This is a question that sometimes comes up when discussing the opportunities and challenges of having Spanish-speaking employees in agricultural operations. Often, the perception is that if you don’t know the language, it can be pretty hard to train these individuals to do what you need them to do. Knowing the language helps, but this by itself, won’t guarantee success when training your Spanish-speaking employees.
Sometimes, training is delegated to someone who may be bilingual, but may not have the skills or abilities to train. Other times, we are so busy getting things done, that we run out of time to do the training and when we get to it, we approach it without a well thought-out and organized training plan. Training should be viewed as an investment that will return employees that produce results with consistent quality and will help in your retention efforts.