Jessica Hawkey, founder and managing director of redAcademy. There has always been a distance between what a person learns in a classroom and what the business needs them to do in the office. For years, companies have absorbed this distance as a cost of hiring. They’ve built systems around the months of onboarding, the time spent teaching the basics, and the delay from entry-level junior to productive employee. The arrangement has been manageable because the pace of change has been slow enough to absorb the delays, but AI has changed this story. The pace of change and innovation within the business and externally has widened the distance faster than formal education can close it. The distance is felt in two ways. The first is by those entering the business. Someone entering the workplace from a formal course arrives with the concepts, but they lack hands-on practice and experience. They understand the theory, but they discover that the day-to-day delivery of the work is often very different. When they walk into the office, they are starting almost from the beginning, and their team has to carry their load until they catch up. It is frustrating for the junior who feels as if they’re suddenly on a steep learning curve that’s impacting their performance and wellbeing. A curriculum written to a fixed syllabus cannot keep up with technology that’s being rebuilt while it’s being taught.The second is by the business. Companies are having to hold the space and give the time to a junior struggling to learn new systems and skills. Manager time is impacted, and team productivity slows as the new hire adapts to the office environment. AI has changed this dynamic even more. The tools change from month to month and a curriculum written to a fixed syllabus cannot keep up with technology that’s being rebuilt while it’s being taught. A person trained on last year’s tools is arriving in the office already behind. And the headlines have drawn the wrong conclusions around this challenge. AI isn’t removing entry-level work – companies still need talent, but the roles are broadening and changing, and entry-level employees are expected to know and understand so much more. AI is changing what the roles embody. There is a very easy answer to this challenge. Companies can embed juniors within the business from the outset of their training, giving them the time to learn from the inside as they are mentored, custom-trained on your tools and way of working, and only moving into a permanent role once they’ve proven they can deliver. By the time they join the business officially, there’s no onboarding or technology gap to cross because they know the environment and the team. The skills they bring are current rather than based on a syllabus, and they are confident within their role from the outset. It’s a step to the left in training that puts the learner and the business at an advantage, one that can be customised and adapted to suit unique needs and environments. It is also deftly dodging the need to build a bridge from training to AI to business by simply bringing them all together. Young talent is perfectly positioned to handle this step-change. The people entering the workforce have grown up inside the technology and have the ability to adapt to new tools without resistance and without having to unlearn old habits. When they’re trained the right way from the start, they are a larger return on investment because there is nothing to reskill. The return on this training investment compounds over time because this generation then becomes the leaders who take a business into whatever comes next. If your business stops bringing in and developing new talent, it loses the capacity to adapt, and this, in such a fast-moving market, can be fatal. None of this argues for less training; it argues for training capable of keeping pace with the work and the technology, built close to real delivery on current tools and in the environment where these skills will be used. The gap between education and application closes when training happens within the business and not at a distance away from it.