Better question is what the hell does either stat do? One of them is SUPPOSED to increase the amount they can Scavenge but that doesn't work.
Yeah I'm kind of wondering how much of an impact some of the mercs (as well as the 2 kids) can have on some of the other merc jobs like scavenger/janitor/etc with boosted stats. I decided to put 5 people on the "study" job for now and see what happens. It's somewhat expensive in the early game, costing me what appears to be slightly over $70 per day per person (which is several times each of their salaries). So far no stat increases. Will see if it's worth doing soon enough I guess. Normally I would just have all of those people on scavenger duty. I didn't bother putting Rifle Savant on study since it looks like he gets a 95% penalty for that and costs more to enroll on top of that. So I guess he'll just be permanently on scavenger duty.
Oddly enough, based on the wiki's description for how the different jobs work, Rifle Savant should be the worst at Janitor, but he actually gives me more influence as a janitor than anyone else I have. What I really want from that job is a maintenance cost reduction though. But none of my mercs give any benefit at all for that from what I could tell. I don't care about a few extra influence per day.
I'm planning to try boosting my relationship status with all my mercs on this play through and also working on sexing up Loren and Aiko to see how that works as well as using floor crawlers to see what happens when the guys have their corruption boosted if anything. Basically the plan is to try and unlock all of the quests for everyone and complete them before I move on to hiring/buying new people after the initial rush in the first week.
It sounds like an upcoming version is going to change it so that carousing at Dockgraves will count as "spending time" with Bud, which will be nice if true. Currently that doesn't work. It does make him happy but does not count as spending time with him for his attention whore trait. It would also be nice if maybe he started getting more interested in the floor crawlers spending time with him at high corruption and less interested in spending time with MC. That would make him more fun to play with once you got a floor crawler or two to welcome him home at night.
Edit: So from what I can tell the "study" job for mercs is definitely not worth it early on. After a week of having 5 people doing that, none of them has gained anything and the cost is equivalent to hiring a top tier merc. I suspect you're probably better off training each merc personally after boosting the MC's stats high enough.