Technical training can shorten the learning curve for non-technical positions

Onboarding Insights

• Individuals in marketing, sales and management need to understand the products and services being sold by the company they work for to do their jobs properly.
• According to research, many new employees are not fully productive in their roles for at least a year.
• When an employee is lost after the first year, it can cost three times the employees annual salary to recruit, hire and train someone else.

Companies that make, design or package something likely have  engineers on the payroll. The same goes for those companies traditionally thought of as being highly technical, mechanical or automated.

Labor statistics tell us there were 15.7 million employees in U.S. manufacturing1 and about 600,000 of those are engineers, by far the most of any industry. That means there are 15.1 million manufacturing employees who aren’t engineers and many of those individuals require a deep knowledge of the highly technical, mechanical or automated work that is central to those companies’ success.

Organizations with strong onboarding processes improve their productivity by 70 percent and employees who attend a structured orientation program are 69 percent more likely to remain at the company for at least three years. Courtesy: Zippia

Individuals in marketing, sales and management need to understand the products and services being sold to do their jobs properly. They need to know the nuanced differences between products, their features and their benefits, sometimes even more so than those who designed and created them. Those in accounting, IT, production and even those in the mail room need a base knowledge of the technologies being used within their companies’ four walls.

Bridging the gap

Industrial automation and the factory floor has implementers, integrators and process designers but often the behind-the-scenes teams — equally important to the success of any company — need to know and learn so much of the same information that engineers and technicians innately know and understand.

“My background was in sales, but in the retail industry,” said James Duckett, sales channel lead at Real Time Automation. “When I came to RTA, not only did I have to understand the dozens of industrial protocols supported on each side of our gateways, I also had to learn all their platforms, mounting options and features and benefits. Just shifting my focus from B2C to B2B and learning the language of the industry was a major hurdle.”

Duckett is not alone. Thousands of manufacturing professionals are hired each week, all with qualifying experience, but many times that experience is in another industry. Around 43% of all open positions at tech companies are for non-tech roles, according to a survey from Glassdoor. “Tech companies are no longer a bunch of engineers in a startup,” said Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor. “As they mature, they have to do sales, marketing and strategy and manage intellectual property.”

The ramp-up to becoming fully integrated into their new role can take time. According to an article in Training Industry Quarterly, it takes at least one year before an employee is “fully productive,” and can take up to two years if the system is difficult to learn or pick up, which is the case in most high-tech industries such as manufacturing and automation.

Learning about the learning curve for engineering

The learning curve is a visual representation of the relationship between how proficient an individual is at a task and the amount of experience they have, usually expressed by number of instances or length of time. In short, it’s a chart showing how long it takes someone to do something well. Figure 16 illustrates the difference between learning something simple and something complex.

The learning curve is a visual representation of the relationship between how proficient an individual is at a task and the amount of experience they have, usually expressed by number of instances or length of time. In short, it’s a chart showing how long it takes someone to do something well. Courtesy: RTA

In the 1970s, a psychologist named Noel Burch created a learning model to describe how humans go through four stages of learning when introduced to a new skill. This model is known as “The Four Stages of Competence.”

1. Unconscious incompetence

A person who does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the need to know or learn the new skill.

2. Conscious incompetence

Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, they recognize their own incompetence as well as the value of learning the new skill.

3. Conscious competence 

The individual understands or knows how to do something, but demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires concentration and heavy mental involvement.

4. Unconscious competence 

The individual has mastered the skill to the point it is “second nature” and can be performed easily, so easily it can be performed while executing another task.

Nurturing competency

How long did it take before something became second nature, that is, to go from zero to hero? Learning is a process, not an event. A new job usually starts with excitement and enthusiasm, a new adventure into the unknown. It also starts with high expectations of the employee and employer. However, the reality that an employee will not be “fully productive” for at least a year has the potential to make a great opportunity feel like an overwhelming failure. According to a Glassdoor survey, 61% of employees said they’ve found aspects of a new job different than expectations set during the interview process. Managing expectations also is part of the onboarding process.

