Training, Induction and the Ramp
Paid hours spent learning rather than producing. The three components, how to spread them, and why the ramp is the largest and least recorded.
What a new hire costs before the first chargeable hour, one employer's own figures
Advertising, agency fee, interview time.
Paid, not chargeable, plus a colleague's time.
Chargeable at about half the usual share.
One-off, per head.
About eleven weeks of loaded cost.
A hire costs roughly eleven weeks of loaded cost before producing a full week's chargeable work. Compared against an overtime hour, which costs a thirteen per cent premium and starts immediately, the lead time is the expensive part rather than the rate. One employer's own figures, not a benchmark.
Training time is paid hours that produce nothing chargeable, and it has three components: statutory and mandatory training, role development, and the ramp — the period during which a new person is working but not yet at full output. The third is the largest and the least recorded.
The practical lesson in “Training, Induction and the Ramp” is that a convenient number should begin a review rather than end one. A team assessing a transparent approach to ethical employee monitoring for ethical employee monitoring can add timely time and project context, with transparent settings, proportionate access and a documented correction process around every material use.
All three belong in the rate, and the ramp usually belongs in the first-year cost of a hire rather than in everybody's rate.
Teams documenting “Training, Induction and the Ramp” may use Basecamp Shape Up guide as an independent reference. A useful source should prompt a specific check rather than replace case-by-case judgement.
Statutory and mandatory training
Health and safety, compliance refreshers, licence renewals. Known, scheduled, usually booked centrally, and usually invisible to the job system.
Get the figure from whoever runs the bookings, in hours per head per year. It is a short conversation.
Role development
Courses, qualifications, conferences. Varies by grade and by year, and is the first thing cut in a bad year, which makes a three-year average a better basis than last year alone.
The ramp
The weeks during which a new person is paid in full and chargeable in part. In skilled work it runs from six weeks to six months, and almost nobody measures it.
It is also doubled: the new person is slow and somebody experienced is spending time on them.
Measuring the ramp
Chargeable share by week since joining, for the last several hires. A query against the job system, grouped by weeks of service.
The curve is usually clear after five or six hires and it is stable enough to plan with.
Where the ramp belongs
In the cost of making a hire, not in the standing rate — because it is a one-off per person, not a recurring feature of every hour.
Putting it in the standing rate makes every hour more expensive forever to pay for something that happens once.
Where the standing training belongs
In the rate, as a divisor reduction or a cost layer, consistently with how paid absence is treated.
Mixing the treatments between the two is the same double-counting trap described for absence.
The colleague's time
Half of the ramp cost and almost never counted. Supervising a new person consumes experienced hours that would otherwise be chargeable.
Where it is counted at all, it is counted as the supervisor being unproductive, which is exactly backwards.
What this does to hiring decisions
It makes the real question visible: not whether the new person's rate is affordable but whether the eleven weeks before full output are.
An operation that needs capacity in three weeks cannot get it by hiring, whatever the rate comparison says.
Turnover multiplies it
Every leaver repeats the whole figure. An operation with twenty per cent annual turnover is paying the ramp cost on a fifth of its workforce every year.
Expressed that way, retention stops being an HR topic and becomes a line in the labour cost.
The figure worth having
Cost to full productivity, per role family, computed once from the last several hires and reviewed annually.
It is the number that makes recruitment, overtime, agency and outsourcing comparable, and almost no operation has it.
Training that is really recruitment
Where a role requires a qualification the organisation pays for, the cost belongs with the hire rather than in everybody's rate — it is a one-off per person.
The distinction matters because it moves the cost from a recurring layer to a hiring decision, which is where it can actually be weighed against the alternatives.
The second ramp
Internal moves have one too. A person moving between teams is unproductive for a period and consumes somebody's supervision, and almost nobody counts it.
In organisations with heavy internal mobility the cumulative cost is comparable to the external hiring ramp, and it is entirely invisible because no recruitment event triggers anybody to look.
What the figure changes in practice
It converts "we need more people" into a dated plan: eleven weeks for the hire, plus the ramp, means capacity in the third quarter rather than this one.
That is a planning fact rather than a cost fact, and it is the one most often missing from a decision taken under pressure.
The training that never happens
Budgeted, planned, and displaced by delivery pressure every quarter. Where the rate carries a training layer and the training is not taken, the rate is over-recovering against an activity that stopped.
Comparing budgeted training hours to actual, once a year, either corrects the layer or raises a different question with a different owner. Both outcomes are better than carrying the figure unexamined.
The two figures to keep apart
The standing training layer in the rate, and the cost-to-productivity figure separately, by role family.
Two numbers. The first belongs in every hour; the second belongs in every conversation about adding people, and keeping them apart is what stops the rate inflating to cover a one-off.