The challenges of corporate training

As I noted in my first post yesterday – the by-now widely read and discussed “Greetings FiftySomethings” – my work in the corporate world is primarily as a trainer. Since this lacks cost-center value in the current economy, my training department was recently dissolved and I was put back into live production, processing financial documents.

I probably prefer live production, when there’s actually something to produce, but such has not been the case lately. Since we’ve spent most of our production time sitting around with little or nothing to do for the past several months, I was excited recently when asked by a higher-up to give a weeklong training session to two of our temporaries.

First, a little background. Because we’ve been in a hiring freeze for the last year or so, when we do need some additional help, we get it through temporary staffing agencies. These folks can come in for a week of training and generally be good enough to fill a seat and at least look like they’re doing a passable job. Then, when the next corporate bottom-line panic comes along, these people can be terminated with a simple call to their agency – no messy scenes, no paperwork, no exit interviews, no etc.

About ten percent of the time, it works well enough that the temp becomes a perm. Usually, the most we can hope for is that they show up regularly and not fall asleep at their work station (virtually all of the temp positions are on the night shift – midnight to 8am). If this happens, management views them as good enough to keep around, at least for a while, regardless of whether they’re any good or not.

Our history with temps is not a proud one. We once hired someone with one eye whose job was to read documents. We hired another reader we discovered on the third day didn’t know how to spell. (I’m always careful to proofread their resumes while they’re still under consideration but incredibly enough, typos don’t disqualify them.) We once hired a typist we eventually discovered couldn’t manage more than about 20 words per minute, and most of those began with “xyvzx”. We hired a young wild-eyed bald guy who was so into Renaissance reenactments that he’d bring a knife to work and clean his nails with it. One group I was training in a windowed conference room took a 10-minute break on the first morning of our five-day session, and I watched in disbelief as two of the participants got into their cars and drove away, never to be seen again.

The twosome I trained a few weeks back were designated by their supervisor to receive an advanced kind of quality training that they really weren’t experienced enough to receive. I’ve made failed arguments against this in the past, but have decided just to go with the flow. I was getting overtime for the training, and that’s about the most positive thing I can find in my work these days.

Janie and Bertie arrived in the training room at the 3am start time, and did their best to stay awake while I overviewed the basics of what we would cover. I had just trained Bertie in basic reading only a few months before, and found her to be the well-read talent that we usually don’t attract. She took notes, asked intelligent questions, and did well enough on all the exercises to demonstrate an understanding of what was going on. Janie, on the other hand, had struggled with her basic training six months previously and wasn’t about to do well with this advanced stuff. We trainers like to encourage give-and-take with our classes by repeating the old there-are-no-stupid-questions line, but Janie proved repeatedly that this was not the case. Most questions included a mispronounced term she should’ve been using on-the-job virtually every day. “When do we update the TLC?” she asked, apparently referring to the table of contents, or “TOC”. “What is squaddling again?” The term is actually “quadding”. During one overview on the subject of when to correct apparent client mistakes, she raised her hand and asked when she would be entitled to a quarterly bonus. That’s not a stupid question?

Anyway, we limped through the training, trying to cram what was supposed to be a 36-hour module into about 16 hours. I was able to take out a lot of material they didn’t need to know, but we still arrived at the end of class on Friday without having covered about a quarter of the work. I gave them a reading assignment to do that would cover most of this (like that was going to happen) and said I’d try to catch up with them during downtime the following week to finish our work.

On Tuesday I came in at my normal 5am start time and noticed all the production tables were empty, a sure sign there’s nothing going on. I approached the shift’s production coordinator, who sits right across from Bertie, and explained how we’re going to spend the next few hours finishing up our training. I get a funny look from the coordinator, who whispers “Bertie and Janie were both laid off last night. Their last day is Friday.”

The sad thing was that not only was I not surprised, I actually laughed. It’s not the first time something like this has happened in our office, and I guess it sort of reinforced for me how dysfunctional we truly are, which makes for very little pressure on a trainer’s or anyone else’s performance. Later in the morning, a manager approached me to apologize for the awkward misunderstanding – “don’t think your time was wasted; we might be able to bring them back after the first of the year when things pick up”, she offered lamely. But in the end we just laughed together about how silly it all was.

I said my good-byes to the pair as they left for the last time Friday, wishing both of them luck and suggesting we might work together again some day (sure). Bertie asked if I could write her a letter of recommendation, which I gladly agreed to do. I thought Janie would similarly request a “letter of resuscitation”, but was glad she didn’t.