Post-training Is Vocational Education

The second stage of education is post-training.

After pretraining, the model has knowledge and can reason, but it does not necessarily understand instructions, does not necessarily know how to use tools, and does not know which things must not be said. Post-training fills that gap: instruction tuning, human feedback, safety alignment — training the model into a more usable person, one who understands requests, calls tools, holds the safety line, and speaks appropriately.

This stage corresponds to vocational education: before entering the workplace, it turns a learned person into an employable one.

It teaches general professionalism

What matters is seeing clearly what post-training taught — and what it did not.

It teaches general professionalism, not the specific skills of your role. Holding a conversation, following instructions, using tools, knowing where the lines are — these are the foundations every job needs, like the communication, collaboration, and professional-conduct sessions in a new-hire orientation. A well post-trained model ramps up fast in any role it lands in. But ramping up fast is not the same as being able to do your work. The workflows peculiar to your role, your domain knowledge, your internal tools — post-training never taught them and never could. It is aimed at everyone, not at your company alone.

So post-training maxes out the candidate's qualities: communicative, rule-abiding, cooperative. But these are still a candidate's qualities, not competence in a role. And the stronger the general ability, the easier it is to believe the job-specific work is already handled.

A candidate — and no further

With both stages of education complete, the candidate has taken shape: general knowledge as the base, professionalism on top, ready to interview for any role.

But they still hold no actual job. What a model-training company can do ends with delivering this candidate. Everything after — giving them a role, equipping them with tools, letting them do sustained work inside an environment — is the employer's business, and this book's.