Why Study Educational Technology?
Why learn about Educational Technology?
Good question! One of the factors that all businesses are coming to terms with is that new quality graduate education, employee training, and skill enhancement is vital for a successful business. So, education technology becomes important if you are involved in student education or in staff training. In fact, far more ‘units’ of educational management software are sold to business than to universities. That fact is a bit misleading because a university may buy a major package such as Canvas or Blackboard and it may be used by hundreds of faculty and tens of thousands of students while most business training is on a much smaller (but equally important) scale.
For businesses, the cost of replacing an employee is significant. There are two types of cost: direct and indirect cost. The first type of cost is direct costs. This category includes:
- Separation costs such as exit interviews, severance pay, and higher unemployment taxes
- The cost to temporarily cover an employee’s duties such as overtime for other staff or temporary staffing
- Replacement costs such as advertising, search and agency fees, screening applicants, including physicals or drug testing, interviewing and selecting candidates, background verification, employment testing, hiring bonuses, and applicant travel and relocation costs
- Training costs such as orientation, classroom training, certifications, on-the-job training, uniforms, and informational literature (Boushey & Glynn, 2012).
Based on the Bouchey & Glynn 2012 study, the average direct cost of replacing an employee is about 20.7% of the annual salary but as the person is compensated more, the higher the cost. (See Figure 1 Replacing employees is costly for companies’ bottom line.) Things are even more expensive in healthcare. As most healthcare workers are highly educated and generally highly paid, it is very expensive to replace employees. In a 2012 study conducted by the Robert Woods Foundation, it can cost up to $60,000 to replace an RN with the average being average cost being $36,567 (That’s $40,787.29 in 2019 dollars.) As RNs have similar education levels and salaries, this is a good indication of RIS costs to replace.
One example from my own history is a hospital where I had faculty privileges. There was an old fashion, mean and nasty thoracic surgeon who was so abusive that staff routinely quit rather than work with him. The healthcare system called in the surgeon and laid down the law about being abusive to staff would result in his privileges being revoked. He said the healthcare system would not dare touch him as he brought in several mission dollars in business every year. Their response was that when staff turnover was taken into effect, the system was losing about $500,000 a year on him. Not surprisingly, the system ended up revoking his privileges after two more incidents. (No other system in the area would allow him privileges and he ended being forced into retirement.)
The second category of turnover costs to businesses is indirect costs. This includes:
- Lost productivity for the departing employee who may spend their last days on the job writing exit memos or with reduced morale
- Lost productivity due to the need to hire temporary employees
- Coping with a vacancy or giving additional work to other employees
- Costs incurred as the new employee learns his or her job, including reduced quality, errors, and waste
- Reduced morale
- Lost clients and lost institutional knowledge (Boushey & Glynn, 2012).
Boushey, H. & Glynn, S. J. (2012) There Are Significant Business Costs to Replacing Employees. https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/CostofTurnover.pdf
Bottom line: Hiring a well-educated professional in the first place and then making sure they are continuously being updated and adding new skills is a wise business decision. All educators need to know about staff training software and all practitioners need to know about educational management software.