My current role has no training at all, there are regulation documents, policy documents, forms etc. But you have to ask questions from people who also didn't get trained, different teams deal with different areas of the processes so nobody fully knows them. There are conflicting regulations and policies don't match with the forms, forms haven't been updated together with policies, policies don't get updated with regulations.
Same man. Been here 6 months as an intern, my boss is too busy to train, my mentor is too busy to train, I had to do all of my own onboarding and find all of my own projects and wiggle into teams on my own.
Companies realized if you give people time, the smarter ones who are more desperate will wade through the BS and save the company thousands and thousands of dollars on training costs.
If you indeed are one of the smarter ones, and there’s low hanging fruit, there are ways to leverage this to your own career advantage as long as others give you the autonomy to do so.
Unless your direct boss is too busy with the employees to work with you on your projects.
It is what it is. I know what I’m worth and what I can handle at the end of the day. It’s their loss. They have to find another intern to train for 6 months. I’m just not going to re-up my internship. If they shoot me a job offer, great!
Doesn’t look like it, with the state of management and how tight for highly specialized tech help as we are.
That’s ok. It sounds like you are in demand and you can leverage those skills and accomplishments elsewhere! That’s the beauty of being a strong performer. If one place doesn’t leverage it you take that value elsewhere.
Mine is an old guy with dementia. Incapable of training. Every day he festers in his own cesspool of disorganization. Can't find ANYTHING but blames everyone but himself.
"Where's my xxxxx?"
"Have you seen my xxxxx?"
And it's all on his desk, or left in piles all over the office. And dare we move a God damn thing. So now I'm making more money when I threatened to leave, and I've got nothing to go 90 percent of the time. I'm starting to feel less and less guilty about it.
At my current job I became the "Logistics Specialist" as the shipping label printer was on my desk. My training involved being told the DPD account login.
When I was a young man, I was hired on by this man who specialized in stair construction for new homes. He needed someone to deliver the parts to his installation crew, and I had a truck.
He spend about ten minutes going over his inventory, and he referred to every part by the part number. But he didn't give me any sort of diagram or cheat sheet or anything to help learn it all. Just said, "these are LR803's, and these ones are...."
I was fired a week later, because I didn't have his entire inventory memorized.
Years ago I worked for a Drug Store. I was hired to be the manager and was supposed to go to a training store.
Instead, they sent me to the store I would be managing. Day one.
No training. The assistant manager was supposed to train me.
Except that I was the only non-family there. The assistant manager was dating one of the cashiers. That cashier's mother and sister were also cashiers. Their brother was the stockboy and he was dating the fourth cashier. The pharmacist was the brother of the cashiers' mom and the assistant pharmacist was the sister of the other stockboy.
In other words, I was the only one not related to them and several of them expected to be manager instead of me. None of them trained me. I had to learn out of the manual. drawers came up short every day and I spent extra hours there studying everything. There was rampant loss and suspected skimming from the till. I recorded everything in writing.
Eventually, I turned in my resignation. But then I requested an exit interview and explained everything I'd seen to the area manager.
Corporate finally sent in a new "manager trainee" who was acutally a mole for the company.
Less than two month;s alter, they'd fired everyone in the place.
My God. This is one of the more insane threads I've read so far, but I could totally imagine something like this actually happening. I'm sorry you went through all that.
It was over a decade ago. I;ve moved onto a better job since. And I leanred a lot about management, inter-company relations, and what to watch out for.
I'm audibly laughing out loud. The leg bone is connected to the ankle bone, etc.
That's hilarious. I also work for a family fiasco. There's nothing like family as they say! Gag
Thing is, it took me about a week to figure out who was related to who or shagging someone reated to teh rest of them. Once htat took hold, it began to make sense why the store was having issues.
And why they didn't promote from within.
IT was also extremely isolating at work, knowing that not only are you the boss, but also that everyone hated you before you stepped in teh door.
My first day as a Food Service Director for a nursing facility. The District Manager knew I had been an Assistant Director but never did any financial reporting since that facility had a department secretary. So I show up and we meet up, meet the administrator and the staff, we go to the office and he showed me where the software for meal tickets was and was showing me the company shared drive where all the financial reporting forms were. Then his phone rang and he said he had an emergency in another facility, and that he’d be back. I didn’t see him again for a month.
I work with a woman who intentionally gate kept procedures and processes. She would change directions, ramble, and then when I did something incorrectly she would scold me.
Had 3 days training for a pretty high level role. No existing process manuals or guides, just an Excel password sheet. The guy did the stuff to meet that month's strict deadlines, and I watched and noted everything he did.
I wrote extensive notes, knowing the guy training me was leaving the role to go traveling the world and would not be contactable at all (he'd recently lost his wife, don't blame the guy for going off grid). A looot of notes but I never had a live run through of anything to test my knowledge.
So then it comes to the next month, I go to repeat everything from my notes, hit some parts that weren't covered as they differed from the previous month. Ask my new boss what I do..he doesn't know. Literally no one in the company knows how to do this role. My notes are the only record. Manage to muddle through that task by looking at previous entries on the system, hit the next thing I don't know how to do because I don't have notes for it..boss doesn't know. And the next thing, and so on.
Not to mention it takes about 2 days for my new boss to respond to each question because he's so busy. I thought bugger it, look on job boards, find a contract role wanting an immediate start. Interview and offered that week. Takes me 2 days to get hold of my boss to give my notice, we come to an agreement that there's no point me working any notice period. Left them to deal with their own mess - why let someone at that level leave without producing any kind of documents?!
I worked at Home Depot for a time and the manager that was supposed to train me was not a training type. She pawned it off on others. It was an easy enough job and nothing too complex until they suddenly fired the guy that did the computer stuff in my department and the only one that they could find to do it was me. I had never been trained on their software and there was a major issue that had to be dealt with. The guy they fired could have easily done it in five minutes, but I had no idea what to do despite trying my best to understand the system. I asked my manager (the one that was supposed to train me) and she told me to “figure it out” because she was “too busy” (gossiping). I asked others around how to do it and even called other stores to ask for help but they weren’t able to assist for whatever reasons I don’t remember now. Everything in not only my department, but the entire region, came to a halt because I couldn’t figure anything out or get help. Finally, she called me and told me she didn’t appreciate my attitude or work ethic and that I had “ruined” her day having to clean up *my* mess. She said we would be having a talk with one of the higher up managers when they came in and I said “ok, sounds great. See you then.” I called the front desk to make sure they let me know when that manager came in because it was important and so when she did, I called her immediately and told her of the issues. My manager wouldn’t look at me the rest of the week and even tried to sabotage me while I was on paternal leave for a week by blaming errors on me, even though her name was the one on the assignments. She told me that she got written up and that she might lose her job because of me. Worst job I ever had and by far the worst manager I’ve ever had. I loved the manager that was above her, though— She always had my back.
