Wes Spencer argues that 90% of MSP employees fail without structured onboarding, not just informal shadowing. Unstandardized training creates unknown gaps that lead to mishandled tickets, slow resolution times, low customer satisfaction, and security incidents. He calls for a formalized knowledge process to set most workers up to succeed.
You know, learning and growth is just one of these things that, like, it takes time. It, it doesn't happen automatically. If we expect when a new employee comes into our MSP that they're just going to follow us around and ask a bunch of questions and go check IT Glue and, and that's what they need to be successful, we're really setting them up for failure. The reality is our all-stars are going to figure it out, but call the all-stars 10% of the company. So now you have a 90% fail rate, or maybe that's aggressive, a 90% at-risk rate because we haven't enabled everyone else with everything that we need to be helping them with to be successful in their role. And we have to think about that for quite a bit, is that if we just— if our onboarding and training at the beginning of their MSP growth with us is just follow me around, that is a very limited value. We should always have some amount of shadowing, don't get me wrong. But if there's no formalization to it, they're going to struggle. They just are because there's so many things that they don't know about. Those unknown unknowns are really, really pesky. And sometimes employees come in and say, I know all this, I got this certification, I'm good, I know all about this and this and this. Come to find out they don't. We just trusted that they knew it and they don't. And all of these things turn into mishandled tickets, way too long for a ticket to be closed, reopen tickets, low CSAT, cyber incidents, all things come about because we don't have process for growth for our people in a standardization of knowledge for it.
