“In 1979, the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station suffered a meltdown which caused billions of dollars in losses. One of the main contributors to the accident was lack of training (Presidential Commission Report, 1979). In 2008, a powerful explosion at the Bayer CropScience plant in West Virginia caused the death of two operators and injured eight others. This plant was producing methyl isocyanate (MIC), the same gas that killed over 4,000 in Bhopal, India. The explosion was caused in part by lack of training (U.S. Chemical Safety Board, 2009). Though not as dramatic, but possibly just as costly, Google’s reputation was tarnished and the company lost millions of dollars after they experienced an outage of all of their App Engine applications. One of the listed causes of the outage was a lack of training (Google, Inc., 2010). There are countless examples of why training is such an important investment for mission critical facilities.

“To be sure, training for mission critical facilities personnel requires considerable ongoing effort and resources. In fact, the cost to develop the initial training program could equal the amount spent to fund the entire program for a year. And more specifically, what I’ve found is that funding for the initial training program should equal the normal first year’s personnel costs and ongoing training should be funded at twenty percent of the ongoing personnel costs. While this may seem a lot, what are the alternatives and what are their consequences? The training program takes individuals from some prerequisite level of skill or knowledge and provides them with the required specific level of knowledge & skill so that they may be successful at their job.”

(Excerpted from Building Mission Critical Facilities Organizations)

As the old AAMCO commercial used to say, “You can pay me now or you can pay me later.” Training is a key component to your mission critical facilities organization success; it is an area that can and does have a measurable return on investment.