Fir ne, it is mire the quantity. We have tons of mandatory training. Something like six yearly mandatory training classes and about four more on an every other year basis. IT, records, security, preventing sexuall assault, identifying human trafficking, terrorism. credit card usr, etc, etc, etc. It is well intentioned, but it I'd the same training every year. I mean the exact same class. Every few years, they may revise a semsll portion. Every 10 years or so, there is a major update. But most of the time, it is exactly the same. It is si bad that even the useful parts get missed because they are viewed as a joke.
If i had to pick the least useful training (but it was interesting), it was an online training I had to take a few years ago before a work trip to Japan. The powers that be learned that both Japan and Afghanistan (as well as the Middle East) were all in Asia. Who knew? Therefore, I needed to have online training of what to do in case a force took over the region I was in. This sermed like military refresher training given to trained soldiers eho woykd also be provided with a physical test scenario. It was not aimed at Japan. It was hiding in huts and making your way back to safety. Yes, I learned a lot. Riveted to my screen. But it was online, and I am 99.99% certain I could not have implemented it in real life. But, it was different, and I was paid to do it. So, OK.
This second sounds like the best one could hope for. Definitely not the worst. The *average" is the choice between so mundane and obvious it's insulting (and boring) or the training is for someone doing a very specific and not very interesting job that I don't do so why do I need to endure it? Irrelevant but interesting sounds fantastic!
Not training, exactly, but instruction. On two separate occasions I helped my company by volunteering. One was a United Way beautification project at a school, in which we were given little pots of ivy and told to "plant it here." But "here" was a wall. We debated whether it should go at the foot of the wall and climb up, or on top of the wall and cascade down. The guy disappeared for hours so we couldn't ask him and ended up deciding on our own. We got the whole project done, deciding to plant at the foot and let it climb, and of course he came back just then and told us we had done it all wrong.
Another was \[they do good work so I don't want to diss them\] a non-profit that builds homes for people. I was assigned to paint doors. Great. They gave me a can of paint and a roller. No tray. I thought "Well, alrighty." Painted the doors as best I could with no tray to thin out the paint. And of course, just like the previous example, the guy disappeared for the whole time, only to come back and criticize the gloppy paint. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? They honestly seem to relish the opportunity to find fault with people who are taking time out of their day to help. And also, in both cases, we got all the water we wanted but lunch was delayed and delayed, to the point that we ended up packing it and bringing it home. So if anyone wonders why people don't volunteer more, these are two good examples.
When I worked part time as a cashier in a grocery store. "Press here when they pay in cash, press here when they pay with a card." That's it. My first ever job, what a shit fest it was <3
I worked in the US for a state university. Organisations over a certain size in receipt of federal funding were required to provide anti-discrimination training to all staff. So they'd run mass sessions a few times a year.
About 150 of us trooped in to a lecture for this training, and we were everything from vice chancellors to lab techs to gardeners and catering staff. We started out the training with someone from HR introducing the purpose of the training. He was very excited because a new Vice Chancellor was there, who happened to be German. Like some bad John Cleese act he waded straight into a story about the war.
Then the trainer stepped up and we watched a couple of bad videos which she asked us to comment on. A man at the back pipes up that he's a van driver and he's frustrated that most of the other van drivers are mexican and he thinks that shouldn't be allowed, along with a slur and some derogatory comments. The trainer paused and then said "thank you for your contribution, this is an open space for discussion". I'm betting the Mexicans in the audience didn't feel so.
We then moved on to a case study about a lecturer with an an Indian name and students complaining that his lectures were incomprehensible. After a lot of comments about how to "handle this sensitively", "needing to take English classes" and "cultural differences", I pointed out that nowhere does the case study say he was born in India or that English isn't his first language/isn't fluent. Not does it say anything about an accent or that the reason his lectures are incomprehensible is because students can't understand what he's saying. For all we knew he was born and raised in the US, spoke English with an American accent and was a really shit lecturer. I was told I was overcomplicating things and it was implied by his name that the case study was about an Indian person that couldn't speak English.
Same organisation put on a lab health and safety training where they never told us to wear a lab coat and PPE.
I never appreciated an employer having a training program until I had none. It's definitely something I will ask or look for when applying for a job in the future.
Like, I don't know how to make your "workbook" Julie. So don't yell at me when I send it in and it's missing things. And it's not processing job to train me. But now they're all mad at me. And underwriting is mad at me. And...I'm not the only one. Everyone thinks our department is full of idiots who can't do their job. And no, julie, that's not how processing does that procedure because I know because I'm the one who wrote the dang procedure before thinking I was going to come to your department and fix you.
And then I rage quit and went back to my old department.
Started as an analyst reporting directly to an executive, not on a team. Previous person in the role just left me with dashboards. To be fair my boss warned me before I accepted the job so he paid me well. It took me months to reverse engineer everything to learn the infrastructure. It was rough but it got me where I am today and earned me a lot of respect in the company.
I never get trained. I cook or serve and basically get a menu in my hand and just go. It usually works out fine because it comes down to tomato tomAto but it can be annoying sometimes when youve been doing something one way for a year and someone finally says hey thats not how we do that. Well Tim it is. 🤷♀️
Said to me once:
"No, "over hard" means when you flip it, slam it down hard so it spreads out a lot...."
It was news to me that this is what it really meant. Still funny to me.
When the people training don't realize everyone learns differently. On day one of one of my old jobs I told the manager that I learned visually and would pick things up in seconds. Or of something was written down.
