ABSTRACT
The costs of gaining experience are those most widely overlooked. They are of course an extension of those very high costs incurred in on-the-job training. In any business there will be bottlenecks which restrict output or sales, and areas of low efficiency which affect the profit-earning capacity of the business. Often these areas of low efficiency are not recognised until an analysis is made, and it is interesting that, frequently, training surveys will throw up the existence of such areas in a clear way. A business needs to have sufficient flexibility to cope with variations in its activity cost caused by outside factors, for example the seasonal effect on ice-cream manufacture. The recruitment of ready-trained staff is often illusory as a benefit to the business since there may be a retraining need which outweighs the advantage of avoiding job skill and knowledge training.