“I think many people get disenfranchised pretty quickly in their jobs, often because they simply aren’t good at them yet,” said Sean Johnson, an assistant professor at Northwestern University. “It takes a while to figure out how to do really well in a job. This idea that you feel passionate about your work when you arrive doesn’t map to my experience or the experience of a lot of people I know. The passion often comes from mastering your craft, not before.”

In his article, How to Improve Your Learning Curve, founder and CEO of Lifehack, Leon Ho, offers a handful of suggestions for new hires to get through the initial days, weeks or months to the point where they feel they finally have their legs under them.

• Start with strengths: Take on tasks that you are already well-aware of. This will help you get the hang of the process before you move on to unfamiliar and more challenging tasks.
• Do not expect miracles: There’s no magic trick that will make you “fully productive” within a few days. It takes time and the employee and employer should understand that.
• Repeat and redo: It’s not just time, it’s also repetition. The learning curve theory is all about repeating a task to reduce the amount of time it takes to complete it in the future.
• Use what works: Time is of the essence, so stick to the tried-and-true techniques of learning whatever task you’re working on instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.
• Multi-tasking doesn’t work: Focus on one element, master it and then move on to the next element. Approaching multiple elements at the same time causes confusion and delays proficiency.
• Track success: Evaluate yourself regularly and honestly. If you’re not improving at a steady pace, you probably need to change your learning techniques.
• Stay determined: Coal goes through incredible pressure to become a diamond. As a new hire, you are coal. Once past the pressures of the learning curve, you become a diamond.

“The first few days and weeks on a job can be exciting and overwhelming as new hires familiarize themselves with the company’s work environment and policies, including any unwritten rules,” said Max Messmer, chairman of Accountemps. “Taking full advantage of orientation events and opportunities to meet and interact with colleagues can help smooth the transition.”

Are you on board with onboarding?

“There is a direct correlation between effective onboarding and employee retention and engagement,” says Susan Vitale, chief marketing officer for iCIMS, manufacturer of talent acquisition software. “Ninety-one percent of [first-year] employees are retained in companies that have a formal onboarding program, but of those who don’t, just 50 percent are retained.”

“There is a direct correlation between effective onboarding and employee retention and engagement,” says Susan Vitale, chief marketing officer for iCIMS, manufacturer of talent acquisition software. “Ninety-one percent of [first-year] employees are retained in companies that have a formal onboarding program, but of those who don’t, just 50 percent are retained.” Courtesy: Fast Company

• Organizations with strong onboarding processes increase new hire retention by 82% and improve their productivity by 70%.

• Employees who attend a structured orientation program are 69% more likely to remain at the company for at least three years.

• Employees whose companies have longer onboarding programs gain full proficiency 34% faster than those in the shortest programs.

• Despite these statistics, only 37% of companies extend their onboarding programs beyond the first month.

Bad onboarding costs companies lots of money and job turnover, according to Mark Newman, founder and CEO of recruiting software provider HireVue. “If you could make the first 45 days better, you could cut new hire attrition by around 20 percent,” he continued. “When you lose an employee after the first year, it ends up costing you three times the employee’s annual salary to recruit, hire and train someone else.”

Many companies have a detailed onboarding process they use for every employee they hire, from the C-Suite to the boiler room. Others have no process at all and wing it with each new hire. For new hires in larger companies, the former is more likely the case simply because everyone in HR knows the shorter they make the learning curve, the quicker a new employee can be “fully productive.”

Small companies, on the other hand, don’t have the resources to employ an individual (let alone an entire team) dedicated to establishing and implementing an onboarding program. Yet, smaller companies and especially those offering highly technical products and services, benefit the most from onboarding programs: a fully productive new hire at a company of 25 has a much greater impact on the bottom line than a fully productive new hire at a company of 2,500.

Are you on board with training?

Onboarding is more than filling out forms (the average new hire is assigned 41 administrative tasks to complete). It’s about processes, responsibilities, cultural fit and, let’s not forget, training. Training is one of the most successful elements of any onboarding program and not just in productivity, but also in employee retention. According to a report by LinkedIn, a Microsoft Corp. company, 94% of employees would potentially stay longer with a company that invests in learning and development.

