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One of the biggest challenges in the business sector is being able to cultivate and create reliable high performing people. And anybody who’s ever been an HR officer or an entrepreneur or a business owner knows how rare and special it is to find the person who performs well under pressure consistently over time. CIA also knows how difficult it is to find that person. And that’s why they invest so much in the recruiting process, but it’s also why they invest so much in the ongoing learning process.
There’s a very systematic formula to how CIA trains officers in their new trade craft skills. They call it a three step model. First, you educate, then you exercise, and then you experience. What that means is it’s not like college where everything is education based, but it’s also not like on the job training where everything is experience based. They start with classroom education, and it really is that. It’s just like being in a college setting. You have an instructor or two at the front of the classroom, and you have a room of anywhere from thirty to a hundred new recruits who learn a skill or a concept. That class might be forty five minutes to two hours long.
Immediately after that class is over, you take a short break and then you come back for a series of exercises or role plays. Maybe you role play with another student, maybe you role play with an instructor, maybe a few students are called to the front of the room where they exercise in real time with all of the other students observing them. What’s happening is the education portion of what happened in the morning is now being demonstrated through the exercise that’s happening in the classroom. Immediately following that exercise, everyone is kicked out into the real world to go actually exercise the skill that they learned and the skill that was demonstrated in the field. And what happens is you will either fail or you will succeed during the process of applying that skill in the real world.
So if you yourself are in a position where you’re either hiring or firing or developing the talent underneath your own umbrella, every person you’re trying to develop needs a certain amount of core education. But that doesn’t mean that’s all they need. On top of that, they also need a safe place to actually exercise the skills that they learn. So whether that’s something that you do every month or every week or maybe even something that you build into their work day, they need a place where they can exercise the skill they just learned, whether that’s a database skill or a sales skill or a marketing skill or a graphic design skill. But even after they exercise that skill, it still isn’t enough. They also have to be put into a high stake situation where they have to apply that skill on their own without a safety net. They have to be put in a position where they must close the sale. They must complete the project. Just like a racehorse, it’s important to understand that you have to prepare and exercise your thoroughbred resource, but until they actually win a race, you never really know if they’re worth the money you invested.