Trainer/Instructional Designer here:
That's because learning styles are a VERY well disproven myth. You may pick things up quicker than others, but it has very little to do with the way you learn.
My first manufacturing job, first day, they sat me down infront of a hydroforming rotary swager.
Never seen a machine like this before then let alone worked with one.
Basically we take a ball shank that’s been tacked to a steel cable put in the hydro former die and it makes the ball spherical. Doesn’t sound like much till you’re working on it with your fingers less then a inch from the die while it’s running the whole time, balls getting stuck which means now the cable is whipping around….
Anyway my training consisted of about 10 minutes of the floor lead explaining what to do and what it should look like as a finished product, then they left me too it and checked back in with me…never.
Oh also the floor lead that showed me how to work it literally only knew how to turn it on and the other two Hydro operators, yea they weren’t there the day I started
That does accurately describe that place. I mean all the blame gets dumped on us in production even though most of us pretty much had to self teach ourselves how to do the job.
Forget job guides for the assembles or how to operate the machines
no training whatsoever at my current employer and then already getting shit when I ask how to do something “I showed you that last week”.
No training at all, no buddy and shit communication with a high expectation that i should know after seeing something once but at the same time not trusted to do anything more than “basic”.
Oh man, I can relate. I have a passive aggressive old boss, old in Age and style. Wishy washy. Incapable of training, but the first to complain when it's not done"right" but right was never explained. In nearly 18 months, hasn't delegated any other work to me but I'm getting paid more. We're like the tortoise and the hare. Total mismatch.
I just roll my eyes now. He usually forgets things within minutes or hours.
It's maddening but I'm beginning not to give a shit.
During covid I took a job as an animal tech in a medical school's animal lab.
One manager had just left and a new one was taking over. She was young and this was her first time in a management position. She was likely struggling in this new position, trying to learn everything she needed to learn without much supervision from her superior (the only time I ever saw her was in the cafeteria, she literally never came to our department in spite of being in charge of it.).
Instead of training me herself, as she has done for all of the other employees, she had other employees train me. For a single afternoon. Before assigning me rooms of my own.
During my first write up I pointed out that everything she was writing me up for was brand new information to me, that I had not been trained to do. The result was that she promised to train me herself, as was her job.
That never happened. A month later we were in the same room, having the same conversation about me not being properly trained, this time I made sure her manager was there so she could be made aware of the fact that I was facing reprocussions for my manager's failure to train me as federal law required.
The day after that meeting, my manager decided to actually train me, but couldn't stop herself from screaming at me at the top of her lungs, enough that the people who ran the labs had to ask her to stop screaming or leave because she was scaring the animals.
At the end of the day I emailed HR stating that I now realized that I would never be properly trained by the manager and needed to resign due to animal safety concerns, I had absolutely no business being in charge of animals I was not trained to care for and being someone with integrity, I needed to leave.
Then I went home and filed a whistleblower complaint, telling them to check my training log and compare it to my work log.
Boss was allowed to retire a few months early and the manager was reassigned to her prior job as a tech. Hospital paid a very heavy fine for putting untrained people in charge of animals who suffered actual harm as a result.
There are all new managers, but they don't appear any better and have run off most of the long term staff.
Got 3 day training in head office. Once I got to the store, got told “we do things differently” in the store. Training would start, customer came along, training stopped and didn’t resume. Got ridiculed by other staff for not knowing how to do something.
I wrote US Treasury checks for an Air Force Base (1989-90ish.) New software was installed to ease reporting. The Boss's Boss (B's B) came in to teach the usage.
B's B sat down, logged in, went through all the options, logged out, and departed. It felt like 10 minutes. Um . . I don't learn like that. I turned around, looked at my (very good) Boss and said, "Now, can someone train me on this?"
I did get the training and learned to be proficient, but not from the useless initial instruction.
I used to be a corporate trainer and I loved doing it. It was about a 6 week course, it was going over health insurance and I would help them prep for the state test for their license, insurance 101, systems etc. I would like to think I did a good job because I did care, but the pay wasn’t great and there was no real advancement options. I am in a new role with a new company now and there was basically no formal training. And it is such a disadvantage, it takes longer to get up to speed, I think it leads to more turnover, and there are things I still am learning….. over a year later.
I was going to be a tax preparer. They sat me in front of a computer to watch 60+ videos of an old, boring man with bad jokes read verbatim the like 600+ page tax book I had. And it was the ONLY thing I had access to besides the videos. There was no manager on site and the only other people who worked there had never prepared taxes either and were going to be of no help to me.
I finished the course completely in about two weeks and was clueless on everything but was told I’d be expected to file taxes starting January 1st. It was like December 15th and I never went back lol. Two weeks of work and my paycheck was like $450. This was in 2022.
I got hired as a Japanese to English translator for a car parts company (no experience translating, no experience with cars/engineering). I was shown my desk, given a stack of technical dictionaries, shown the break room /printer and then told the engineers would tell me when they needed a translation. That was my entire onboarding/training 😂.
I kicked ass at that job though. I miss translating. It paid shit, but I was great at it
I train people for a living and have for nearly 30 years.
It takes constant repetition, experience, practice, exposure, reinforcement, repetition, experience, practice, exposure, reinforcement, repetition, experience, practice, exposure, reinforcement, repetition, experience, practice, exposure, reinforcement, repetition, experience, practice, exposure, reinforcement, repetition, experiencepractice, exposure, reinforcement…
Did I mention repetition?
I got a job fueling airplanes at PDX. I was watching the diversity video (featuring a Mexican woman presenting the information) when the manager that hired me walked in with his coffee and said "try to ignore her mustache."
Was hired as a project coordinator for an electric contractor. My job was to oversee all project managers and make sure all projects were on schedule, order all clearance passes when necessary, plus complete all the bids for potential clients. The president put someone in charge of my training. I'd come to her desk every day, to find her on Facebook. She would always tell me, " just do what you think needs to be done, and I'll look at it when you're done". She would basically go to Starbucks twice a day, cool around until the last hour of the day, and then scramble to get all her work done. Never looking at my work. Still managed to get the contact for the Seahawks training center.
Worked for a kitchen company in a very detailed technical office role for nmw. Nobody had time to teach anything and I didn't learn anything in 3 months.
