Best and Worst Training

[Rapscallion]

People get trained in their jobs. Some of it leaves you ready for the job, but others leave you ready for the scrapheap.

Training stories in here, folks - good or bad.

For me, my worst training was by K, the apparent queen of the fridge until I arrived. She had a condescending tone and didn't like people asking questions after they had been told what to do. She told me to do things the wrong way around, and she tried various attempts to impede my picking rate - my job depended on that.

My best training was the stuff I gave myself in the fridge - I worked out that I had to find out what to do from others, so I went around asking drivers for comments on what was good and bad, and how they wanted it. I also made sure they felt comfortable coming to me with mistakes I'd made.

I've had other elements of training at my current place - quite a few - but none stand out to that extent.

Yours?

Rapscallion

[Ringtail Z28]

The only good training that I've ever had was on how to use the cash register at Target. For obvious reasons they didn't want people screwing up when it came to money.

Walmart and the county had no training whatsoever. They used the "figure it out yourself" style. Walmart management expected employees to figure out how to handle equipment and learn policy on their own, and then flipped out when the employees would interpret things differently than management expected. Training in a County office is similar but management there doesn't get pissed, they don't really care about screw ups involving taxpayers money.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

Last year they decided to put me out in lawn and garden for a while until the kids away at college came back and retook their jobs in lawn and garden.

My training consisted of the manager going into the computer learning program for lawn and garden, skipping ahead to the questions at the end, and then putting in all the answers himself.

Therefore, I was more or less useless out there. All I ever did was water or prune plants, and I knew nothing about the different kinds of plants, or where they even were. I always had to go get somebody else to help customers.

[Kiwi]

All of my jobs bar one, have given me equipment training only, eg, how to run the register. Not one scrap of customer service, product knowlege. I was expected to learn that on my own time (yeah not at minimum wage im not)

however at the gift store they trained me very well, I was taught how to merchandise, do stock reconcillation, order items, they had reps come in specifially to explain their product to me in one on one sessions (all of their other workers had worked there for nearly a decade so they didnt need them) they spent hours upon hours showing me little tips, tricks, hints, friendly advice. Upselling, gift wrapping, fitting a gift to a customers need, how to approach without seeming pushy, how to get through a transaction quickly without rushing the customer etc

for a solid year, I worked on average 20 hours a week and in at least 10 of that I was placed under someones wing and taught something, including our avid gardener who taught me every single silk flower we sold (like 200 different types) and our hardware man who sold swords, knifes, armour and mens gifts.

I miss that job more than I can say, I loveeeed going to work! I bawled my eyes out when I left, I couldnt even say it, I had to write it on paper and read it off.

The gift store had many repeat customers, because the service was excellent, they prided themselves on having enough staff working to pretty much have a personal shopper for everyone. The staff knew all of their product so well we didnt have to get a manager for anything, we had total independant authority for any discount the customers deserved. The owners knew that loyal staff were an ASSET to the company and treated them as such. Thats why they made so much money, customers came back all the time and thats also why they hadnt needed to get a new staff member in over 10 years before me.

If I ever own a shop, thats how Im going to train and treat my staff. Not as an expense to be cut down as much as possible, but as an important asset that will make the store more money than advertising ever could.

[CherryB]

Was hired some years back as a "loan officer" for a mortgage lender specializing in home equity loans and their target customer were folks with less than stellar credit. (ie they had a horrendous APR rate for their loans and charged mucho points and closing costs on every loan).

But I didn't know any of that when I applied, was hired and assured that I would receive full training, not only in how mortgage lending worked, but how to cold call customers and lastly how to use the computer program they used for all of their lending applications, appraisal requests, credit checks-you get the idea.

On my first day I walked in only to be told "I am sorry the manager( he was the one who was supposed to train me and the 4 other people he hired)who hired you is in Phoenix at a very important meeting today, so you can just hang out and listen to some of the other reps on the phone."

So I and the 4 other new hires spent the day trying absorb the best we could, listening, asking questions, etc. Next day, we all get to work only to be told "um, manager was fired while up in Phoenix yesterday." Just flippin peachy! Now what do we do?

Well, when life hands you lemons-so I found the computer program training manual and sat down and started figuring out the damned prgram. Another agent took pity on me and gave me some leads to call and coached me a lil bit on how to do cold calling. So there I sat for the next week and just basically figured it out and helped the other new agent who had also stuck it out. Oh- the other 3 new hires just quit showing up to work after the first day.

Worked there 4 months and quit when they refused to give us our full commission checks. They took took $300 "service fee" from eash check and claimed they "forgot" to tell us this would happen on each check.

I figured it wasn't worth fighting over-but in a few months I got a letter from an attorney's office asking if I would like to join a class action lawsuit against this company because they had been shorting pay checks. Long story short- took me 2 years but I got my money out of em!

[Jet]

Most of my jobs were a train yourself type thing, first day of work where I work now. I was told to put cds away and help customers that was about it. When I moved to the camera department I had a little training but knew a good bit before. Then I got told I was going to be our wireless expert, I told my boss I knew nothing about cell phones. He said too bad. So at that point I had to either sink or swim, and boy did I swim. We ended up being top 50 in the company pretty much each month when I ran the department. Then I got moved to computer sales, I followed M around one day in street clothes then got tossed to the dogs. I think I'm swimming fairly well there.

