Don't you think you are going reverse way here??
The reasoning sequence should be:
1. Company spends money/efforts on training. They "know" the cost of training & can justify (say 50K).
2. They don't want the employee to leave the job, unless the training cost is recovered by the gains from services provided by employee. They know the ratio of gains against cost to define the term.
3. This term (say 1 year) is agreed between company & employee.
While here is your reasoning sequence:
1. Company does not want the employee to leave the job sooner. (You are not sure if you can provide environment, where he would want to stay at least a year).
2. A clause is put in agreement with an inflated amount, based on the salary offered; so employee cannot afford to leave.
3. Actually company does not pay much on the training itself. Generally there is internal training of 1 or 2 weeks. Then the employee trains on job. The senior engineer is generally a team lead, whose responsibilities include services from his juniors & he does not book seperate time on "training" throughout the year.
4. Then company is now searching for the reasons on how to justify the amount, so if they have to go legal in future, they are covered. For this, help of such forums is taken.
Is this the real purpose of this forum?
& is HR department also not responsible for ethics?
How does it fit into ethics, to find the reasoning on internet, for the expenses that are not actually directly done by company.
Any way, there are some things that you can do:
1. Estimate the initial 'formal' training cost.
2. Some companies call this period as 'probation' period, so the quality requirements need to incorporate the 'training curve' for employees for this on-job training period into your quality system (say performance index or earned value). Give clear picture to employee about his training curve.
3. Ask the senior engineers to record the efforts for training into the quality management documents.
4. If still the 'budget' of 50K is not fulfilled, then do provide some additional trainings to the employee, so you would actually have a 'better trained' employee. Remember, the basic need of training is for betterment of employee assets; & not to justify the clause in contract.
Hope I was helpful, & pardon me for any strong words up there!
Amod.