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

The solution:

o Hire fast learners

o 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, employees often walk out the door and some other company benefits from all the money and time I put in.

Like many entrepreneurs, this advice upset and confused me. He knew it was true: better-trained people performed better. Then I started implementing the just-in-time training.

This approach is much better, and your competitors don’t get a freebie. Create valuable sets of tasks and responsibilities for new hires (meaningful roles) as soon as they join you. Creating real, actionable roles from scratch requires separating the more complex existing role elements and creating new, more limited jobs that people learn quickly to start contributing right away.

This approach gives your employees a great sense of ownership in their work. It also leads to a higher commitment to quality, as your reputation is tied directly to observable results within your control. As a person catches up with each set of tasks and begins to perform them skillfully, their goal is to keep adding new responsibilities. Train them in stages for each new work package.

The good news is that you can give important jobs to people who don’t yet have the depth and wisdom for all the work. However, you can’t just do it and walk away. This requires a high degree of commitment (ongoing negotiation, training, and measurement) from you and your managers.

The real challenge for your company is creating an environment where all your employees are, to some extent, knowledge workers. That means training everyone, but not in the long term. 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, and not because they are lazy or have a short attention span. Just-in-time learning is the only way to learn given the tidal waves of information that we all deal with. We must be strategic about learning. “Will it be useful today or tomorrow?” becomes the key question.

There are hundreds of corporate universities in the US, including a high percentage in Fortune 500 companies. They range from bad to excellent, just like “real” universities. But these are the specific skills for the future to perform specific jobs in your company now.

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

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

Once hired, employees are assigned a relatively simple starting job or task. Train them to get exactly what they need to know so they can be ready for work tomorrow or next week. Then an experienced employee spends the minimum time necessary to teach the new worker how to perform the first task.

The new person does not follow the more experienced person, taking notes, observing and hoping to learn by osmosis. Rather, it’s a low-cost custom boot camp for quick max impact.

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

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