[nicegirl]

i had "ok" training from wal mart. i did the computer based learning thing, then went to shadow a person at the register. in a week others were shadowing me.

as for starbucks, it was really weird. i went through a computer based learning for the register. then i was thrown to the wlves. for the marking cups, that was easy since i had been a customer for years. i kinda already knew how to do that.

getting bar training was difficult. the store i started at still had the old manual espresso machines. the store was gonna get the new automatic ones soon so they gave me very minimal training with it.

amazingly, i have been with the 'bux almost 3 years.

[Phone Jockey]

The 401(k) company knew I'd never worked with retirement accounts & still only gave me maybe 2 wks of training before shoving me onto the phones. I did that job for 2 yrs & still don't know all that much about 401(k)'s. You KNOW that's bad when you don't really learn anything in over 2 yrs. However, I was smart enough to bullshit it for that long...yay me!

I've been trained well at both of the remaining call centers, both car insurance & now the cable industry. We received 7 wks of training on software, procedures, necessary info, etc... at current job. Thank goodness for that! Plus, we can ask just about any of our co-workers & they're always very helpful when we're stumped. The woman who trained me for my new position was awesome. She had drawn up a training manual for her job & had lots of good information. She trained me in 4 days. How awesome is that?

[Jayn_Newell]

Oh, time for me to talk about they worst shift I've ever worked (so far).

Last summer I was working as a security guard. Now, I got general 'training' when I started, but a) that was reading a manual and b) I needed seperate training for each place I worked, to know what to do at each particular post. Unfortunately, how good that training was differed from post to post

One of my first postings was a 12-hour overnight shift, 8pm to 8am. Was boring, but pretty easy. I soon learned to bring a book ;) I never really got trained on that post though--it was left to the other guard with me (rather than a supervisor) and she basically told me to sit in a chair all night. Even at the end of the two weeks I was there I was never entirely sure what to do, although I did learn a lot more on the one shift I should never have accepted.

See, I wasn't given a schedule--I was offered shifts and I either accepted them or I didn't. My weekly schedule was worked out on Tuesday morning (though it became not uncommon to be called in last minute), at which point I'd been asleep for an hour or so--in other words, awake I most certainly was not. So the first Tuesday after I was working there I was offered the shift opposite the one I was working--8am to 8pm. Due to me not really being awake, and not yet figuring out that I didn't have to take everything offered to me, I accepted. Bad move. But I figured, hey, I'd go to bed earlier and try and make it through the day.

The night before I did not sleep at all. I started getting sleepy at about 5am--which, to me, was too late to get any sleep, since I hate to get up and rush out the door. To make matters worse, when I got there, I found that my co-worker was on his first day. Not at that site, but with the company. So let's recap--

-I don't know what I'm doing, having never been trained properly and only having worked the easier shift at that site
-My co-worker knows less than I do
-There's no supervisor on site from our company
-I'm too tired to care about doing a good job

I did call about an hour in to ask for a replacement, since I was barely awake. My replacement arrived (after a second call) at 5pm--9 hours in. Meanwhile, the office had been called by the site supervisor (not ours, the company who hired us) because we weren't doing our job. I felt bad, but at that point I was just starting to wake back up after nearly falling asleep on the job. Finally a supervisor comes and actually gives my co-worker and I some proper instruction on what to be doing, which I passed onto my relief when he arrived. So that was the day that I learned--

-if I don't know what I'm doing, call for a supervisor to come show me
-my sleep is worth more than my paycheck

[wagegoth]

for a solid year, I worked on average 20 hours a week and in at least 10 of that I was placed under someones wing and taught something, including our avid gardener who taught me every single silk flower we sold (like 200 different types) and our hardware man who sold swords, knifes, armour and mens gifts.

That store sounds awesome. It would be very hard to leave.

[Kiwi]

It was, I cryed my eyes out for a week (not joking) they offered me my job back (I left to meet my now boyfriend) when I got home from travelling and I regret not taking it.... stupid craft store.

If any of you ever find a place that will put in that much effort into training you, stay. A supportive workplace is one in a million.

[Gurndigarn]

I had a boss who told me his first day went something like this:

(Setting: medium-large arcade)
"Hey, I'm here to start my shift."
(His boss hands him the store keys) "Good. Boy, am I beat. See you tomorrow."
"Huh? What do I do?"
(Gets funny look from his new boss) "Make change. Take care of things. That kind of stuff."

I got better training. It was two full shifts before I ran it by myself.

[TNT]

We received 7 wks of training on software, procedures, necessary info, etc... at current job. Thank goodness for that! Plus, we can ask just about any of our co-workers & they're always very helpful when we're stumped.

You got seven weeks of training? Wow. Normally, CSRs where I work get four weeks. But, I started as a temp, doing nothing but taking orders. So, I got two days of training and then started on the phones. After a few weeks of that, I got three hours of billing training, and started taking billing calls. After a few weeks of that, I got a brief training in trouble calls, and starting doing that. And so on and so forth. All told, I had 3 and 1/2 days of classroom training.

During all of this, I sat among the Tier II tech support people and they didn't know anything about the customer service end of things. I relied on the help desk all the time.

Actually, if I had it to do all over again, I'd do it the same way. It fit me well... I like learning one thing at a time and getting used to actually doing it before moving on to the next thing. I had lots of down time between calls, so I could go back and puzzle out the theory behind what I'd just done on the last call. In the process, I thoroughly learned the software. In between all that, I picked up a lot from the techs about troubleshooting internet calls. The job was a lot of fun because I sat with the techs and techs are... well, a strange bunch... and I fit right in.

All in all, it worked out well for me.

[purplecat41877]

At my first retail job, there was a manager who decided that I would be in charge of the register supplies, and he announced it at one of the meetings. Fortunately, it didn't require much training.:D