The sad decline of on-the-job-trainingWhy companies are struggling to teach employees how to do their jobs
The first day at a new job is always weird. You have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing, who to talk to, or how to even really be. The theory is that over time you get the hang of it — but lots of workers make it months into their jobs and feel like they’re still kind of winging it. It’s not that they don’t want to learn; it’s that nobody’s teaching them. In many pockets of corporate America, on-the-job training mostly amounts to “figure it out.” Workers are struggling to get a handle on their jobs, and this failure falls on everyone — companies, managers, human-resources departments, and, in some cases, the workers themselves.
You don’t need to look far to find evidence that people don’t feel ready when it comes to work. Some bosses complain that Gen Z workers don’t know what they’re doing and are lazy. HR professionals and Gen Z workers argue that young people want to be successful in the workforce, but they simply aren’t given the tools to do it. In a survey from the software company Adobe, 83% of Gen Z respondents said having a mentor at work was crucial to their career, but only half said they had a mentor. It’s not just young workers who are facing a training problem; it’s everybody. For Gallup’s employee-engagement indicator, which analyzes employee perspectives using random samples of working adults, less than half of US employees said they knew what’s expected of them at work. This is a costly problem, too: Gallup found employees who weren’t engaged cost $8.8 trillion in lost productivity worldwide.
Just figuring out the day-to-day basics of the job is a challenge. The pandemic-driven upheaval of the past several years led to high amounts of job-hopping, organizational brain drain, and a decline in loyalty among employers and employees. The chaos has left employers, managers, and employees wondering just how much time and money it’s worth investing in training in the first place. The rise of remote and hybrid work has complicated the situation even more. It’s tough to learn by osmosis over Slack, and the deluge of HR apps and training modules isn’t filling in the gaps.
“Most companies want employees to ‘hit the ground running’ and use apps, AI, and training videos to avoid disrupting another employee’s flow or for the lack of staff to train someone new or help someone learn a new skill,” Ana Goehner, a career strategist and HR professional, said.
That may work in some instances, but in others, instead of hitting the ground running, workers find themselves perpetually zig-zagging, unable to break into a full sprint.
That people feel like they’re not equipped to do their jobs isn’t a new phenomenon. There’s been a long-standing decay of investment in learning and training by employers as part of an effort to create leaner organizations, said Kenneth Matos, the director of market insights at HiBob, an HR-tech company. If you’re cutting costs, training is an easy place to do it. That’s especially true when many employers use the internet to access a wider talent pool than in the past, which means they can just look for a candidate who already knows everything instead of having to teach someone. And, of course, plenty of companies have been axing middle managers, the people who would have previously been in charge of training up younger or newer employees.
“You cut away the people who are the link between big strategic ideas and day-to-day tactical activities,” Matos said. “And so you end up with a scenario of a big strategic speaker talking to a much more junior doer, and they’re like, ‘I don’t know how this translates into my job.'”
If you’re cutting costs, training is an easy place to do it.
Making matters worse, in many workplaces, training and mentoring are treated as an extra, rather than an integral part of the job, if they’re noticed at all. In your performance review, “I spent 10 minutes explaining something to the new guy he was too afraid to ask his boss about” doesn’t rate very highly. As workers and managers are increasingly overextended, these types of unmeasured, softer activities can fall by the wayside. This creates a conflicting web of incentives. It may be better, organizationally, for a manager or experienced employee to spend time teaching everyone on their team to complete a complex task so that a team’s performance is better overall, but if they have an individual quota to meet, they may opt to focus on doing the task themselves, even though it’s not what’s best for the business.
“You end up with this really weird tension around organizational citizenship behaviors like mentoring and developing employees,” Matos said. “Do you give a manager a lower quota because they are also magnifying everybody else’s, or are you assuming they’re going to do more than everybody else, are more talented, and also do the mentoring?”
The people in the middle — who find themselves in between the big bosses and the little guys — are going to focus more on managing up than managing down. It’s hard to tell the CEO that you can’t come to that third unnecessary meeting of the day because your time would be better spent training that new hire on logging sales calls.
