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...and I weep.
So for those who aren't familiar, I have recently made a career change into office admin from childcare. I am currently contemplating any extra training I may qualify for and if absolutely necessary, I may even look at a traineeship (traineeship wages suck though, so maybe NOT the best option). My job is a temp one doing data entry and some minor tasks around the office such as filing and processing reports for a correspondence vocational school*.
The reports are not a problem-it's either that I'm updating the status of students, flagging student accounts for one reason or another or filling in gaps (such as missing student ID numbers). What the issue is today is handling ENROLMENTS.
Now in my current state, you can access a buttload of different courses that are government subsidised. The criteria for this however, is picky as hell (as in if you have studied anything higher than this level of qualification you normally wouldn't qualify but if you're disabled and retraining, guess what, let's throw that criteria out the window) and therefore we are required to enter certain bits of data twice (such as your education, your residency and so on). The first round is used to give us a price for the course and to ensure that you can actually study with us as a subsidised student**, the second round of data actually enrols you if you are successful.
Today, my CW and I had to deal with the following bits of missing or stupid information:
-People who did not put their entire phone number in. This baffled me as people kept starting their phone numbers with "4" and were 9 digits long to boot (this looks more like a system error as mobile numbers over here start in 04, but as of 2017 will likely start with 05)
-People who had obtained their citizenship but were born overseas and did not give a year of arrival in Australia, or people who did not put their home country but their year of arrival.
-People who put down their "social security" number (the Australian equivalent at least) but did not give us a date to indicate they were registered with an employment provider or not. (the ONLY time this would not be the case is if they indicated they were receiving a government benefit or allowance. None of the applications we had between us were receiving either of these but still put their social security number down! Grrr...
)
-One guy did not give us the year he had finished high school (not entirely sure why this is here, but I'm guessing for some funding/qualification thing I'm not entirely aware of?) and the system won't let us through without it -_-
-And perhaps the worst one of all...someone on my CW's side put down certain contact details (email and phone). This was one of the incomplete forms. End result: phone call resulted in wrong number twice (and my coworker dialed the correct number...it was a mobile) and the email bounced back. So now this random person hasn't been enrolled yet because he put down the wrong details! >.<
And one from the other day...government student numbers. THIS one was just the worst. Basically I had to go through the system and fill in a bunch of missing government student numbers. Find out that either 30 people did not give the correct student number or someone who actually put these in borked it royally. Every single one of these refused to go through the system because they were missing a character (it's a 10-character random letter/number bunch).
Needless to say, I actually cheered when my boss gave me some filing to do because I was ready to wage war on whoever screwed up there! (Also can anyone give me suggestions on what I should leave my computer as an offering so it'll decide not to give me a glitchy screen halfway through the day?
)
*-To clarify how this works, most people who take the courses through said college are doing so because they either have a job in that field and are doing it sort of like a traineeship but without the crappy pay that comes with it or they are doing it for other reasons. The college organises practical placements if you don't have a place to work at and the rest of the course involves giant envelope packets and emails. We don't do things like hairdressing or automotive, but we do do things like dental admin, legal secretary and childcare.
**-A typical course through the face-to-face versions of the government college can start from 5k if you are not fully subsidised. Some states charge less, others charge more. Subsidising it brings the total down to around $1000-$2000. If you're disabled or otherwise on a concession, your course can be as little as $240 while ATSI students get it for free. Students on a traineeship can also qualify for exemptions, but in return get a crappy paycheck (albeit they're subject to the same working conditions as someone on a full wage. To give you an idea of how crappy the paycheck is, I'm getting paid around $24/hour for this temp job (I'm "casual" full-time), someone on a traineeship is looking at around $15/hour. Minimum wage is $16/hour. This is under a government award to boot.)
So for those who aren't familiar, I have recently made a career change into office admin from childcare. I am currently contemplating any extra training I may qualify for and if absolutely necessary, I may even look at a traineeship (traineeship wages suck though, so maybe NOT the best option). My job is a temp one doing data entry and some minor tasks around the office such as filing and processing reports for a correspondence vocational school*.
The reports are not a problem-it's either that I'm updating the status of students, flagging student accounts for one reason or another or filling in gaps (such as missing student ID numbers). What the issue is today is handling ENROLMENTS.
Now in my current state, you can access a buttload of different courses that are government subsidised. The criteria for this however, is picky as hell (as in if you have studied anything higher than this level of qualification you normally wouldn't qualify but if you're disabled and retraining, guess what, let's throw that criteria out the window) and therefore we are required to enter certain bits of data twice (such as your education, your residency and so on). The first round is used to give us a price for the course and to ensure that you can actually study with us as a subsidised student**, the second round of data actually enrols you if you are successful.
Today, my CW and I had to deal with the following bits of missing or stupid information:
-People who did not put their entire phone number in. This baffled me as people kept starting their phone numbers with "4" and were 9 digits long to boot (this looks more like a system error as mobile numbers over here start in 04, but as of 2017 will likely start with 05)
-People who had obtained their citizenship but were born overseas and did not give a year of arrival in Australia, or people who did not put their home country but their year of arrival.
-People who put down their "social security" number (the Australian equivalent at least) but did not give us a date to indicate they were registered with an employment provider or not. (the ONLY time this would not be the case is if they indicated they were receiving a government benefit or allowance. None of the applications we had between us were receiving either of these but still put their social security number down! Grrr...
) -One guy did not give us the year he had finished high school (not entirely sure why this is here, but I'm guessing for some funding/qualification thing I'm not entirely aware of?) and the system won't let us through without it -_-
-And perhaps the worst one of all...someone on my CW's side put down certain contact details (email and phone). This was one of the incomplete forms. End result: phone call resulted in wrong number twice (and my coworker dialed the correct number...it was a mobile) and the email bounced back. So now this random person hasn't been enrolled yet because he put down the wrong details! >.<
And one from the other day...government student numbers. THIS one was just the worst. Basically I had to go through the system and fill in a bunch of missing government student numbers. Find out that either 30 people did not give the correct student number or someone who actually put these in borked it royally. Every single one of these refused to go through the system because they were missing a character (it's a 10-character random letter/number bunch).
Needless to say, I actually cheered when my boss gave me some filing to do because I was ready to wage war on whoever screwed up there! (Also can anyone give me suggestions on what I should leave my computer as an offering so it'll decide not to give me a glitchy screen halfway through the day?
)*-To clarify how this works, most people who take the courses through said college are doing so because they either have a job in that field and are doing it sort of like a traineeship but without the crappy pay that comes with it or they are doing it for other reasons. The college organises practical placements if you don't have a place to work at and the rest of the course involves giant envelope packets and emails. We don't do things like hairdressing or automotive, but we do do things like dental admin, legal secretary and childcare.
**-A typical course through the face-to-face versions of the government college can start from 5k if you are not fully subsidised. Some states charge less, others charge more. Subsidising it brings the total down to around $1000-$2000. If you're disabled or otherwise on a concession, your course can be as little as $240 while ATSI students get it for free. Students on a traineeship can also qualify for exemptions, but in return get a crappy paycheck (albeit they're subject to the same working conditions as someone on a full wage. To give you an idea of how crappy the paycheck is, I'm getting paid around $24/hour for this temp job (I'm "casual" full-time), someone on a traineeship is looking at around $15/hour. Minimum wage is $16/hour. This is under a government award to boot.)
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