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A guide to preparing your permanent staff before the campaign, not just the extra hires
Every campaign designs training for the people coming in and none for the people already there. The assumption is that anyone with years in the job already knows it. They know last year's job.
On 10 November, sixty extra hires join a retail chain and every one of them goes through a training path. The same network has a hundred and twenty permanent employees who go through nothing, because nobody saw the need: they have been there for years.
On 24 November, one of those hundred and twenty applies last year's returns policy to a Black Friday purchase. It is not carelessness. Nobody told them it had changed.
The idea that veteran staff need no campaign training rests on confusing two things: the job itself and the layer the campaign adds on top of it.
They do know the job. What changes every November is not the job, it is everything built on top of it for six weeks: different prices, product references that did not exist in September, a returns protocol that gets revised every year, and peak operations that alter replenishment cadence and queue management.
None of that was in their original training, because when they joined it did not exist.
It helps to inventory them separately, because each one has a different owner inside the organization, and that is precisely why none of them reaches training.
| # | What changes during the campaign | Who decides it | What happens if it does not reach the floor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Promotions, prices and conditions | Marketing or commercial | Last year's discount gets applied, or the condition gets explained wrong |
| 2 | Campaign product and references | Buying or product | Nobody can recommend or locate what will sell most |
| 3 | Returns and after-sales protocol | Customer service or operations | Returns handled badly at the highest-volume point of the year |
| 4 | Peak operations: replenishment, queues, opening hours | Operations or store management | The store runs at normal-season pace during its busiest week |
The pattern repeats across all four rows: the decision is taken in a department that is not training, it gets communicated by email or in a managers' meeting, and it is assumed to have landed. Between that meeting and the person on the floor on Saturday there are two or three hops, and precision is lost at each one.
Part of this is not just good practice. Article 19 of Spain's Law 31/1995 requires employers to guarantee preventive training "both at the time of hiring, whatever its modality or duration, and when changes occur in the functions performed or new technologies or changes in work equipment are introduced"¹.
In other words, the trigger for the obligation is not that someone is new, it is that what they do changes. If during the campaign a permanent employee starts handling a pallet truck they did not use before, covering the receiving dock, or working with a different replenishment flow, the obligation applies to someone who has been with the company for eight years.
The same article adds an operational condition worth keeping in mind when planning: training must be delivered "whenever possible, within working hours", and its cost "shall in no case fall on the workers"¹. Campaign training is scheduled inside working hours or it is not scheduled at all.
Even with an impeccable path built for the sixty people coming in, much of what they end up doing does not come from it. It comes from asking whoever is standing next to them.
That means the accuracy of your permanent staff propagates. If the veteran has last year's version of the returns protocol, they do not make one mistake: they seed sixty. And because that informal learning happens on the floor with no record, the error surfaces late, usually through a complaint.
Put differently, how long an extra hire takes to perform depends on the quality of the information circulating around them. If that calculation interests you, it is worked through in the guide to sizing training for a five-week campaign: every ramp day you save is worth more than the content that saves it.
The obvious objection is that there is no room to also train permanent staff in the weeks before the campaign. That is true if you frame it as one more session. It is not true if you frame it as distribution.
Three decisions are enough.
Separate what is shared from what changes. The basic operational block is already produced for the extra hires. What permanent staff need is not that block, it is a short piece covering the four layers in the table above: what changes this year and how it differs from last. It usually fits in under fifteen minutes.
Have the piece built by whoever decides the change. If marketing closes promotions on 20 October, that date is a training milestone, not a marketing one. The inventory of changes is collected from the four areas in the table, not reconstructed afterwards by asking around.
Produce it in a format you can partially rebuild. This content expires by design: next year the promotions are different but the structure is identical. If every campaign requires rebuilding it from scratch, it will not happen two years running. With a modular format, of the kind training video platforms such as Vidext allow, you replace the pieces that changed and keep the rest.
A campaign has two training audiences and almost always serves one. Extra hires are taught a job they do not know. Permanent staff need to be told what has moved since last time, which is little content but reaches a lot of people and holds up the accuracy of everything else.
The sign that this is not happening is easy to recognize: if December brings incidents resolved with "I thought it was the same as last year", the problem was not in the training of the people who just arrived.
On what changes, yes. They know the job, but promotions, campaign references, the returns protocol and peak operations are revised every year. On top of that, if the change affects the functions they perform or the equipment they handle, article 19 of Law 31/1995 makes that training mandatory.
Much shorter than for a new hire, because there is no job to teach. In practice a short piece focused on the differences from the previous campaign is usually enough, provided somebody has collected those differences from the areas that decide them.
Preventive training must be delivered, whenever possible, within working hours, and its cost cannot fall on the worker. It is worth scheduling it inside working hours from the start, because during a campaign the room to make up time disappears.
Because each layer that changes is decided by a different area (marketing, buying, customer service, operations) and none of them considers that it is creating a training need. It gets communicated in a managers' meeting and assumed to have landed.
¹ Law 31/1995 on Occupational Risk Prevention, art. 19 - BOE
Programme to promote permanent employment of qualified young people within the framework of the National Youth Guarantee System. Vidext has received a grant of €25,401 awarded by LABORA (Valencian Employment and Training Service) for the permanent hiring in 2024 of qualified young person(s) registered in the National Youth Guarantee System, an action eligible for co-financing by the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) 2021-2027 or any other European Union fund. Expediente ECOGJU/2024/550/46. This publication is made in compliance with the transparency obligations established by Spanish Law 19/2013 of 9 December.
