How should I handle refusing to sign a document that may indicate that I plan to leave soon?

Question

My company, after being reluctant to send employees on training, finally offered us a training course. The course is expensive and overseas.

If we want to attend we have to sign a document that states that if we leave the company in the following 12 months we need to repay, in full, all the training costs. I plan to leave the company in the next 12 months; refusing to sign this document will be a clear signal to my managers that I plan to leave.

I would like to keep my intention confidential and I would politely like to refuse to sign the contract. What would be the most professional way to handle this?

Answer 1

Do you plan to leave?

Refusing to sign the contract will not actually be a clear signal to your managers that you plan to leave; it will be a clear signal that you do not want to sign that contract and find it objectionable.

Being human, though, they will naturally come up with reasons why you probably find it objectionable. To a certain extent, you can't stop this, but you can handle it. I'll touch on that, but first...

There's a lot of reason for this to be objectionable.

Even if you're planning to stay with the company, there's plenty of reason to be concerned about this contract. In particular, you might simply have to leave anyway. Your work situation may become untenable for various reasons, or personal emergency may demand you leave your job, or a number of other things may change in your life.

Naturally, being obligated to pay $(large amount) to your company if you need to leave is an unwelcome spectre to have looming over you.

That's also assuming best intentions on the part of your employer, and that nobody in the company decides to take advantage of the fact you might not be able to afford to leave the company.

When you decline, communicate your reasoning.

This is the most you can do. Politely decline, and communicate to those offering the contract, simply, that you do not find the obligation fair and acceptable. If you feel the need to explain, or if they inquire, you should not need to explain much:

Such an obligation is not acceptable simply because changes of circumstance can happen and force you into a position where you need to leave your job. This is a natural phenomenon of the workforce. Having this financial obligation placed upon you in such a scenario is not acceptable.

You may also assure them you are planning on continuing to work for the company (for how long is not their business), but if they consider this an unreasonable explanation, doing so is probably unreasonable of them.

Answer 2

I was in a similar situation once. The company was bringing in trainers for a period of 2 months. The team was supposed to work with the trainers two days a week during that time.

The company passed a document around that the training was mandatory and said that if we quit then we need to repay the training costs which was around $2k. Everyone was told to sign it.

I went to my boss and simply stated that I wouldn't sign the document. If they required me to have that training then pay for it was completely up to them as it was not something I was seeking. Fortunately, half the team did this...we just didn't know the others had made the same statements. Because of it the company relented. At first they made the training "optional". Then, when no one signed the document they decided to simply provide it with no recourse.

Now, as to your specific situation. The main questions are whether the training is mandatory or if it's optional.

• If it's mandatory then you can decline to sign saying that if the company requires the training then the company needs to take all responsibility for it's payment. The risk is that they terminate your employment in order to replace you with someone that has the skills required. I suspect this isn't the case though. In part because locating a replacement employee which already has the skill set they want is usually more expensive than simply providing the training to an existing one.

• If the training is optional then decline to sign and simply don't go. It sounds like it might be optional if the company was reluctant to provide it to begin with.

• However, if it's optional and you want to go then I'd say you need to sign the agreement. Mainly because they are paying a lot of money for something that you will be the primary beneficiary of.

Note that all of the above possibilities completely bypasses whether you actually will be at the company in 12 months or not.

I certainly understand the company's position here. I have seen several instances where employees were provided advanced training that increased their market value and they left shortly thereafter. Although it is in the company's interest to keep their employees up to date, if employees have a history of leaving shortly thereafter then the company is not getting the benefit and therefore has no real reason to provide it.

Answer 3

I'd also be inclined to refuse to sign the contract based on the inability to know what might happen in the next 12 months. An unforeseen circumstance could arise that prevents you from remaining in that particular employment and you don't want to take any risk that you may be lumbered with hefty reimbursement of employee training costs.

Unless of course, you see something else in the provided contract that gives you good grounds to refuse to sign it.

Answer 4

First of all, I would not refuse to sign the agreement, take the training, and then leave in less than 12 months and expect to not have to reimburse the company. I think that would be dishonest. While I wouldn't like being in that situation either, I think it's fair for the company to say, Hey, if we make this big investment in training you, we don't want you to just quit the day after you get back and go take all that skill and knowledge that we paid for to a competing company.

