Poor Training Processes: The Biggest Risk Brokers Don’t See
Content for this blog post came from the TIA Livestream Training Mistakes in Brokerage with Nick Dangles of Sync Logistics training . Watch it here.
The Big Picture: Freight brokerages routinely deprioritize training, and it’s costing them more than they realize, whether in margins, in carrier relationships, or in employees who never reach their potential.
That’s the argument Nick Dangles, co-founder of Sync Logistics Training, made on a recent TIA Livestream. With 15 years in the industry, and a decade of it brokering freight, Dangles has seen the same patterns repeat across brokerages of every size.
Why it happens: It’s not laziness, it’s just basic math. Training takes time, and time is the one thing brokerages never have enough of. It’s hard to see the immediate ROI, and the person responsible for training is almost always pulling double duty with another role to cover as well.
The result is a persistent industry mindset, that training is a nice-to-have rather than a dire need. Dangles hears the same justifications constantly: “I give my employees the same training I got, and I turned out fine.”
Or: “I trained my low and high performers the same way, so the training isn’t the problem, the low performers are.”
“That’s a real shame,” Dangles said, “because it has a huge impact on lots of different aspects of your business.” Low margins, load board dependency, operational errors; a lot of these trace back to gaps in training that nobody connected to the root cause.”
Brokers Bucket Themselves: Most training programs land in one of three places. No training at all, most common at smaller brokerages where good intentions get buried under day-to-day demands. The crash course, with new hires given two or three weeks of cramming as much content as possible before being tossed to the wolves. Or the classic desk ride, having the newbie shadow experienced reps, and hope they learn by osmosis. Smaller brokerages tend toward the first and third while mid-size brokerages lean on the crash course. None of the three, on their own, work particularly well.
The shadowing problem: Dangles was careful to say shadowing is a valuable too, the problem is treating it as the only tool. Without structure, a new hire shows up to shadow an experienced rep, the rep’s phone rings, a fire breaks out, and an hour later nobody remembers what was supposed to be taught.
His fix is straightforward; give the person being shadowed specific instructions ahead of time, clear time dedicated to the new hire, and a defined list of what to cover. That way, when that fire does break out, the new hire has a better grounding of the situation and can learn how to handle these issues by watching.
Information overload is its own trap: The crash course model has a fatal flaw rooted in basic neuroscience. People forget roughly 90% of what they learn within a week if it isn’t reinforced. Cramming two weeks of brokerage knowledge into a new hire means most of it is gone by week three.
The shadowing problem: Dangles was careful to say shadowing is a valuable too, the problem is treating it as the only tool. Without structure, a new hire shows up to shadow an experienced rep, the rep’s phone rings, a fire breaks out, and an hour later nobody remembers what was supposed to be taught.
His fix is straightforward; give the person being shadowed specific instructions ahead of time, clear time dedicated to the new hire, and a defined list of what to cover. That way, when that fire does break out, the new hire has a better grounding of the situation and can learn how to handle these issues by watching.
Information overload is its own trap: The crash course model has a fatal flaw rooted in basic neuroscience. People forget roughly 90% of what they learn within a week if it isn’t reinforced. Cramming two weeks of brokerage knowledge into a new hire means most of it is gone by week three.
The shadowing problem: Dangles was careful to say shadowing is a valuable too, the problem is treating it as the only tool. Without structure, a new hire shows up to shadow an experienced rep, the rep’s phone rings, a fire breaks out, and an hour later nobody remembers what was supposed to be taught.
His fix is straightforward; give the person being shadowed specific instructions ahead of time, clear time dedicated to the new hire, and a defined list of what to cover. That way, when that fire does break out, the new hire has a better grounding of the situation and can learn how to handle these issues by watching.
Information overload is its own trap: The crash course model has a fatal flaw rooted in basic neuroscience. People forget roughly 90% of what they learn within a week if it isn’t reinforced. Cramming two weeks of brokerage knowledge into a new hire means most of it is gone by week three.
The shadowing problem: Dangles was careful to say shadowing is a valuable too, the problem is treating it as the only tool. Without structure, a new hire shows up to shadow an experienced rep, the rep’s phone rings, a fire breaks out, and an hour later nobody remembers what was supposed to be taught.
His fix is straightforward; give the person being shadowed specific instructions ahead of time, clear time dedicated to the new hire, and a defined list of what to cover. That way, when that fire does break out, the new hire has a better grounding of the situation and can learn how to handle these issues by watching.
The crash course crash-out: The crash course model has a fatal flaw rooted in basic neuroscience. People forget roughly 90% of what they learn within a week if it isn’t reinforced. Cramming two weeks of brokerage knowledge into a new hire means most of it is gone by week three.
Dangles advocates spreading training out over months, keeping content relevant to what the employee actually needs to do right now, and using a learning management system to trickle information in over time rather than flooding people with it upfront. Again, structure and a plan for action make it a much more successful process.
Don’t forget the veterans: The assumption that top performers don’t need ongoing development is one of the most common and costly mistakes Dangles sees in brokerages. He breaks continued development into three areas: consistent retraining on fundamentals, management training for newly promoted leaders, and professional development to help keep experienced employees.
On the management point specifically, he was direct: being a strong individual contributor doesn’t make someone a good manager. Without training, newly promoted managers tend to default to doing their old job while also telling people what to do. That’s not leadership, and can just scare off other employees.
Tech training with intention: When it comes to onboarding new tech, Dangles said most brokerages make the same mistake. A new platform is bought, and people are just shown which buttons to click without explaining how the tool fits into existing workflows. If employees don’t understand how new technology connects to what they’re already doing, they’ll keep doing things the old way.
The bottom line: As automation takes over more repetitive tasks, the skills that remain, thingslike negotiation, communication, relationship building, conflict resolution that separate the man from machine, are exactly the ones that don’t get enough attention in training programs today. Dangles’ closing argument was simple: if you want to scale, need to improve margins, or reduce operational problems, start by taking training seriously.