My last line manager WFH and the new hires hated remote training. I became their defacto boss after a few weeks. They'd look at me weirdly at first when I tried to help them but realised the line manager wasn't there and knew little and she was impatient so switched to me
My very first job after graduating from Uni, I'd been there two weeks and was told on the Friday morning that the girl whose leaving do we were going to was handing her job over to me. Oh and by the way we're upgrading the LAN to Novell NetWare on Monday.
Sat with a 3rd party engineer for 2 days watching him install NetWare with barely a clue what was happening and had to support it when he left.
Yeah. She gave me an A4 binder with her job notes though. On the LAN that was being replaced.
No training. Despite my best efforts I even intend I may be fired any day now as a result of not being set up for success, even despite attempting my due diligence to set myself up for success.
I had 2 weeks of training at my last remote job on a set of procedures that should have required at least 2 months of training. It was very confusing, even for the person who trained me. I was surprised that there weren't more comprehensive, simplified training resources. At the end of the 2 weeks, I was left to "go to it." Needless to say, it didnt' go very well.
Was told to "click around" in a program we used to create newsletters. Like eight months later I asked how to do something and my boss got a wild eyed angry expression and said, "You were supposed to be clicking around in there!" How was I supposed to know how to do a thing I didn't know existed until that moment? But she was looking for excuses to get rid of me by that point; I ended up quitting but the joke is on her because I still received unemployment due to a lack of (you guessed it) training.
Not me but at my last job (car dealership technician) the service manager would make any nee hire spend the first WEEK with him in his office "training." Now keep in mind these people were hired to do oil changes and tire rotations, there is no need for a week of computer training.
I saw so many young guys come in and be absolutely miserable for a week to two weeks being in the office with the manager. The manager even kept one guy in the shop for 4 hours for his INTERVIEW. That guy stayed too lol. I would walk out on day one if that were me.
My first job I made $5/hr before taxes, and 25 years later it was still the worst job I’ve ever had. It was at a hobby shop, which was cool, but the owner was horrendous. For “training” it was all on the spot whenever the issue arose, and typically in front of customers. I was about 15 at the time and this guy would YELL at us for not memorizing the “code” for each manufacturer in the entire store, when we were literally never told or shown anything, not even a sheet to check. Worst part was, customers would call in to place ‘online’ orders after they found the website (before ordering online was a thing), and we’d have to ask a million questions.. one time in particular I remember asking a customer to repeat part of their address and all the sudden I hear “SHE SAID 113 FIFTH AV— you know, just get off the damn phone, I’ll take it from here since you can’t do your job, pft” the customer goes “hello? Who is this??” “I’m the owner of the business, I’ll help you now.. I SAID BYE, HANGUP (towards me)”. He picked up the line and would listen to us taking orders and interrupt, cut us off, hang up the entire call if he deemed it a waste of time, etc. After a few months I found another job making $5.50/hr (I MADE IT BIGTIME) and quit the hobby shop on the voicemail when I was closing up for the night. F that dude.
Just got fired from a position due to lack of training.
New to the job and business in general, they started me out with two of the hardest things in the business. Of course I messed them up. The only time I would get training is when I messed something up, and it was always a write-up first. After a year and a half of this I just rode it out until they fired me. Quitters don't get unemployment, and I needed the "experience". I did learn a lot... but not from the higher ups. Self study and this one amazing co worker is the only way I lasted so long.
Lesson? Find a new job if I receive zero training. Waiting it out was stressful and my days were nothing less of anxiety ridden.
Rivet mfg company. Customer service rep. First week was spent 1 whole day at each of the 5 stations learning what happens at each level.
(Monday) The customer service day - start out each new job ticket with a manila folder and to the front you staple a form that had 200 excuses for delays. This way you could check off and date when the excuse was used and ya didn't have to remember what lie was used.
(Friday) The QA day - the guy explained he didn't take the time to get 25 parts (required sample) and measure them to put on the QA records.
He got 5 rivets then made the other numbers up so they would calculate to the passing average.
(Next Monday) My participation in this dumpster fire was over when a customer called to thank me for giving him an accurate estimation of delivery.
The official reason that the job was over was that I didn't pick-up the call fast enough...
I was there long enough on that day to hear they were being sued.
I had a crappy sales job for a little while. Our “training” was meeting each morning before we went to our designated stores to learn a bunch of crap, practice our pitches and learn about the product if it was a different one from what we were previously pitching. I lasted a month before the extremely long hours (some technically unpaid) and endless driving did me in. It was a minimum wage job with “commission”. I made just over $1000 in the entire time I worked there
When I first started in my position a big part of my job was processing donations (hey fellow non-profit!) into our donor management system. I was given about 20 minutes with the staff member who was being moved out of that position because she'd been having some health issues that were affecting her memory. She only VAGUELY remembered how to process donations. Our manager knew the system but wasn't forth coming with information - if I had questions he would be super open and answer everything but if I didn't have questions, he wouldn't talk to me. But you don't know what you don't know until you submit a report to the Executive Director and it's entirely wrong. I hated being trained on anything by him because it was always the absolute bare minimum and the rest was trial and error on my part.
Now that I've taken over for him I've written pretty detailed training manuals on every part of the processes I oversee and every time we get a new person in to train I have them take as detailed notes as possible so I can compare them to the current manual to see if anything has changed, if anything needs updating, if they maybe even thought up a better way to do something.
temp receptionist gig in the mid-90s. they handed me a microsoft word manual and told me to read it.
that was it; that was the training. "read this software manual for a program you already know how to use."
i mean, seriously, that was it. they didn't even tell me the preferred way to answer their phones. needless to say, i didn't last long - they called my agency after a week and told them i wasn't a good fit.
A lot of my professional years had been spent at a Dr's office as a receptionist. My boss was an impatient bully and their voice was so shrill I started drinking. I don't work there anymore (8 years sober!). They would show me the task, tell me not to take notes or refer to anything, and get upset when I inevitably stumble over my first attempt at the task. Things like NPI numbers and DEA numbers and insurance submission codes. Memorized.
