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You have a workforce of unskilled recruits. Now comes the step that makes a town productive: giving people professions. Your production buildings do not run on generic labour - they need workers of a specific profession to operate. A building that bakes needs cooks; a building that heals needs doctors. This lesson covers the two ways people get into buildings: training them up, and hiring them in. They are two halves of one handshake, and once you have done it once it never feels confusing again.

Two kinds of citizen

At any moment, a citizen is one of two things: an unskilled worker, or a specialist with a profession - a professor, a doctor, a cook, and so on. Unskilled workers are flexible but cannot run a specialised building on their own. To make goods, you need the right specialists, which means turning some of your raw recruits into trained professionals. Think of it as the difference between a willing helper and a qualified tradesperson - both valuable, but only one can run the shop.

Training at a school

Training is how an unskilled worker becomes a specialist, and it happens at a school. The cost is gentle: 1 energy plus some materials, and it takes 1 hour. The clever part is that a school unlocks more professions as it climbs in level, so your school is a gateway that widens over time. Here is exactly what each level opens up, and it is worth a good look because it shapes what your whole town can make.

• Level 1 trains professors and policemen.
• Level 2 adds firemen and doctors.
• Level 3 adds priests and cooks.
• Level 4 adds bartenders and casino workers.
• Level 5 adds tailors, bankers and jewellers.

So if you need a profession that is not yet available, the answer is to level up your school until that profession unlocks. A level 1 school is a fine start, but a town that wants tailors or jewellers has to grow its school all the way to level 5 first. Plan your training around what your production buildings will demand, and let your ambitions for what to produce set the pace of your school.

Read that unlock list as a ladder rather than a menu, because each level keeps everything below it. A level 3 school can still train the professors and policemen from level 1 and the firemen and doctors from level 2, and it adds priests and cooks on top. So you are never trading one profession away for another - you are only ever widening your options as the school grows. The practical takeaway for a new mayor is to look at what you want to produce, find the profession it needs in this list, and grow your school to exactly that level. If your dream is a cook for a food workshop, you need the school at level 3; if you are content with the early professions, a humble level 1 school will serve you for a good while. Build the school to fit your plans, not bigger than you need today.

Hiring into a building

Training makes a specialist; hiring puts that specialist to work. To hire, you assign free workers of the building's required profession into a finished building. Each hire costs 1 energy. The number of workers a building needs equals the building's level - so a level 3 building needs 3 workers of the right profession to be fully staffed. Let us make that concrete: a level 3 workshop that needs cooks requires 3 cooks, and since each hire is 1 energy, staffing it fully costs 3 energy in total. Predictable and cheap, just the way we like it.

Picture the chain end to end, because seeing the whole journey makes each step feel small. You recruit unskilled workers at the City Hall, walk some of them to a school to train into cooks, then hire those cooks into your workshop, one energy each, until the building has as many cooks as its level. Only then is it ready to produce. It feels like a lot the first time, but it is just the loop again: people in, training, then jobs. Do it once slowly and you will do it on autopilot forever after.

That founder rule surprises almost everyone, so let it sink in before it trips you. The familiar faces you started with are wonderful in other ways - we will see in lesson 10 that they never age or die - but they are not your labour force. Your working population is built entirely from people you recruit or buy. If your buildings keep saying they need workers despite a full-looking town, this is usually why. Look past the founders and count only your recruited hands.

Let me leave you with a way to think about professions that keeps the whole system simple in your head. Training and hiring are really just two questions you ask in order. First: do I have the right kind of person? If not, train one at a school - and if the school is too low a level to offer that profession, raise the school until it does. Second: is that person actually inside the building doing the job? If not, hire them in at 1 energy each, as many as the building's level demands. Almost every staffing problem you will ever face is just one of those two questions answered with a no, and now you know exactly how to turn each no into a yes.

It is also worth appreciating why the game asks for professions at all, because the reason makes your town feel alive. A world where any worker could do any job would be flat - every building interchangeable, every citizen a faceless unit. By asking a bakery for cooks and a clinic for doctors, the game gives your people roles and your town a real economy of skills. It means your school is genuinely important and a well-staffed specialist building is genuinely an achievement. So the small friction of training and hiring is not busywork - it is the system that turns a pile of identical recruits into a town with bakers and doctors and tailors.

With trained specialists hired into a finished building, you are finally ready for the heart of the loop: production. Take a moment to appreciate how far you have come - land, building, people, and now skilled workers standing at their stations. The next lesson is where all this careful setup pays off and your buildings start turning materials into goods you can sell.