“Managers feel so caught up, and oftentimes they feel pressure of, ‘OK, well if I’m going to disappoint someone, then it’s going to be someone junior to me and not someone senior to me,'” said Ashley Herd, the founder of Manager Method, a training platform for managers.
Many managers really are over it. Gallup found that in 2023, managers were likelier than nonmanagers to say they’re disengaged at work, burned out, and on the lookout for a new job. Their workers have been given more responsibilities, their teams have been restructured, and they’re expected to accomplish everything with fewer resources, as in, money. And less than half of managers said they’re sure they already had the skills needed to be great at their jobs, meaning managers weren’t getting taught to be managers.
At the r/managers forum on Reddit, the what-am-I-doing sentiment is evident. “Is it normal to get zero training as a new manager?” one Redditor asked. “I have reviewed the team’s work over the past couple of years, asked them questions to clarify a few things, and asked my boss questions to clarify a few things and have basically picked up most of it. Thought it was kind weird I got zero training, though.”
Technology is supposed to make training better, in theory. Why have an HR person go over the same PowerPoint on vacation policy for every new hire when a quick video or document stored away somewhere can do it just fine? That may work for simple processes like requesting time off or finding subscription logins, but it can become a problem when companies try to throw technology at their more-in-depth training problems. Nobody knows what they’re doing here? Why not get an app to fix that?
Most companies say they have a mentoring program, but few have one that works.
One of the biggest issues with using tech to solve what’s ultimately a human problem is that it’s hard to know if anyone is even going to use it. Take mentorship: Having one-on-one coaching from someone with more experience can help workers gain skills and knowledge that can’t be found in a training video. It can also make workers likelier to stick around longer, help them feel more connected, and boost the sharing of institutional knowledge. Fostering these kinds of relationships is important, hence why the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies say they have mentoring programs, many of which are facilitated by apps and software. How many people are actually using those programs, however, is unclear. Christy Pettit, the CEO of Pollinate Networks, which creates mentoring software, told me she recently spoke with a large multinational that told her despite having 2,000 licenses for the mentoring program, which was mainly an app, fewer than 200 people were using it and participation was declining every quarter.
“Most companies say they have a mentoring program, but few have one that works,” she said. “It feels a little bit like when you buy a gym membership, and it makes you feel like you’re doing something, but you may or may not be going to the gym.”
In some cases, tech-based training materials are disconnected from the realities of the work. All the training videos are done in an “official” corporate speak it turns out nobody actually uses, Matos, from HiBob, said. Or managers aren’t well versed in what their charges are being taught and end up wanting the task done differently.
Even when companies invest in training, it can often be directed toward the wrong people. Herd said that businesses often make the mistake of spending a ton of money on fancy retreats and training courses for their most senior leaders without making much, if any, investment in the bottom rungs.
“You could spend a fraction of that and give good training to all of your employees, and you’re probably going to get more ROI if that’s what you’re focused on,” she said.
Stephanie Wolf, a vice president at RebuttalPR, a legal-communications firm, said the company learned the hard way about the costs of not investing enough time and energy in training people. As the firm grew, managers wouldn’t realize people didn’t know how to do timely tasks until they became urgent, or they’d discover employees were doing things in a way that wasn’t consistent with the documentation and processes in place. That meant they had to rely more on senior staff to do the work and that projects took longer because training was happening alongside execution. “We’ve seen how our whole team can suffer when we don’t train folks thoroughly enough,” she said. To ensure accountability, she’s now the point person on training, because the company found that when training was everyone’s job, it was no one’s. The firm has taken steps to get all the necessary information in one place and to slow the onboarding process down — instead of expecting people to take a week to get up to speed, it now gives them about a month.
Wolf acknowledged it’s “super easy for training to fall by the wayside when your client work gets busy,” which means not allowing that to happen is a conscious effort. “Investing time now is going to save us all time in the long run,” she said.
It’s easy to blame hybrid and remote work for some of these issues, to argue that if people were just gathered in an office together, that would fix things. But many HR professionals and career coaches say that’s not necessarily the case. Yes, human interaction is helpful, but it doesn’t solve problems like misaligned incentives, increasingly stretched managers, and a lack of a real, holistic plan for getting people up to speed. A remote-work training plan probably has to look different from an in-person one, but it’s not impossible to craft.
