CV /Resume bulk submissions, recruiting, networking, referral recruitment, hiring, interview. If we take a look at Amazon, we see what happens when they make a concentrated effort to train their workforce. Their warehouse workers have completed as much as 5 weeks of computer instruction and another 5 weeks of apprentice training before they are considered as a full employee. That’s 10 weeks of training, not just for knowledge, but for soft skills as well. On top of that they had to go through 3 months of classroom training. This is how Amazon makes the claim that they can find talent for any role that they need. To get an idea of what other companies are doing, we can take a look at Walmart’s training program. Walmart has no brick and mortar stores so when they hire someone they don’t have them do warehousing or customer service positions. Instead of in-store training, Walmart has partnered with in-house providers for their employees to go through. These online providers typically have 2 weeks of classroom training, 2 weeks of digital instructor training, 1 week of virtual classroom instruction and then finally 1 day of on the job training. This is not a long process. To contrast, Amazon is looking at roughly 10 weeks of initial training followed by another 10 weeks of on the job training. What’s the purpose? The cost of employee churn is significant to an employer. Each person is costing you between 30-40k a year. That’s 20-30x more if they quit versus getting re-trained and coming back. That does not take into consideration the costs of onboarding, training costs or the costs to replace someone who has quit. Not every employee you hire should be a long-term employee. It takes more time to train an employee than it takes to find someone new and train them. In addition, employees who are long-term, productive employees cost the company less in turn so it pays to focus your time and efforts training your highest value employees. But what about all the other people out there? I can only speak for myself but in my 20-year career I have worked at a multitude of startups, small and large companies, all kinds of positions, various types of people, in different industries, from all walks of life. I’ve seen a vast variety of results. The bottom line is that they either quit, get re-trained, leave on their own or something in between. Most of the time, they leave on their own. These are the people I see the most because these are the ones that I hear about all the time. If you’re lucky, I might come across someone who left because they were demoted or demotivated. Sometimes the best I can do is get an idea of the general direction to help people who were demotivated and were looking for a new path. I’ve also seen many companies in large and small industries, large and small startups and some more successful than others. I’ve seen companies who focused on training and had great results from training their employees. I’ve also seen companies who placed little value on training and didn’t see the benefits of training their employees. Why is it that you see the companies who put little effort into training and the ones who do a great job at training their employees? Training is hard. I have nothing against it. In fact, I think it’s so valuable that it’s part of every day operations at Google and I have no doubt they do a fantastic job at it. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy. Just like with everything else, there are tradeoffs. The more effort you put into training, the more energy you have left to spend on something else. I don’t mean the cost of training. Sure, you have to spend money to get employees trained. But as I said before, if you are doing a good job and are training the right people, your employees can learn for free. I did an interview with Alexis Ohanian a while back that went into more detail about the relationship between training and retention. This was a great interview but I wanted to summarize it for this blog post. We went into the interview prepared to talk about retention. What Alexis ended up talking about though was how they go through training and how it applies to everyone else. So while I think this has the potential to be a great blog post, it became a bigger interview with Alexis. I’ve included the original parts of the interview below so that you can get an idea of why we went off on this tangent. [tweet “How could the best way to learn improve someone’s performance? I like asking experts.”] I’m not an expert, but I love asking experts. Alexis Ohanian was no different. He and his wife, Serena Williams, are co-founders of Reddit and they’re raising their child here in LA. We wanted to know a little bit about Alexis and how he manages work/life balance, so I emailed him to see if he’d be willing to talk to me. He said yes and it was a lot of fun. You have been successful in a large variety of industries. What is the connection between your skills, experiences and the companies you’ve founded? The link to the knowledge you’ve created and the skills you’ve learned in the work you’ve done is in your network. Everyone has a slightly different answer to this question but everyone can help you by passing on the knowledge they’ve acquired. There’s a strong argument that we don’t just live in a knowledge-based economy but a networked economy and you can never acquire enough skills without knowing people who can help. Every successful company is the result of building a team of employees with different knowledge and skills. I believe that the future of work will be focused on helping employees, their communities and humanity. So the number one thing to do is build strong connections with people through all aspects of your life. People who will help you and make you stronger. What are some of the most important skills that you learned in your career? I can’t think of a single skill. I’ve always found that when I invest my time into learning something I end up becoming better at it. So in that sense, everything I’ve learned has helped me. Even things like how to manage time, the best way to do it, how to write well, these are skills that I’ve learned over time and they’ve all helped me in one way or another. Even the smallest details like the different types of notes you take on meetings and who you should be paying attention to during those meetings have helped me focus. I’ve always been a person who spends most of my time reading about the next thing I should be working on and figuring out what I should do next. These things are great because they help me identify what’s going on but they don’t necessarily get me closer to the next thing I should be working on. How much of that has to do with your age as well? I know it’s hard to give a blanket statement but you are at a pretty young age for someone who’s had a lot of success. Everyone has at least one piece of advice that they offer to other people that has resonated with them and stuck with them over time. There are many books that I’ve read that have resonated with me and stuck with me because they’ve been passed down through my family. My parents are really smart and have done a lot of work in the development world. My dad wrote three books and my mom helped to make them into a film. I can see how the things they were teaching to me and instilling in me might have helped me in a lot of ways. My mom even read a good chunk of the book Blue Ocean Strategy which I wrote with Tom Peters. But it goes beyond books. I spend time going to conferences and I’m always paying attention to what’s going on in the world. I think the big question with training is knowing what you want from it. If you were to describe your training model, how would you describe it? One of my favorite quotes that’s stuck with me over the years is “what I know is in the future, so I learn”. I have no way of knowing what I’m going to need to know 10 years from now so I keep trying to train myself. For instance, I’ve been paying close attention to VR and virtual reality as it’s changed through my entire career and I’ve learned as much as I can about it. Because of that, I know where it could go in the future. Because I’m trying to pick things up quickly and learn them I will continue to be successful in the future. Is there any other advice you have for a new manager that isn’t as focused on training and