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Training is like an often underrated thing, particularly in high skill work. You know, it’s it’s funny. In low skill work, like, if you work at McDonald’s or Target, you do get trained. But, you know, sometimes if you work at a very sophisticated technology company, you might not get training.
Employee satisfaction
Training provides all kinds of benefits. So one is just sheer employee satisfaction. People come. They go to work. They have a purpose. They’ve been trained on it. They know what they’re supposed to do. And that just is going to make for a much happier person at work if they have that.
Performance Management
Secondly, it enables performance management. If you’re managing people and you don’t train them, then you haven’t set any expectations about what the job is and what they need to do. If there are no expectations, then how do you communicate that they’re performing below par or well or anything? Because, you know, there is no bar. So training ends up being super important. It also disciplines the manager to kind of provide context and definition around the jobs that they want. Every manager is always incentive to have as big a team as possible because it enhances their career. I think it’s always a mistake to let somebody hire someone unless they have a training plan for that person. Because if there’s no training plan, then they don’t even really know themselves what they need done.
Productivity
Thirdly, the productivity. I think people often think of training as just, like, some kind of skill training where, like, okay, you know, can I learn how to use Google Docs or something, which is probably, you know, in some ways, is the least interesting type of training to do in an organization. More importantly is kind of the training on the context of the organization and how to get things done. I can be extremely smart, but if you’ve got an organization that’s, you know, old or large or kind of has knowledge in it that, you know, and it hasn’t just started, then how do I get that knowledge? Like, how do I know how the organization works? For an engineer, that might be like, how does the architecture of the product work? How do I, you know, check-in code? Who wrote the various pieces of code? You know? What are their names? How do I talk to them? All that kind of thing really, really accelerates people’s time to getting productive, and the kind of optimal way to get them productive is to train them. Often, you’ll see kind of companies where all of the work ends up being done by the very kind of small handful of employees who started it because they’re the only ones who know how the company works. That kind of combination of benefits is very, very powerful and not to be underestimated and not to be neglected.