This article makes it very clear why every worker needs to be prepared for any eventuality in their career. Don't let companies use severance pay as a form of "golden handcuffs" to keep you in line for the last few weeks of your job.

Instead of wasting your time training others to do you job, you should be off finding your own position, hopefully with a company that has more respect for its work force than the current one. Take your knowledge to new company that appreciates your work. If your skills are important enough to pass on to new employees, then it is important enough to keep you employed. Companies cannot have it both ways. They can either pay for the knowledge or do without it.

As far as it being an employees "responsibility" to train their replacements, I don't see what responsibility an employee has to a company that has already decided to fire them. It is a transparent attempt to manipulate your actions, one last time. Your responsibility to yourself to better your career far outweighs any supposed responsibility to the employer.

Build your own cash reserves so that the next time a company decides to try and manipulate you with a severance package you can simply walk away and onto the next phase of your career.

Techies Asked To Train Foreign Replacements

Makarand writes "David Lazarus of the San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that Bank of America (BofA) is moving thousands of tech jobs to India and has asked its techies to train their Indian replacements or risk losing severance pay. Although there is nothing in writing that says precisely this, the employees have been made clear about this responsibility in their meetings. BofA is outsourcing tech work to Indian companies whose employees do the work at half the cost of what a U.S. worker gets paid. According to an estimate, outsourcing has allowed the bank to save about $100 million over the past five years."

(Via Slashdot.)

Technorati Tags: career, job, jobs, work, workplace, technology, exploit, ethics

---