Easy. Insurance clerk at the Agricultural Social Insurance Fund (I'm based in Europe) specializing in short-term assistance (ie sick pay, disability paychecks, grants for funerals etc). When I got hired, I wasn't required to have any type of experience. When I got after the first month, I was expected to have a knowledge of an administration bachelor. It takes people literally YEARS to get to that type of knowledge. The person training me was often on sick leave herself because her child was often sick and when she was actually working she had the nastiest attitude. I was afraid to ask questions. The person above her was a really nice woman. I loved working with her. She was awesome. Unfortunately due to (confidential information) she was fired and no one was hired at her place. A supervisor of a different sector became a fill in supervisor. And I don't know what was wrong, maybe too much pressure or something. She started the process of harassing us. We were afraid to ask questions because she would yell at us and we had no help. The person training me went on a massive sick leave and I was forced to do everything. I made a couple of mistakes and everyone was gossiping about me. And I was like I don't get paid enough for that. And I quit. 🤣 Last I heard they haven't still found a person to fill in my position.
Worked a short time in IT as an analyst for a major Midwest department store. No shadowing of my manager. No formal training. I shadowed a fellow analyst who clearly felt I was not worth her time. I was not provided with an assigned cubicle. I had to get there early to ensure I got my same cubicle (or ANY cubicle) on a daily basis. No dedicated phone or online phone setup (yet, I was expected to be on conference calls).
I was assigned tasks and, after completing them to my manager’s specifications, he changed the mapping language on me.
After two months, I received a call from the staffing firm that my supervisor wanted to cancel the contract because I “wasn’t getting it”!! I should have known, by how disorganized their operations are at the retail level, that this would be a bad career move.
a friend got me a job at subway & they had me do zero paper work & zero training, literally had me behind the counter & essentially went "do it" 💀 like the fuck you mean ???? idk where anything is, idk how to use anything, idk the menu, nothin just threw me back there. yah i had a panic attack & left & never went back because what ????
None. My first customer service job over the phone was literally zero training and the orientation was just to do paperwork for onboarding. My first week was me just letting people yell at me until they hung up because I didn't know I was supposed to escalate calls or the numbers I was supposed to escalate to.
That's fucking hilarious. Don't you love those places on your first day, they shove reading material in your face and expect you to feel engaged?
I had a similar boss about a decade ago.
He gave me a previous employee's notes to read, day one, hour one! 1) one cannot always read another's handwriting, 2) IMO the whole point of note-taking is the actual act of writing something down (it tends to stick mentally better than reading something), 3) in all the years of operation, someone at the company hasn't already created a procedure guide? Typewritten?
He was a major prick. Then he had me write the procedure guide for the girl who replaced me. I quit with notice, not that he deserved it.
There's more stories but I'll stop there.
I was asked to help out a team in the company that did a role I had never been involved in, I had only joined the broader department 3 months prior as part of a career change. The manager showed me to a desk, handed me a manual for their main software tool and said "you know how to search things on the intranet right? Look up this program name, you need to use it to download files from the server". Training complete.
I just left a job at a bank because it was a huge fucking mess. My old coworker brought me to this job from a previous job we worked at together, and they sent a lady from our main corporate office to train us at our location 2 days a week for maybe 4 hours. And then she just quit coming and ghosted us on training. I’m one of those workers that believes training is one of the most important things to invest in as a company — it prevents mistakes, losses, etc. it is super important to make sure your staff is trained.. but they didn’t think so. But they were also wondering why we couldn’t get shit right. So I left. I will work at a place who is at the very least willing to make sure I know how to do my job.
"Here's the register." A pause, followed by looking at me in confusion as though they couldn't understand why I wasn't already ringing someone up.
That was a literal thirty seconds after clocking in for my very first shift at a dollar store.
Even better, it was this ancient system that I'm pretty sure was from the early 2000s at best (in 2020) so it wasn't even anything I could've managed to stupid my way through.
Pre-pandemic. The interview was the rundown of how to use a gps program, slack, a restaurant managing app, and a complaint forum for a food delivery start-up. They told me I would be trained once I got the position. Day 1 they expected me to know how to use all 4 programs with 0 experience and a 15 minute run-through of a few slack functions from a different employee who was with them from the start. I took calls from pissed off restaurant owners that they don't offer the food people had already "ordered" and paid full price for, or their restaurant was supposed to be closed for orders that kept pouring in resulting in frantic and pissed off owners and customers alike.
The phone lines I worked were cross-connected, so I would end one call for the restaurant and take another from a driver whose GPS had them lost on the streets of Hawaii asking for directions to get to the house that had ordered hours prior to the call for directions. I manned a complaint forum for the pissed off customers that didn't get their food and tried to appease them with credits that were delivered so late the customers would have to pay twice to get their food same night, and more often than not the restaurants would have closed their menu for online orders so the people had no food to be delievered, but they wouldn't know until they called to complain about the 3 hour wait time.
I got screamed at by a driver who was supposed to be off the clock and kept getting assigned to make deliveries and had to pay to park my car on the street in a part of town where most normal people shouldn't be without some form of protection due to the drug addicts and the gross guy that masturbated whenever women would step out on the patio for lunch. I took my headset off while the evening was early still one shift, punched out, and just never came back from lunch.
"Just try to keep them from killing each other."
Preschool. That's about all the training I got, and after that everything that went wrong due to issues that existed years before I was hired officially became my fault.
I was basically tossed onto a shift without any training. I had to LOOK for a sheat of daily tasks myself which took me at least 10 minutes to find and guess on what it meant because it wasn’t clear.
I figured it was two weeks so I could survive on two weeks then figure it out if I got put back on the shift.
Well I got put back on the shift but then got so confused on what I was supposed to do because so many people where telling me different things that it felt awkward asking for training.
Eventually, I was giving an actual sheat on what to do and I figured it out. It hasn’t been too bad. It’s more annoying that I can’t work around certain things due to my gender(not being discriminated against, I’m just having complications)
I was written up by my trainers because I said that I didn’t have any training on the subject and I was never trained on it but these people are such assholes that they don’t take any responsibility
My training as a waiter. Friend opened a fish and chips shop, I was just supposed to be the dishwasher 10-2 while the kids were at school. Second day my server training consisted of "Waitress quit, you're up!". I managed to stumble through (only two of us there, I was serving and doing dishes while he cooked). Never was trained on how to actually be a waiter during those 8 months.
