When it comes to training, the Navy Seals spent a lot of capital into training high levels of skills in addition to doing strong selection. A big part of the reason why the Navy Seals can do that and the average company can’t is that a person can quit their job at a normal company while a Navy Seal can’t simply quit.
If a company wants to hire someone with 1⁄1,000,000 skills it costs the same to employ the person whether they found the person through selection or trained them.
A Navy Seal is essentially for a certain amount of time a slave of the military. We don’t like slavery as an institution and thus our laws don’t allow for that setup. Some bootcamps manage legal setups where they get part of the wages for some time and thus have an actual incentive to teach skills.
Here’s one theory: in order to train systematically, we need some kind of feedback loop—some way to tell whether the training is working. In other words, we need a test. Similarly, we need a test to prove to others that the training worked. And if we have a test, then we could just forget about training and instead use the test to select. As long as we’re not asking for too many bits, that’s probably cheaper than figuring out a whole training program.
So, we end up with a society that’s generally not very good at training.
While this explains why companies aren’t in the business of training skills it doesn’t explain why we don’t have schools that are good at teaching skills.
A school that can say: “People who entered scored X on the test. People who left scored X+Y. The course is 3 weeks and costs 5000$” will get some customers if the skill is valuable enough and the skill improvement is big enough.
If we would have prediction-based medicine we would have the test for providers of medical treatment and thus we would likely have higher skilled treatment providers.
When it comes to training, the Navy Seals spent a lot of capital into training high levels of skills in addition to doing strong selection. A big part of the reason why the Navy Seals can do that and the average company can’t is that a person can quit their job at a normal company while a Navy Seal can’t simply quit.
If a company wants to hire someone with 1⁄1,000,000 skills it costs the same to employ the person whether they found the person through selection or trained them.
A Navy Seal is essentially for a certain amount of time a slave of the military. We don’t like slavery as an institution and thus our laws don’t allow for that setup. Some bootcamps manage legal setups where they get part of the wages for some time and thus have an actual incentive to teach skills.
While this explains why companies aren’t in the business of training skills it doesn’t explain why we don’t have schools that are good at teaching skills.
A school that can say: “People who entered scored X on the test. People who left scored X+Y. The course is 3 weeks and costs 5000$” will get some customers if the skill is valuable enough and the skill improvement is big enough.
If we would have prediction-based medicine we would have the test for providers of medical treatment and thus we would likely have higher skilled treatment providers.