Everyone believes on-the-job training is faster: skipping the classroom, getting people doing real work, and they’re productive immediately. The reality is much messier. OJT gets new hires contributing quickly, but “contributing” and “competence” are very different things. There’s a ramp-up period that can stretch on indefinitely, where people are busy doing work but doing it slowly, inefficiently, or incorrectly, and in return not delivering value at the level you need.
With OpenRoads Designer this period is especially long because the tools are so sophisticated. Discovering how to work efficiently takes time when you’re learning by observation or trial-and-error. Formal OpenRoads Designer training short-circuits this, compressing months of gradual discovery into days of focused learning, getting your team to genuine competency faster than OJT ever could.
The Hidden Costs of Skipping Formal OpenRoads Designer Training
Extended learning curves
On paper, OJT looks fast. A new hire starts on Monday, takes on a first task by Wednesday, and is shipping design work or plan reviews within a month. However, when you look closer, a task a trained user could finish in two hours takes the new hire eight. There will be constant questions, mistakes to catch and correct, and foreseeable traps an experienced user would have anticipated and avoided.
At three months they’re maybe 40% as efficient as a trained peer; at six months, 70-80%; full independence can take a year or more. That isn’t their fault, it’s the nature of learning a complex tool by observation or trial-and-error. You can’t compress gradual discovery because discovery takes time.
Formal training changes this. A structured curriculum teaches the principles, best practices, efficiencies, advanced features, and common pitfalls all at once. This approach compresses the ramp-up period from six months to two weeks of active training plus a month of applied practice.
Mentor productivity drain
OJT can have major impacts on the rest of the design team. Your best engineer, the one you’d pair with a new hire, is now spending real time mentoring and teaching. Let’s be honest about this part, not everyone is a natural teacher. Being the best doesn’t always translate into being able to teach. As these inefficiencies add up, plan review time starts to get compressed, and questions interrupt workflows limiting how much the more senior staff can accomplish in a day. Multiply that across several new hires a year and you’ve lost substantial capacity from your most valuable people.
Formal OpenRoads Designer training concentrates this cost up front. Delivering training with a structured approach allows new users to learn the right way from the start. This jumpstart will take them from a mentoring burden on the team’s capacity to a value added much sooner. One week of trainer-led instruction beats six months of ad-hoc mentoring.
Inconsistent onboarding experiences
With OJT, onboarding quality depends entirely on who mentors the new hire. If they get paired with someone who’s experienced and a good teacher, great. If they get paired with someone who’s brilliant but impatient, or who learned the tool years ago and has forgotten the beginner’s perspective, the results are unpredictable.
This inconsistency means:
Skill variance across your team. New hire A learned deep template management from their mentor. New hire B never learned it and manually recreates models. Both are “trained” by your standards, but one is significantly more capable than the other.
Morale issues. Some new hires feel confident after onboarding. Others feel lost and uncertain, even months in. This variance is demoralizing and affects retention.
Knowledge gaps. Without a curriculum, there’s no checklist. No one deliberately teaches data validation strategies or certain workflows unless they happen to come up on a project. New hires graduate from OJT with inconsistent capabilities, and no one knows what they’re missing.
Formal training eliminates this. Every new hire gets the same comprehensive education. Everyone learns the same core competencies. You can measure what they know and identify gaps. When you can adjust and improve the curriculum based on outcomes, you get consistency.
Fast-Tracking Your Team’s Output with OpenRoads Designer Training
The paradox of on-the-job training is that it feels fast in the moment but in reality causes delays in real productivity. Formal training feels like an investment (because it is), but it compresses the ramp-up period and gets your team to genuine competency faster.
With OpenRoads Designer, where the tool is sophisticated and the learning curve is real, this difference is even more pronounced. The teams that train their new engineers and designers systematically move faster, with higher quality, and with less friction than those relying on observation and trial-and-error.
And the economics are favorable: external training typically runs $1,500-5,000 per person, a cost offset in the first month of increased productivity alone. If speed matters to your organization, and for most teams it does, formal training isn’t a luxury. It’s the faster path. Invest in training and watch your team’s velocity and capability increase within weeks, not months.
The fastest way to close the gap between “onboarded” and “genuinely productive” is a structured training program built around how your team actually works. Talk to our team today to find out how our OpenRoads Designer training gets your engineers up to speed in weeks, not months.