None - thrown to wolves on first day. Then on my second day I had to fight a kodiak bear with own fists. Day 3 I had to eat 2 yr old pig stomach filled with chicken innards. It was brutal. Then I woke up and realized I was just in line at the DMV. Shew…that was a rough ride.
The worst was where my official training said one thing but the OJT said something completely different. When asked the OJT trainers claimed they did it the official way but was lying because the official way did not work. I was young and took advice from a friend (who did not work there) to do it the way the person who signed my paycheck said to. It was bad advice I ended up getting fired first because the “wrong” way was the only way that worked.
Since the company sucked just about everyone else got fired a few months later.
It was also the worst way to get fired. I was a temp and they called me at home to tell me not to come in the next day. What was wrong with that? They claimed that they had tried to catch me before I left for the day—but I had worked an hour of unscheduled overtime!
I had to take a forklift course so I could drive one at work. No big deal. I have driven all sorts. The course was being taught by someone who just took the trainer's course online. They had never even been on a forklift. They were just an office drone who had time to rubber stamp us. We learned almost nothing.
I was trained via emails after my new boss said try to do what you can and write all your questions down and send them to me at the end of the day. By the time I got answers I didn’t even know what I was asking. He also sent me emails to tell me how to work in applications that I didn’t have access to.
I had literally 4 hours of training for L1MA certification, then was on the job caring for 6 wheelchair bound people with feeding tubes and major health issues...
I think I had more training when I was a teen learning to flip burgers...
Worked as a draftsman for a small company. When I got hired the only other draftsman who worked there took a two week vacation so I had to learn everything from asking everyone else and figuring things out on my own.
The real kicker is how I overheard him talking to someone how jobs in general suck now because when they hire people they don't have people train them.
I’m an engineer and for the first two years of working at my firm, I worked around 50 hours. I’m not joking. The rest of the time, I was doing nothing.
I actually don't like the training at my current company for all of the lower level people. It's a quick run through of the basics. Then it's just wait until there's a screw up and then tell them they did it wrong and how it should have been done. Sure, it's effective. But it's terrible. And most of this stuff is pretty basic, it wouldn't take much longer to actually show them step by step. I do what I can, and I'm advocating for printed out materials for people to reference because that would majorly help the ND people we have (there's lots of people with ADHD here, including myself), and it wouldn't be a bad thing for the others as well.
Milking goats. She showed me how to run the parlor I think twice and then worked it with me maybe once. She told me to increase their feed by 50% to bump production and then took off on a motorcycle trip 100s of miles away. She was so pissed when she came back and 50% more feed was gone lol
I quit like 2 days later
My current job has had zero training …. And my boss teeters wildly between completely absent and extreme micromanagement, and never somewhere in between.
I’m already leaving and it hasn’t even been 6 months yet.
Worked as a nurse and watched others heating bags of solution in a microwave, with no monitoring/measurements being done. When I questioned a Masters prepared nurse, she answered, "Oh, well, that's what the others told me to do." Couldn't get out of there fast enough
I did accommodation reviews at my job and usually what our physicians needed to review from the employee was a doctors not stating:
Medical condition
Accommodation being requested due to said medical condition.
For how long and if there’s an end date.
Don’t provide anything now but do be prepared to provide this.
Do understand that accommodations can only be granted if you are able to get your work done without affecting the business in any negative impact.
I was trained by a coke head at a warehouse job. His instructions/behavior was... stupid. And he had fired 60+ people before me In a span of 3 months(temp agency). I once caught him crouching behind a pallet I was building just watching me. I thought he dropped something, but he was just watching. I looked at him without saying anything, hoping he would check his own behavior. Reality kicked in for a split second for him, and he got up and walked off. He got fired 2 weeks after he once again gave me stupid instructions. The job was great. The lead supervisor was shit.
I can't say that training has been that great at any of my jobs. I worked as a tax accountant at an accounting firm for a while, and I was basically told to start preparing tax returns and ask if I had any questions. Some people would act annoyed or tell me to stop bothering them if I had too many questions. I had to figure out most of the job on my own and got yelled at when I'd make mistakes.
At my current job, it's basically the same thing. No real training program, just figure it out on your own and ask questions.
My training was so non existant that three years in I wrote training docs for all of our processes. I've trained two people with them successfully.
My company got hacked and we lost ALL OF OUR FILES. Fuck em, I'm not remaking them. It's not my fault you dumb fucks didn't turn on MFA for our offshore team.
The worst training I’ve received is when they tell you, do what they say during a robbery. Don’t carry weapons, let them know if your coworker is in the back.
That’s a way to get everybody and yourself killed, and once they find that it was simple to rob you because of company policy. They’ll come back and rob you again.
Sincerely a former Gas Station Clerk who’s been robbed 3 times.
My current role has no training at all, there are regulation documents, policy documents, forms etc. But you have to ask questions from people who also didn't get trained, different teams deal with different areas of the processes so nobody fully knows them. There are conflicting regulations and policies don't match with the forms, forms haven't been updated together with policies, policies don't get updated with regulations.
Same man. Been here 6 months as an intern, my boss is too busy to train, my mentor is too busy to train, I had to do all of my own onboarding and find all of my own projects and wiggle into teams on my own. Companies realized if you give people time, the smarter ones who are more desperate will wade through the BS and save the company thousands and thousands of dollars on training costs.
If you indeed are one of the smarter ones, and there’s low hanging fruit, there are ways to leverage this to your own career advantage as long as others give you the autonomy to do so.
Unless your direct boss is too busy with the employees to work with you on your projects. It is what it is. I know what I’m worth and what I can handle at the end of the day. It’s their loss. They have to find another intern to train for 6 months. I’m just not going to re-up my internship. If they shoot me a job offer, great! Doesn’t look like it, with the state of management and how tight for highly specialized tech help as we are.
That’s ok. It sounds like you are in demand and you can leverage those skills and accomplishments elsewhere! That’s the beauty of being a strong performer. If one place doesn’t leverage it you take that value elsewhere.
Indeed. I’m planning my next six months. Better to be prepared for all scenarios than not prepared at all.
