We work really hard to stay sharp for the founders we work with. Most employment advice is not written for them. Most of what's out there: it's built for companies with L&D departments, six-figure training budgets, and headcount to spare. Useful information, but often too much noise for a small business to translate into something they can actually use. Our job is to filter that noise and pull out what actually applies at your scale.

This week, one article did that filtering for us.

The Problem With Traditional Onboarding

We have a bone to pick with traditional onboarding, and how employers underprepared people for the job, then complain when they miss KPIs or margins. Make it make sense.

Traditional onboarding looks like a buffet of tax paperwork, compliance modules, and a binder of processes. All of it teaches you how to be an employee at the organization. None of it teaches you how to actually do the job.

Then leadership acts surprised when performance lags.

What Haskell Got Right

We came across a piece from Training magazine about The Haskell Company that stopped us in our tracks. For years, they trained project managers the way most industries train anyone into a hard role: throw them in, let live projects do the teaching, hope they swim. They called it a rite of passage. It was really just the absence of a system, or piss poor planning dressed up as tradition.

Haskell took a different route. They built a rotation model that cycles project managers through every core discipline: estimating, scheduling, field leadership, procurement, safety. With real structure behind it. Foundational learning first, then instruction on the judgment calls a textbook can't teach, then observation checklists, then required field hours. Four pillars, every rotation, no shortcuts.

Here's the line that got us: you cannot specialize your way out of a talent shortage.

We'd take it a step further. There's a shortage of companies willing to actually train their people, or who've gotten so comfortable outsourcing the problem that they're hoping AI quietly fills the gap instead. (That's a blog for another day.)

Why This Isn't Optional Anymore

This is a lesson we've seen play out again and again building and scaling teams, in the military and out of it. Nobody walks in the door knowing how to do every part of the job. They know the foundation, thats why you hire them, but expecting more than that without training is unrealistic.

On-the-job training isn't a one-time deal, either. As the business grows, so do the roles. But too many organizations skip that part. They hand someone a laptop and a login, then act surprised when performance lags, or worse, decide the problem is that nobody knows what they're doing anymore.

Haskell didn't do that. They saw the gap in how project managers were developed and built a process to close it, one with measurable outcomes, not just good intentions.

So What Does This Mean For Your Business?

You don't have to run a construction company to have this problem. Most small businesses have the same gap Haskell had, just without the language to name it, and without the enterprise budget to solve it the way Haskell did.

Onboarding and training are not the same thing, and conflating them is where the breakdown starts. Onboarding is for the person: getting them oriented, comfortable, and clear on how things work here. Training is for the role: building the actual competency to perform it well, and it has to evolve as the role does.

Before you assume you have a talent problem, ask:

• Does onboarding stop once paperwork is signed, or does it continue into actual skill-building?

• If a key person left tomorrow, could someone else step into their role with real preparation, or would they be thrown in to sink or swim?

• Are you measuring whether training changes outcomes, or just whether it happened?

• As the business has grown, has training kept pace, or is your newest hire getting the same onboarding your first hire got three years ago?

If those questions were uncomfortable to answer, there isn't a talent shortage. There's a training gap.

The Work

This is the work we do with small businesses. We find where the gap is between what your team was hired to do and what they're actually equipped to do. Then we build the training that closes it, with outcomes that support the business, not just a checklist that says "onboarding: complete."