Training Program

Overview

Responsibilities: Design, development, delivery, mentorship/facilitating, adjusting the program as needed

Target Audience: Agency employees

Tools Used: Google Docs, Teamwork, Google Meet

Client: Remotish

Year: 2021

Problem

We were hiring for client service team members and interviewed a candidate who did not have enough experience to be client-facing for a while, but they possessed many other helpful skills for a small agency and a willingness to learn. We had always struggled to hire people for the client services team since we were so small and couldn't offer the same financial benefits as competitive agencies to hire people who had a lot of experience at very similar jobs in the past.

Since our agency was a revenue operations agency, our servicing team not only needed expert knowledge of the software we worked with, but also needed knowledge of sales teams, customer success teams, marketing teams, and overall business and operations processes.

We needed a way to hire people who may not have had an opportunity to gain 100% of the skills needed but showed a willingness to commit to learning.

Solution

We created a new role and training program inspired by this candidate, titled RevOps Coordinator. This role would train for 6-12 months across all areas of the business to gain the information, skills, and confidence needed to join the servicing team and successfully deliver RevOps services to clients.

As Operations Manager, I would manage and mentor this role, leading them through the training program to learn about all the different parts of the business that I currently or previously worked in.

Examples:

• Training program plan (cleansed).
  • This was a living document we updated each time we reviewed it
• Meeting agendas
  • Coordinator Weekly 1-1 Meeting Agenda and Notes - first months
  • Coordinator Weekly 1-1 Meeting Agenda and Notes -- starting month 4

Process 

1. Analysis: Researched the skills and knowledge needed to complete the goal and fill in the gaps in the candidate's experience, using my own previous experience working in the client servicing team, managing servicing team members and seeing their common struggles and successes, job descriptions for current services team roles, research in communities about entry level RevOps or overall business operations training, and research interviews from experts for a book on a related topic.
2. Design: Decided the length and topics for the program, with feedback from my manager (the CEO)
3. Development: Created the plan document. 
4. Implementation: Hired the candidate and started them in our new onboarding program which already heavily emphasized learning about the business and the software for the first 30 days, with some added customization and acceleration for this special role. This training program plan was used in place of the custom month 2-3 onboarding plan, since it contained months 2-6.
5. Evaluation: We would discuss the progress or problems with the plan in our weekly 1-1 mentoring meetings, adjusting as needed. 
6. Continuous Improvement: Making feasible improvements on a regular basis, documenting larger improvement feedback for the future, and continuing to improve and iterate. After a few months we extended the program to 12 months since 6 months was too ambitious to gain both the overall business knowledge in each department and also the technical software knowledge for delivering services to clients.

Results & Takeaways

One of the main takeaways was that six months was too ambitious or accelerated to learn everything while also completing real tasks as part of the training, as mentioned above.

Another big takeaway was that instead of continually adding new things to learn each week, it would be better to have more than one week to get used to new activities before adding more new types of work. We also learned that we would have to remove some of the current duties in order to add more responsibilities to learn about, for the sake of time available in the 30-40 hour workweeks. This is what we moved toward later in the program, taking on new responsibilities and learnings each month instead of each week.

Though the employee left the company before they were moved into the client services team, creating and running this program helped us evaluate who we could hire and train instead of trying to find the rare candidate who had all the skills necessary right away.

The employee was also able to find work in another company in a very similar role that we were training them for, the goal role. So the training appeared successful, even if retention was not successful.

Creating and running this training role gave us confidence that we could more easily hire from different sources than only the previous employees of competing agencies who were very similar to our company.

It gave us additional training tasks to add to the regular employee onboarding program.

Creating this type of experimental role was also helpful in the creation of our next new role, FinOps (financial operations) strategist, our first part-time employee.