# Training people in the work place



## ENTJudgement (Oct 6, 2013)

It depends on how your company operates and what kinda system you have. My company's system for example is essentially, your worth is how much money u bring in and how much money u bring in is from how much you were able to charge each client for your hours/services on your projects.

So to ensure high billable hours or money earned for the company, you need a high amount of billable hours but you're not assigned work, projects come in and it's like a market place to see who gets what.

We have to kind of pitch for the project internally, then again externally to the client as they check our C.Vs and experience and hand pick the team THEY want as we only deal with large corporates and they're not stupid, they always pick the best, most experienced guys coz they know, if left up to the company, they will often pair juniors with seniors yet charge out similar rates so clients with very risk adverse projects that CANNOT go wrong would much rather have a team of only highly qualified seniors.

Therefore, if a new person comes in and manages to get more work than you, hes the one who will likely get the pay increase, not you. So to some degree, it's almost like a zero sum game until the company is short staffed. So theres a constant moral dilemma, do I wanna train the new guy and risk losing some of my projects to him or don't put my hand up for the training role so he learns something irrelevant to what I'm doing and I keep my monopoly on these set of projects that come regularly.

Albeit I did train a few people, I really didn't like it, a lot of them expect you to literally spoon feed every step but you can't just memorize steps in something thats complicated, you need to understand the underlying principles. It's like trying to learn maths by memorizing 5x5=25 then getting a problem that looks like *f=7x−2if=7x−2i and g=4q+97ig=4q+97i. *So in a way, theres not really any training coz you're expected to go learn in your own time and understand all the underlying principles and the actual training is essentially how each vendor chooses to code their language and how they laid out their hierarchy. I.E Cisco vs HP switches have different commands and in their wireless lan controllers, are laid out differently but you're expected to know how networks work and function, the training u get is just if Cisco did it this way, then thats how you do it in HP which u can just look up urself anyway...


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## recycled_lube_oil (Sep 30, 2021)

ENTJudgement said:


> It depends on how your company operates and what kinda system you have. My company's system for example is essentially, your worth is how much money u bring in and how much money u bring in is from how much you were able to charge each client for your hours/services on your projects.
> 
> So to ensure high billable hours or money earned for the company, you need a high amount of billable hours but you're not assigned work, projects come in and it's like a market place to see who gets what.
> 
> ...


I am going to take a mad guess that you work for an MSP?

My last place was an MSP, however we used a slightly different structure. Our Level 2 team was shift workers and until you were level 3 (days) you were not involved in billable project work. Whilst I was shift worker, the timesheet was pretty easy to fill in. But once I reached Level 3, I had to put chunks for each of several projects I was working on.


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## ENTJudgement (Oct 6, 2013)

recycled_lube_oil said:


> I am going to take a mad guess that you work for an MSP?
> 
> My last place was an MSP, however we used a slightly different structure. Our Level 2 team was shift workers and until you were level 3 (days) you were not involved in billable project work. Whilst I was shift worker, the timesheet was pretty easy to fill in. But once I reached Level 3, I had to put chunks for each of several projects I was working on.


Nah not an MSP business but obvious why you'd think that.

My company just places a lot of responsibility on their consultants (thats me) so we sort of operate as if we're a contractor almost. We do the project management, all the admin shit minus billing/accounts. We see the work from start to finish, from engaging with the clients, gathering the business requirements, quoting and creating a statement of work based on the requirements gathering and discovery, SoW includes all the PM shit like risk registers, deliverables, milestones, constraints, dependencies, assumptions, methodology, sign off criteria BoMs, SLAs etc... It's the contract essentially.

I guess the best way to think about it, the company has different resources in different areas of the business, you get a client and a very brief outline of what the client is looking at then you try sell your services to the said client, project manage the project, design, implement, test, get sign off and hand over to the business as usual team once done.

A lot of people who come from overseas thinks this is stupid, why are consultants doing everything when it should be delegated better but having 1 person be able to start and finish a project from end to end means guaranteed profitability.


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