It's just that having done all their sim training with trainers who know nothing first hand about EK SOPS and procedures, they start their line training with little to no idea of what's expected of them, and the poor bloody training captains are given far too few sectors to squeeze a trained FO out the other end of the sausage machine.
An interesting twist to this thread. As a trainer, I generally agree with the above comments but have to place at least some of the blame on EK. When they decided to employ the 3rd party trainers, they were too cheap to spend any time on standardizing them to EK standards. It was a full year after they showed up before they were given any specific EK training and very little time was spent actually supervising them.
Now, that said, it will always be more expensive to employ 3rd party training. The benefit is that you can use them in the peak times, thereby not having to carry a larger organization than you need for your average training load. In that case, it might make financial sense. In our case, it's probably more of a case of inadequate planning which in the long run will cost us more money.
EK definitely uses the model of finite resources. If they have to increase resources in one area (exorbitant spending on 3rd party training), they will decrease it in others (I'll leave you to to fill in that blank).