The Economic Pay-Offs to Informal Training: Evidence from Routine Service Work

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between informal training and job performance among 2,803 telephone operators in a large unionized U.S. telecommunications company. The authors analyze individual-level data on monthly training hours and job performance over a five-month period in 2001 as provided by the company's electronic monitoring system. The results indicate that the receipt of informal training was associated with higher productivity over time, when unobserved individual heterogeneity is taken into account. Workers with lower pre-training proficiency showed greater improvements over time than did those with higher pre-training proficiency. Finally, whether the trainer was a supervisor or a peer also mattered: workers with below-average pre-training proficiency achieved greater productivity gains through supervisor training, while workers with average pre-training proficiency achieved greater productivity gains through peer training.

Working hours and productivity

“…Figure 1 shows the density of average handling time and shows that the distribution is rightskewed. Earlier studies using performance data of call agents have used similar measures to estimate the impact of training and learning on-thejob on performance (Liu and Batt, 2007;De Grip and Sauermann, 2012;Breuer et al, 2013;De Grip et al, 2016). Panel (a) of Figure 2 depicts the descriptive relationship between our measure of productivity (1/AHT) and daily working time.…”

Managerial time constraints and young worker productivity: Natural experiments with NFL rookies

“…That is, a higher level of pretraining rookie productivity encourages training time allocated to rookies and suggests increased rookie productivity on that basis, independent of other factors. Because the output of unproven rookies represents only a projection, the hypothesis implied by this comparative static motivates the collection of data on rookies' NFL draft status, a reasonable indicator of their market‐determined initial productivity (or “initial proficiency,” as phrased by Liu & Batt, ).…”

General training in labor markets: Common value auctions with unobservable investment

“…They observe that "while most firms provide training, relatively few workers appear to be getting it." Likewise, Liu and Batt (2007) find that different managers at the same company provide unequal levels of training to staff members. They also demonstrate that the effectiveness of training is related to the seniority of the trainer.…”