The Training Paradox: Train Them and They’re More Valuable to Me and My Competitors!

Training is a paradox. If you train your staff, they are not just more valuable to you, they are also more valuable to your competitors. Once they have your training, maybe they will simply leave.

• Recruit those who learn fast
• Use just-in-time training

For years consultants have told me to train my employees, that training makes them more productive. But when I do, the employees often walk out the door and some other company gets the benefit of all the money and time I spent!

Like a lot of businesspeople, this advice bugged me and confused me. I knew it was true: better-trained people performed better. Then I started implementing just-in-time training. This approach is much better, and your competitors don’t get a freebie. Create valuable bundles of tasks and responsibilities for new employees—meaningful roles—as soon as they join you. Creating doable, real roles early on requires unbundling the elements of more complex existing roles and creating new, narrower jobs that people learn quickly to start contributing immediately.

This approach gives your employees a great sense of ownership in their work. It also leads to a greater quality commitment, since their reputations are tied directly to observable results within their control. As a person gets up to speed on each set of tasks and begins performing them ably, your goal is to keep adding new responsibilities. Train them in stages for each new work bundle.

The good news is that you can give pieces of important work to people who don’t yet have the depth and wisdom for the whole job. However, you can’t just do it and walk away. This requires a high degree of engagement—ongoing negotiation, coaching, and measuring—from you and your managers.

The real challenge for your company is to create an environment in which all your employees are, to some extent, knowledge workers. That means training everybody, but not for the long haul. Train one hour, one day, and one week at a time.

Most people today want to learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it—and not because they are lazy or have short attention spans. Learning just-in-time is the only way to learn given the tidal waves of information we all deal with. We must be strategic about learning. “Will this be useful today or tomorrow?” becomes the key question.

There are hundreds of corporate universities in the U.S., including a high percentage at Fortune 500 companies. They range from bad to excellent, just like “real” universities. But this is the future—specific skills to do specific jobs in your company now.

Yes, put new employees through boot camps. But if you used to do a ten-day camp, make it three days and get them out working faster. Then follow up regularly with half-day, specific training.

If you want real talent in your new hires, focus on their ability to learn quickly and reduce your focus on the skills they bring now.

Once hired, employees are matched with an initial relatively simple job or task. Deliver training to get them exactly what they need to know so they can be job-ready tomorrow or next week. Then an experienced employee spends the minimum time necessary to teach the new worker how to accomplish the first task.

The new person does not shadow the more experienced person, taking notes, watching and expecting to learn by osmosis. Rather it is a low-cost, one-on-one boot camp for maximum impact fast.

Whenever fresh responsibilities are added to the new person’s job, somebody with more experience provides hands-on instruction—always the minimum amount to ensure that new responsibilities are learned.

Will your employees lose the big picture with this ‘piecemeal’ training? Potentially they could. The low cost way to avoid it (and also build teamwork) is regular team meetings to keep everyone informed of your strategy.

My prediction, as someone who invested heavily in getting an MBA from a leading school? Corporate training and distance learning will eventually wipe out many MBA programs around the world. Yes, we all need to learn how to think, but a liberal arts degree will do that. The MBA provides basic training in key areas of management. However, it is just too long and general, and we all forget most of what we learn in a few months. What’s the half-life of the knowledge learned from an MBA? I doubt it is more than three months. Ten two-week programmes spread over five years and learn what you will use in the next few months is way more useful.

Expect an industry the size of the business schools to come out fighting on that prediction. But they would argue that, wouldn’t they?

The business schools have long had executive programmes. These range from the one-day how-to courses to eight week strategic programmes for general managers. The shorter programmes, a week or less, are the best value for employers. As an executive search consultant for many years, I’ve known lots of senior executives who go on the longer programmes. With new skills, a new perspective and their eyes opened by all the new people they meet on the course, their old job can look a little tired. So many of them leave for greener pastures, which is incredibly costly for the company that paid the bill for the course.

There are hundreds of corporate universities in the U.S., including a high percentage at Fortune 500 companies. They range from bad to excellent, just like “real” universities. But this is the future—specific skills to do specific jobs in your company now.

