Training Somebody You Did Not Hire
Teaching somebody your way of working makes their method yours, which is the heaviest factor nearly everywhere, and most of it happens without the word.
Reads as a businessReads as employmentCuts both waysDepends where you are
Four factors, and no total. Every bar is the same length: the side is the claim, the size is not. Training is the instrument most often used without anybody noticing what it moves.
You want somebody to work differently, and training is not available
Their output is technically fine and in the wrong style
With an employee
Send them on the course, review the next three pieces
Available to you
Publish the style as part of the brief and reject against it
The price: You cannot improve this supplier, only buy or not buy from them
They do not know your domain well enough yet
With an employee
Induct them over a month alongside the team
Available to you
Supply the domain information as material anybody doing this work would get
The price: It is thinner, it takes them longer, and some of it they will have to learn at your expense anyway
A new system has been introduced that they must use
With an employee
Train the whole team on it together
Available to you
Give them access, documentation and a point of contact for questions
The price: They may charge for the time, and they may decide the engagement is no longer worth it
Their work is good and could be excellent
With an employee
Develop them, over a year, with feedback and stretch work
Available to you
Nothing. This is not an instrument you hold
The price: If you want to develop somebody, you are describing an employee
Four cases, and in the last one there is no substitute at all. The fourth is the one businesses find hardest to accept. One company's own practice, not a description of anybody else's.
Teaching somebody your way of working makes their method yours, and method is the factor nearly every test weighs most heavily. Most training of contractors happens without anybody using the word.
The management distinction in “Training Somebody You Did Not Hire” matters when software turns a brief into a continuous stream of instructions. Teams considering consult the official product notes for employment of relatives policy should define the outcome being measured, limit access and preserve the contractor’s ability to organise the method where the agreement requires it.
It is also, very often, the business solving a problem it created by engaging somebody who could not already do the work.
The workflow in “Training Somebody You Did Not Hire” can be cross-checked against Zoho workplace resources. A useful review should end with named owners and written decisions instead of a copied checklist.
What you are buying instead of training
Existing competence. A supplier is supposed to arrive able to do the thing, which is a large part of what the rate pays for and the main reason the rate is what it is.
A business that routinely has to train its contractors is either engaging the wrong people or asking for something unusual enough that nobody arrives knowing it, and those two situations have different answers.
Information is not training
The distinction that does most of the work here. Handing somebody the documentation, the access, the context and the standard is supplying information, and any supplier doing this job would receive the same.
Sitting with them for a week while they learn your way of doing it is training. The first is material; the second is development of a person, and development of a person belongs to an employer.
The system nobody outside your business uses
The honest exception. Where the work requires an internal application, a bespoke process or a client's proprietary platform, nobody arrives knowing it and somebody has to explain.
Keep it narrow: documentation first, a named person for questions, a bounded session if one is needed. And expect to pay for the time, or accept that the supplier is absorbing it, because they are.
Training that is really onboarding
Where the explanation extends beyond the system into how the team works, who to talk to, what the culture is and what is expected of people here, it has stopped being about the work.
That is induction, which has its own article next, and it is the point at which several factors move at once without anybody intending it.
Courses, certifications and conferences
Paying for a supplier's professional development is a visible thing to be doing. It is also, occasionally, genuinely in your interest — if a certification is required for your work and only your work.
The cleaner form is to require the qualification as a condition of the engagement and let them obtain it, priced into what they charge. The form that moves things is paying for their career to progress, which is what employers do.
The supplier who asks to be trained
It happens, and declining feels unkind. A supplier asking for training is usually asking for something reasonable: to be better at the work they are doing for you.
The answer that costs nothing is to give them the material and the access and let them learn, which is what they would do with any client. The answer that costs is to put them through what your staff go through.
What you give up
The ability to improve somebody. That is a real loss and it is the one managers feel most, because improving people is a large part of what good managers do and enjoy.
The substitute is selection: choosing better at the start, paying for the quality you need, and ending engagements that do not work. It is blunter and it costs more, and there is no version of this arrangement in which it is otherwise.
Knowledge that leaves
A supplier you trained extensively takes it with them and there is no notice period long enough to recover it. This is the practical argument against training that most businesses find more persuasive than any of the others.
The structural answer is documentation as a deliverable: handover notes, written process, decisions recorded as part of the work. Paid for, specified, and owned by you.
The induction that is actually a trial
Worth separating from everything else here. Some businesses run new suppliers through a training period because they are not yet sure the person is any good.
That is selection wearing the wrong clothes. The commercial form is a small paid piece of work with a real deliverable, judged on what comes back, and it answers the question faster and more honestly than four weeks of supervised learning. It also leaves nothing behind that reads as a probationary period.
What to do about the one you already trained
Nothing dramatic. You cannot un-train anybody, and a sudden change in how the engagement is run looks worse than the original drift.
What is available is to stop adding to it, to convert what was taught into written material that any supplier would receive, and to look at whether the arrangement overall is still describable. That is the ordinary repair, and it is the same one at the end of every article in this collection.