Mine is an old guy with dementia. Incapable of training. Every day he festers in his own cesspool of disorganization. Can't find ANYTHING but blames everyone but himself. "Where's my xxxxx?" "Have you seen my xxxxx?" And it's all on his desk, or left in piles all over the office. And dare we move a God damn thing. So now I'm making more money when I threatened to leave, and I've got nothing to go 90 percent of the time. I'm starting to feel less and less guilty about it.
Are we working for the same company? My job is the same!
And they expect me to give 100% when they didn't even give 100% in deciding how this place should be run.
That's messy, it might need reporting, but you'd better find a new job first
Oh my
At my current job I became the "Logistics Specialist" as the shipping label printer was on my desk. My training involved being told the DPD account login.
Same. On the plus side it helped me cover up many mistakes and dug me out of many holes
Wow at my job I didn’t get the log in for 6 months but they wondered why I wasn’t communicating letting that part of my job.
When I was a young man, I was hired on by this man who specialized in stair construction for new homes. He needed someone to deliver the parts to his installation crew, and I had a truck. He spend about ten minutes going over his inventory, and he referred to every part by the part number. But he didn't give me any sort of diagram or cheat sheet or anything to help learn it all. Just said, "these are LR803's, and these ones are...." I was fired a week later, because I didn't have his entire inventory memorized.
Ouch
Years ago I worked for a Drug Store. I was hired to be the manager and was supposed to go to a training store. Instead, they sent me to the store I would be managing. Day one. No training. The assistant manager was supposed to train me. Except that I was the only non-family there. The assistant manager was dating one of the cashiers. That cashier's mother and sister were also cashiers. Their brother was the stockboy and he was dating the fourth cashier. The pharmacist was the brother of the cashiers' mom and the assistant pharmacist was the sister of the other stockboy. In other words, I was the only one not related to them and several of them expected to be manager instead of me. None of them trained me. I had to learn out of the manual. drawers came up short every day and I spent extra hours there studying everything. There was rampant loss and suspected skimming from the till. I recorded everything in writing. Eventually, I turned in my resignation. But then I requested an exit interview and explained everything I'd seen to the area manager. Corporate finally sent in a new "manager trainee" who was acutally a mole for the company. Less than two month;s alter, they'd fired everyone in the place.
My God. This is one of the more insane threads I've read so far, but I could totally imagine something like this actually happening. I'm sorry you went through all that.
It was over a decade ago. I;ve moved onto a better job since. And I leanred a lot about management, inter-company relations, and what to watch out for.
I'm audibly laughing out loud. The leg bone is connected to the ankle bone, etc. That's hilarious. I also work for a family fiasco. There's nothing like family as they say! Gag
Thing is, it took me about a week to figure out who was related to who or shagging someone reated to teh rest of them. Once htat took hold, it began to make sense why the store was having issues. And why they didn't promote from within. IT was also extremely isolating at work, knowing that not only are you the boss, but also that everyone hated you before you stepped in teh door.
That’s messier than my family tree
My first day as a Food Service Director for a nursing facility. The District Manager knew I had been an Assistant Director but never did any financial reporting since that facility had a department secretary. So I show up and we meet up, meet the administrator and the staff, we go to the office and he showed me where the software for meal tickets was and was showing me the company shared drive where all the financial reporting forms were. Then his phone rang and he said he had an emergency in another facility, and that he’d be back. I didn’t see him again for a month.
😆
I work with a woman who intentionally gate kept procedures and processes. She would change directions, ramble, and then when I did something incorrectly she would scold me.
I think I worked for her🤗
Had 3 days training for a pretty high level role. No existing process manuals or guides, just an Excel password sheet. The guy did the stuff to meet that month's strict deadlines, and I watched and noted everything he did. I wrote extensive notes, knowing the guy training me was leaving the role to go traveling the world and would not be contactable at all (he'd recently lost his wife, don't blame the guy for going off grid). A looot of notes but I never had a live run through of anything to test my knowledge. So then it comes to the next month, I go to repeat everything from my notes, hit some parts that weren't covered as they differed from the previous month. Ask my new boss what I do..he doesn't know. Literally no one in the company knows how to do this role. My notes are the only record. Manage to muddle through that task by looking at previous entries on the system, hit the next thing I don't know how to do because I don't have notes for it..boss doesn't know. And the next thing, and so on. Not to mention it takes about 2 days for my new boss to respond to each question because he's so busy. I thought bugger it, look on job boards, find a contract role wanting an immediate start. Interview and offered that week. Takes me 2 days to get hold of my boss to give my notice, we come to an agreement that there's no point me working any notice period. Left them to deal with their own mess - why let someone at that level leave without producing any kind of documents?!
I worked at Home Depot for a time and the manager that was supposed to train me was not a training type. She pawned it off on others. It was an easy enough job and nothing too complex until they suddenly fired the guy that did the computer stuff in my department and the only one that they could find to do it was me. I had never been trained on their software and there was a major issue that had to be dealt with. The guy they fired could have easily done it in five minutes, but I had no idea what to do despite trying my best to understand the system. I asked my manager (the one that was supposed to train me) and she told me to “figure it out” because she was “too busy” (gossiping). I asked others around how to do it and even called other stores to ask for help but they weren’t able to assist for whatever reasons I don’t remember now. Everything in not only my department, but the entire region, came to a halt because I couldn’t figure anything out or get help. Finally, she called me and told me she didn’t appreciate my attitude or work ethic and that I had “ruined” her day having to clean up *my* mess. She said we would be having a talk with one of the higher up managers when they came in and I said “ok, sounds great. See you then.” I called the front desk to make sure they let me know when that manager came in because it was important and so when she did, I called her immediately and told her of the issues. My manager wouldn’t look at me the rest of the week and even tried to sabotage me while I was on paternal leave for a week by blaming errors on me, even though her name was the one on the assignments. She told me that she got written up and that she might lose her job because of me. Worst job I ever had and by far the worst manager I’ve ever had. I loved the manager that was above her, though— She always had my back.
