By the Time I Trained Them, Half Had Left

I was on a treadmill that never stopped, and going faster wasn't an option, because the training itself was the slow part.

High-turnover environment. People came and went constantly, which meant I was perpetually onboarding new hires. And onboarding was slow — weeks of bringing someone up to productivity through shadowing, supervised practice, gradual exposure. The cruel part: a meaningful number of people left *during or shortly after* that long onboarding, before they ever became productive. So I'd invest weeks training someone who'd leave before the investment paid off, then start over with the next person, who might also leave. The slowness of onboarding and the speed of churn were fighting each other, and churn was winning. I was running as hard as I could just to stay in place.

The longer onboarding takes, the more people you lose before it pays off, and the more you have to onboard. Speed wasn't a nice-to-have. It was the whole problem.

Immersive onboarding compressed weeks into days, and that broke the cycle.

Instead of weeks of shadowing and supervised practice on the live floor, new hires now learn the core of the job in immersive simulation — fast, hands-on, repeatable, several people at once. What used to take weeks to reach baseline productivity now takes a fraction of that, because they're practising the actual work intensively in VR instead of slowly absorbing it through observation. They reach competence quickly, and crucially, they reach it *before* the window where people tend to leave.

That changed the maths entirely. People become productive fast enough that the investment pays off even with turnover. And — this surprised me — faster, hands-on onboarding seems to make people *more* likely to stay, because they feel competent and useful early instead of lost and unproductive for weeks. A new hire who's contributing in days feels very different about the job than one who's still floundering after three weeks.

The treadmill finally slowed down. I'm not perpetually drowning in weeks-long onboarding for people who leave before it pays off. They get good fast, they feel good about it, and more of them stay.

I used to joke that by the time I finished training them, half had left. It wasn't really a joke. It's not true anymore.