What options is the company giving you?

If they say, "Everyone is required to take this training, and you must sign this agreement", then you are in a bind. At that point your only really choices are to either quit your job before the training; take the training, quit, and then reimburse the company; or delay quitting. Which I would do would depend a lot on the circumstances. If the training is valuable in future jobs and/or will look good on a resume, and you have no reason to leave on a specific date, you just don't particularly like the job, then you might just take the training and delay quitting. If there is some reason why you really must quit in less than 12 months -- you have another job already lined up or this job is so awful that you will kill yourself if you have to stay or whatever -- then you just have to make a decision which option is least objectionable.

If not taking the training is a realistic option, then that is what I would do. Like @Rus925 said, if they just sent out an email or a memo that says, "Anybody interested in this training, here's how to sign up and, oh, you'll have to sign this agreement", you could just not reply to the memo. If there are many people in the company not taking the training for any number of reasons, it's quite possible that no one will ask why you didn't. If it's optional, it's likely that many will say, "I can't take that much time away from my regular work" or even "I'm just not particularly interested".

If you must explain, you don't have to reveal specific plans. You could say, "I'm just not prepared to make this commitment. Who knows what will happen in the next 12 months?" If you just started at this job, you might say, "Hey, I just started here. I don't know how things will turn out."

By the way, I had a job a few years back where the company would pay for employees to go to college, but with a similar requirement that if you quit in less than -- I forget whether it was a year or how long -- that you had to repay the money. I took a few classes toward a master's degree under that program but then quit. I never paid any money back, I forget if I waited long enough or if they just didn't bother to enforce the policy.

A similar experience that I have now had at two companies is that after I took the job and had been working there for some time, they came up with new agreements that they wanted me to sign.

In one case they wanted me to sign a non-compete agreement that said that if I quit, I would not get any job involving computers -- I'm a software developer -- for one year. Well I wasn't going to sign that. I had no plans to quit at the time, but the odds were that sooner or later I would, and signing that would mean that I would basically have to agree to be unemployed for a year. Well, I suppose I could flip burgers at a fast food place. In that case I put my foot down and said that I'd agree not to go to work for a competing company, but I wouldn't agree to be unemployed for a year. The company agreed to change the contract, basically changed it from "... job involving computer technology of any kind whatsoever ..." to "... job involving computer technology that competes with ..." (The actual words in the contract were "of any kind whatsoever".) If they had insisted on the original wording, I don't know what choice I would have had but to quit. Better to be unemployed for a few weeks while I searched for another job than for a year.

Another one was a job where they suddenly demanded that all employees sign an agreement saying that any inventions they made or products they developed while working for the company belonged to the company. So if you spent your evenings and weekends developing some new product at home, using your own tools and equipment, not involving the company in any way ... it belonged to them. The agreement even specifically said "whether or not using company property or equipment". I and many other employees didn't want to sign that. Lots of people have dreams of starting their own business or at least some side business. In that case, I just never signed it. My boss came to me once and said that he needed to get my signed copy of the agreement. I just mumbled some excuse and never gave it to him, and nobody brought it up again. If the company had pressed, had said sign this or you're fired ... well, in that case the agreement was only for while you were working at the company, so I probably would have signed and then promptly started looking for another job.

Answer 5

Are they expecting a personal response from you, or did they just email everyone on your team to share the "good" news? If it's the latter, you might not need to say anything.

If you do have to respond, you could just ask to be informed the next time the training is offered, after the first group from your company has returned with an assessment of the program. Potential price tag aside, there's a guaranteed huge time cost considering that the training is overseas; it's natural that some people wouldn't go even absent the contract.

Answer 6

If as a result of taking the training you will pass an exam or gain a qualification that will make it very easy to get a new job, then the employer may have a case. (For example an accountancy qualification that you would pay for yourself anyway.)

Otherwise I would refuse to sign explaining that I could not predict what would happen to my wife’s job in the next year and we need the flexibility to be able to relocate if her job requires it.

Also remember that most training is of no benefit for getting a new job without practical experience.