Despite corporate training being regarded as an important tool for employee retention, companies need to overcome challenges associated with facilitation and completion. For one, employees do not have much time to spend on learning and development. According to one report, the average employee only has 24 minutes a week to spend on learning. This might explain why 60% of workers embarked upon their own skills training, highlighting an unmet appetite in the workforce for greater knowledge. It’s been shown that online learning raises retention rates by 25 to 60%.

Another challenge that training needs to overcome is costs: organizations spent $1,296 per employee on learning. However, from a dollars and cents standpoint, the argument could be made that the cost of not training your employees is even higher. Every penny spent on online training leads to a $30 increase in output. And in a survey of 2,500 companies, those with “comprehensive training programs” have a 218% higher revenue per employee and a 24% higher profit margin. Lastly, untrained employees take up to six times longer to perform the same task as trained employees.

“Our most-recruited positions are customer service, call center and outside sales positions,” says Lisa Fleming, public relations manager at Paychex. “Our commitment to employee learning and development has been a strong contributor to company success for over two decades. This commitment has also benefited Paychex from a recruitment and retention perspective. Our training programs consistently get rated as one of the reasons people make the decision to work at Paychex.”

Short-term and longer-term technical training

For employers, there’s no question that training should be an important part of an employee’s first few months, especially for non-engineering positions in highly technical industries. All the statistics mentioned previously are compounded by the shallow learning curve these positions tend to experience, making it even more imperative for those companies to provide comprehensive, longer-term training as part of their employee development process.

“We have continuously asked ourselves: How could it be better,” said Katie Schaaf Klinzing, director of support at Braintree. “We turn this question on our new hires because we’ve learned that our best source of insights into how to set them up for success is to ask.”

For employees taking on non-engineering positions in highly technical industries, ensuring reasonable, mutually understood expectations are in place prior to starting and having access to extensive training after starting should both be part of your decision-making process. Ensure you’ll be set up for success today, tomorrow and further on in your career.

Pat Lafferty, marketing copywriter, Real Time Automation. Edited by David Miller, Content Manager, Control Engineering, CFE Media and Technology, dmiller@cfemedia.com.

CONSIDER THIS

What can you do to improve your company’s onboarding process?

See 22 sources for materials cited in this article.

Resources

https://www.nist.gov/el/appliped-economics-office/manufacturing/manufacturing-industry-statistics 

https://www.bls.gov/careerout1ook/2018/article/engineers.htm 

https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/18/success/get-a-job-in-tech 

https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/trainingindustry/tiq_2012winter/index.php?startid=40#/p/40 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence#cite_note-   Conscious_competence_learning_model_matrix-2

https://www.valamis.com/hub/learning-curve 

https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/6-in-10-employees-say-job-rea1ities-different-than-expected-glassdoor-survey/ 

https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/when-the-new-job-is-a-1etdown-hot-jobs 

https://www.lifehack.org/870273/learning-curve

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/survey-identifies-greatest-challenges-when-starting-a-new-job-183332441.htm1 

https://www.fastcompany.com/3059585/what-to-do-during-your-employees-first-week-to-avoid-losing-them 

https://www.zippia.com/advice/onboarding-statistics/ 

https://blog.atrivity.com/onboarding-for-higher-employee-retention 

https://webinarcare.com/best-sales-training-and-onboarding-software/sales-training-and-onboarding-statistics/#6 

https://learning.linkedin.com/resources/workplace-learning-report-2018 

https://joshbersin.com/2018/06/a-new-paradigm-for-corporate-training-learning-in-the-flow-of-work/# _ftnref6 

https://www.edume.com/blog/employee-retention-statistics-2021 

https://elearningindustry.com/facts-and-stats-that-reveal-the-power-of-the-elearning-sector 

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https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/companies-with-awesome-training-development-programs 

https://builtin.com/recruiting/employee-onboarding

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