Training Never Ends

The principle emerged from a specific and instructive Samasource failure. In 2016, a Nairobi team trained for an autonomous-vehicle annotation contract performed well initially, then experienced quality erosion six months later when the client updated its taxonomy. The workers had not regressed; the target had moved. The training had been designed as a completion event; the work required training as continuous process. Janah formalized the lesson into an operational principle that extended across every Samasource contract: training is not an upfront investment to be amortized but an ongoing operational expense, consuming between twenty and thirty percent of productive capacity on a permanent basis. The cost was not a startup inefficiency. It was the price of keeping collective understanding current with evolving demands — the price that every organization serving a dynamic technology landscape must pay or accept the quality erosion that its absence produces.