Essentially, if you see something — or don’t know something — say something. Ask questions, or take the initiative to figure things out on your own.
“In a remote environment, you, as the leader, need to model and also hold the individual accountable for taking initiative, saying, ‘Hey, if you need something, I need you to tell me because I can’t see you,'” Phoebe Gavin, a career and leadership coach, said.
Gavin emphasized that it’s not just on companies and managers to make sure employees are learning and getting onboarded but also on individual workers. Essentially, if you see something — or don’t know something — say something. Ask questions, or take the initiative to figure things out on your own. I told her about an experience I’d had at a job where on my first day, one of four “important” passwords I’d received was for software the company didn’t use anymore. I expressed disappointment that the HR department hadn’t caught the error, which it took me a long time to figure out even was an error. She pointed out that I should have then gone to HR to alert them to the error so the next new person didn’t have the same experience. I did not.
“That’s a tiny place where you could have a positive impact,” Gavin said. It wasn’t necessarily my fault, she said: “Just that was an opportunity that you didn’t take, and those sorts of things happen all the time.”
But not everyone gets the chance to sound the alarm on their employer’s faulty training system before it’s too late. That’s what happened to Michelle, which is a pseudonym I’m using to protect her privacy. Before starting a job at a science-focused communications firm earlier this year, she was assured that she would get all the training she needed to overcome the fact that she didn’t come from a scientific background. When she started, she was surprised by the deluge of training modules and videos that were added to her plate on top of the tasks of the job itself. There were supposed to be meetings with other, more seasoned coworkers after those video training sessions, but eventually, almost everyone stopped showing up. She was fired in a matter of weeks after being told she wasn’t picking things up fast enough. She said she received little feedback and hadn’t been given warning that things were going wrong.
“I felt blindsided by the termination just because I didn’t think I was given enough time to do all of this,” she said. “I was led to believe they would kind of hold my hand a little bit at the beginning, and a month in, to me, is very much still the beginning.”
You know how there are certain tasks in life that feel designed to be so complex that you’ll give up? Like filing an insurance claim or quitting the gym. Work should not be like that, but for many people, it is.
Employees have complained about just being thrown into the fire forever. Many employers subscribe to the idea that you just toss people into the water and see who can swim. Trial by error is part of learning at work — one of the best ways to learn how to do something is to just try doing it. But it shouldn’t be the entire approach. You know how you learn at school? The teacher explains something, you do your homework, it gets graded, you take a test, and you move on once you more or less figure it out. Imagine if teachers just piled 15 algebra tests on high-school students and everyone hoped for the best.
There are aspects of the current workplace environment that make training more complicated to tackle. Remote work is different — you can’t just lean over and ask the person next to you how this one software works again when you’re typing on your laptop alone from your couch. Workers and employers don’t feel as tied to one another, so there may be a decline in investment from both sides in the idea of getting supergood at the task at hand. The middle-management class is increasingly stretched thin and hollowed out.
Above all, it’s really easy to load up on a bunch of tech-based solutions without identifying whether they actually solve anything. Relying on tech is appealing financially because buying a software license is a heck of a lot cheaper than paying a real live person. Many of the HR experts I talked to for this story suggested the training gap was a problem artificial intelligence might fix, a common refrain for intractable problems, no matter the industry. Maybe that’s true — if your manager won’t have a one-on-one with you, having a chatbot to ask questions to isn’t the worst thing in the world (assuming said chatbot knows stuff and doesn’t make things up). But AI isn’t going to be a panacea here. When you need to speak to a real person, no Coursera video or HR app or robot can do the trick. People make human mistakes, and sometimes humans need to address them.
Wolf’s firm is fully remote, but managers have noticed that Gen Z hires, in particular, tend to inquire about an in-person component for training. So they’ve adjusted. For a couple of incoming hires, they’ve rented a coworking space and enlisted some other employees to work alongside them for a couple of days to help them learn the ropes.