Yes, put new employees through boot camps. But if you used to do a ten-day camp, make it three days and get them out working faster. Then follow up regularly with half-day, specific training.

If you want real talent in your new hires, focus on their ability to learn quickly and reduce your focus on the skills they bring now.

The Under-30s

One thing I love about the under-30s is their attitude toward learning. Recently I ran some workshops for senior managers on how to hire and keep these strange people (the young). I had a couple of young presenters, including my 18-year-old son, so the audience could hear their stories firsthand.

When we got onto learning, the young people got very passionate, very strong in their views. To summarise their perspective: In their short lives they have seen technologies come and almost vanish (think VCRs and music CDs). They see all technology as temporary, so they learn just enough to get something working and that’s it.

For example, when I bought an iPod and wanted to learn how to do some stuff, not one person from my team, all heavy, daily users had a clue. But they could transfer and play music.

The youngsters also knew that 90% of what they learned in high school and college is out of date and/or irrelevant. Doesn’t that make you think that just-in-time learning is the only way to do business?

Why you need to build a pipeline of people

In this new world of Free Agents, successful organisations need a strong and small core group of talent while they get more of the work done by tapping large pools of fluid talent. So what is a Free Agent? In the business world, your best employees are typically Free Agents—they are most able to leave you. They have options that are often created by employers who don’t understand the market forces at work. The free agent is typically adaptable, technologically literate, innovative, self-reliant and entrepreneurial.

As a result, you need to keep a steady stream of people in the pipeline. Advertise for new employees whether or not there are positions to fill immediately. That way you are constantly interviewing people and screening people so you always have a ready list of finalists.

On www.abacusrecruit.com.au we examine the power of networking for building your career.

But for recruiting great people, networking also has a vital role to play.

In our existing, transaction-focused world of executive recruiting, most employers start an executive recruitment process when they have a specific, urgent need. A better approach is to build a pipeline of potential recruits, with people in the pipeline at various stages of learning about you and your organisation.

There are two ways of building this pipeline:

1. On your own: the key method is to attend industry events and conferences. When there, you need to begin the necessarily long process of building relationships with others in the industry. This is not about blatantly or aggressively trying to poach people. Instead it is about getting to know them: their interests and where their careers might be heading. Then, as in building all networks (which are just relationships), you try and find ways to help them, and ways to stay in touch (such as sending them information, sharing research, etc.)

2. In conjunction with an executive recruiter or Search consultant: you continue to do the same activities as described in the first alternative. The consultant's job is to then feed more people into the process of 'staying in touch'. This increases the numbers of people you have a relationship with, so that you are more likely to have a pool of potential candidates when you need them. The consultant feeds more people in by doing a broad-ranging, non-aggressive search. This involves the consultant, or their researcher, doing phone interviews with perhaps a few hundred people, and narrowing it down to perhaps 50 who broadly meet the requirements of you, their client. Then the consultant stays in touch with some of them, while others are referred for exploratory meetings with you, the client. In this way, the long process of relationship building starts.

When does this pipeline become valuable?

Firstly, when you suddenly have a need, it is much easier to escalate the relationship and start talking to them about an actual job with you.

Secondly, in all people's careers, there come times when they have to consider leaving their employer. Sometimes this is forced on them due to a takeover or a redundancy. Alternatively, they are working in a regional area or a smaller city where there are no suitable promotion opportunities for them. Or there is a restructure at work that has damaged their prospects. Or, they simply want to change careers to one not offered by their current employer.

At this stage, which organisation has the best opportunity to attract this person? We all gravitate to people we have a relationship with, where there is some trust and familiarity. And if you are following this approach, the talent will come to you. It is ALWAYS beneficial to do this before you have a need, when you are rightly seen to have a narrow self interest. But most importantly, many organisations recruit their most valuable people by creating a job for them, perhaps even tailoring it specifically to their skills and aspirations. And such people, almost by definition, become extremely valuable to you and your company.

When you combine these factors and make them work for you, you will rightly be thinking: What scarcity? There is an abundance of talent.