Develop the Skills or Hire Them? An Organisational Choice
Expecting immediate independence and investing in learning require different staffing decisions, time and support.
Civil Engineering Jobs editorial team
What does “someone who knows what to do” mean?
An employer may need someone able to manage a particular assignment immediately. Another may have room to develop a promising person. Both can be reasonable choices. The problem begins when a role is advertised as a learning opportunity but managed as though no learning time were required.
Define the actual skills needed: evaluating an option, documenting a decision, coordinating a site visit or recognising when specialist advice is necessary. “Be more proactive” is too vague to teach or assess.
Training needs more than a course
The Government of Canada provides assessment and training resources through Skills for Success. [1] Such tools can help structure development, but the organisation still needs to connect learning to the work.
A practical approach is to show an example, explain the reasoning, let the person attempt a suitable task and review the result. Give feedback on what they did, what they missed and what to try next. Assign someone with time to provide that feedback.
Distinguish the gap from the conditions
Before deciding that a person lacks maturity or motivation, examine whether instructions conflict, information is missing or the workload makes careful work unrealistic. Also consider whether the assignment exceeds their present experience.
That does not mean every performance problem is an organisational failure. It means the response should match the cause. Repeating the same instruction louder is unlikely to resolve a missing skill.
Make an honest staffing decision
Hiring established expertise can be appropriate when the need is urgent or the consequences demand it. Experienced people still need project context, access and clear decision routes.
Developing someone requires suitable supervision, practice and protected time. Improvement is not guaranteed, and progress should be assessed against clear expectations. For job seekers, ask which skills are essential on day one, which will be developed and who will support that development. These answers reveal more than a generic promise of mentoring.
Source and why it was chosen
[1] Government of Canada — Skills for Success tools. Selected as a Canadian starting point for assessing and developing workplace skills. The coaching examples above are editorial suggestions, not a prescribed training programme.
https://www.canada.ca/en/services/jobs/training/initiatives/skills-success/tools.html