Re-training Employees

[Reu11]

Just noticed that my staff seems to be losing skill slowly... I assume this has been re-implemented since the release of Alpha 10... it’s a little bit annoying to have to micromamage all your staff and retrain them individually seeing HR won’t effectively do it on its own! Having a company of over 200 employees and having to do that periodically with each employee is quite tedious. Is there a way to improve this?

[ploppo]

It is a new fake mechanic.

Young employees suffer the most. So, basically, when you hire new YOUNG employees - ie the low-wage employees- they have had their Specialisation skills artificically increased - but their Base skill is incredibly low.

So, all of these employees are basically duds - all of their artificially boosted specialisation stats will drop off monthly unless they are used - ie, if they don't use 2D Art, then 2D Art will drop.

So, basically, they mould themselves in reverse.

It is a weird game mechanic, as most people would expect employees to LEARN skills - but now it is a case of they get some of them and they UN-LEARN them.

Obviously, you can still re-train them to reverse the shrinking of their specilisations.

In a nutshell, I don't like this new game mechanic.


EDIT:
The thing to remember is this is probably a placeholder game mechanic - ie, it will eventually get replaced.

[Reu11]

Originally posted by ploppo:

It is a new fake mechanic.

Young employees suffer the most. So, basically, when you hire new YOUNG employees - ie the low-wage employees- they have had their Specialisation skills artificically increased - but their Base skill is incredibly low.

So, all of these employees are basically duds - all of their artificially boosted specialisation stats will drop off monthly unless they are used - ie, if they don't use 2D Art, then 2D Art will drop.

So, basically, they mould themselves in reverse.

It is a weird game mechanic, as most people would expect employees to LEARN skills - but now it is a case of they get some of them and they UN-LEARN them.

Obviously, you can still re-train them to reverse the shrinking of their specilisations.

In a nutshell, I don't like this new game mechanic.


EDIT:
The thing to remember is this is probably a placeholder game mechanic - ie, it will eventually get replaced.

That makes sense. Thanks for clarifying that! Does it still happen with the medium/high wage employees?

[ploppo]

I have not really tested it as I don't play the game as much, but this is the official statement:

Specializations will now decrease for employees each month, but less as they age, so they start specializing as they get older depending on what they work on most often/have been educated in

[RoxiSinister]

Two takes son this aspect.

First, as you age you do "unlearn" things you don't use much. Consider a foriegn langauge you took 2 or 3 cllasses in back in high school, but now you have not really used it much, or at alll, since. How much of it do you remember? Sure, some migh come back to you with a bit of practice, but it would take quite a bit of practice to get back to where you were in your third year of taking it in high school, right? Unused skills decay naturallly, point of fact.

Second, if you don't keep "up to date" on a skill, you aren't really "unlearning" it so much as you are "fallling behind" with the emerging technologies. Suppose you are a programmer who learned a lot of C programming back in college, and you use it every day in your work, but all lyou ever see is C langauge applications. Certainly you coulld translate the basic programming methods into any new language, but if you don't see that new language, you won't know it. Eventually, your skill level in C is going to be very high from using it daily, but your skill in python, for example, will be nill because you don't use it. Everyone else is using python and also C, so they know both very well. You are now behind the curve. Your skill didn't decay, it just failed to keep up with new things.