecessary since they had plenty of time to learn professional skills when they became official members. Therefore, the CEO decided to cancel the training.
Another reason that such investment is not worth is because many employees may not serve the company permanently and many employees will oneday move to another company, which may cause great financial loss to the company. A company may provide a large amount of fund and support to improve its employees’ professional skills. However, sometimes the company may end up helping other companies instead. We have all read stories that scientists being trained and funded tens of years move to other research facilities, and this will cause huge loss for the original facilities that trained the scientists. Although in some companies, there is policy that any employee who sign up to accept training must at least work in the companies for five years or even longer-in order to prevent job-hopping. Such policy can be very negative impact on the enrollment and many people will choose not to work in such companies because of lack of freedom.
Furthermore, the biggest investment should be to promote the popularity of the company. It’s common sense that famous company can get lots of additional profit, and in fact many multinational corporations are spending lots of money and effort to promote their reputation. Take coca-cola for example. The coca-cola company has spent astronomical sums of money on advertisment and posters in order to let people know about its existence. When people are asked about which is the biggest food company in the world, many will say coca-cola, even though in fact it isn’t. Coca-cola’s popularity has gained huge profit for its own because people in many countries are willing to buy coca-cola rather than local beverage, even though the price can be a bit higher. Therefore, promoting reputation is the biggest investment for a company because such investment will lead to profit.
In conclusion, the most important investment of a company is not to improve the skills of its employees because such investment can be costly and employees may not serve the company permanently. A company’s major investment should be to improve its popularity.
TOEFL listening lectures: A university lecture on the history of the English language