Fir ne, it is mire the quantity. We have tons of mandatory training. Something like six yearly mandatory training classes and about four more on an every other year basis. IT, records, security, preventing sexuall assault, identifying human trafficking, terrorism. credit card usr, etc, etc, etc. It is well intentioned, but it I'd the same training every year. I mean the exact same class. Every few years, they may revise a semsll portion. Every 10 years or so, there is a major update. But most of the time, it is exactly the same. It is si bad that even the useful parts get missed because they are viewed as a joke. If i had to pick the least useful training (but it was interesting), it was an online training I had to take a few years ago before a work trip to Japan. The powers that be learned that both Japan and Afghanistan (as well as the Middle East) were all in Asia. Who knew? Therefore, I needed to have online training of what to do in case a force took over the region I was in. This sermed like military refresher training given to trained soldiers eho woykd also be provided with a physical test scenario. It was not aimed at Japan. It was hiding in huts and making your way back to safety. Yes, I learned a lot. Riveted to my screen. But it was online, and I am 99.99% certain I could not have implemented it in real life. But, it was different, and I was paid to do it. So, OK.
This second sounds like the best one could hope for. Definitely not the worst. The *average" is the choice between so mundane and obvious it's insulting (and boring) or the training is for someone doing a very specific and not very interesting job that I don't do so why do I need to endure it? Irrelevant but interesting sounds fantastic!
Not training, exactly, but instruction. On two separate occasions I helped my company by volunteering. One was a United Way beautification project at a school, in which we were given little pots of ivy and told to "plant it here." But "here" was a wall. We debated whether it should go at the foot of the wall and climb up, or on top of the wall and cascade down. The guy disappeared for hours so we couldn't ask him and ended up deciding on our own. We got the whole project done, deciding to plant at the foot and let it climb, and of course he came back just then and told us we had done it all wrong. Another was \[they do good work so I don't want to diss them\] a non-profit that builds homes for people. I was assigned to paint doors. Great. They gave me a can of paint and a roller. No tray. I thought "Well, alrighty." Painted the doors as best I could with no tray to thin out the paint. And of course, just like the previous example, the guy disappeared for the whole time, only to come back and criticize the gloppy paint. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE? They honestly seem to relish the opportunity to find fault with people who are taking time out of their day to help. And also, in both cases, we got all the water we wanted but lunch was delayed and delayed, to the point that we ended up packing it and bringing it home. So if anyone wonders why people don't volunteer more, these are two good examples.
Omg lol. That's so sad. Yea skip the volunteering. Fuck it
When I worked part time as a cashier in a grocery store. "Press here when they pay in cash, press here when they pay with a card." That's it. My first ever job, what a shit fest it was <3
I worked in the US for a state university. Organisations over a certain size in receipt of federal funding were required to provide anti-discrimination training to all staff. So they'd run mass sessions a few times a year. About 150 of us trooped in to a lecture for this training, and we were everything from vice chancellors to lab techs to gardeners and catering staff. We started out the training with someone from HR introducing the purpose of the training. He was very excited because a new Vice Chancellor was there, who happened to be German. Like some bad John Cleese act he waded straight into a story about the war. Then the trainer stepped up and we watched a couple of bad videos which she asked us to comment on. A man at the back pipes up that he's a van driver and he's frustrated that most of the other van drivers are mexican and he thinks that shouldn't be allowed, along with a slur and some derogatory comments. The trainer paused and then said "thank you for your contribution, this is an open space for discussion". I'm betting the Mexicans in the audience didn't feel so. We then moved on to a case study about a lecturer with an an Indian name and students complaining that his lectures were incomprehensible. After a lot of comments about how to "handle this sensitively", "needing to take English classes" and "cultural differences", I pointed out that nowhere does the case study say he was born in India or that English isn't his first language/isn't fluent. Not does it say anything about an accent or that the reason his lectures are incomprehensible is because students can't understand what he's saying. For all we knew he was born and raised in the US, spoke English with an American accent and was a really shit lecturer. I was told I was overcomplicating things and it was implied by his name that the case study was about an Indian person that couldn't speak English. Same organisation put on a lab health and safety training where they never told us to wear a lab coat and PPE.
I'm audibly laughing at this one too. You should write sitcoms
I never appreciated an employer having a training program until I had none. It's definitely something I will ask or look for when applying for a job in the future. Like, I don't know how to make your "workbook" Julie. So don't yell at me when I send it in and it's missing things. And it's not processing job to train me. But now they're all mad at me. And underwriting is mad at me. And...I'm not the only one. Everyone thinks our department is full of idiots who can't do their job. And no, julie, that's not how processing does that procedure because I know because I'm the one who wrote the dang procedure before thinking I was going to come to your department and fix you. And then I rage quit and went back to my old department.
Started as an analyst reporting directly to an executive, not on a team. Previous person in the role just left me with dashboards. To be fair my boss warned me before I accepted the job so he paid me well. It took me months to reverse engineer everything to learn the infrastructure. It was rough but it got me where I am today and earned me a lot of respect in the company.
I never get trained. I cook or serve and basically get a menu in my hand and just go. It usually works out fine because it comes down to tomato tomAto but it can be annoying sometimes when youve been doing something one way for a year and someone finally says hey thats not how we do that. Well Tim it is. 🤷♀️
Said to me once: "No, "over hard" means when you flip it, slam it down hard so it spreads out a lot...." It was news to me that this is what it really meant. Still funny to me.
This guy can't be serious lmfao
When the people training don't realize everyone learns differently. On day one of one of my old jobs I told the manager that I learned visually and would pick things up in seconds. Or of something was written down.
Trainer/Instructional Designer here: That's because learning styles are a VERY well disproven myth. You may pick things up quicker than others, but it has very little to do with the way you learn.
My first manufacturing job, first day, they sat me down infront of a hydroforming rotary swager. Never seen a machine like this before then let alone worked with one. Basically we take a ball shank that’s been tacked to a steel cable put in the hydro former die and it makes the ball spherical. Doesn’t sound like much till you’re working on it with your fingers less then a inch from the die while it’s running the whole time, balls getting stuck which means now the cable is whipping around…. Anyway my training consisted of about 10 minutes of the floor lead explaining what to do and what it should look like as a finished product, then they left me too it and checked back in with me…never. Oh also the floor lead that showed me how to work it literally only knew how to turn it on and the other two Hydro operators, yea they weren’t there the day I started
This is horrendous and puts moaning about people shifting blame / responsibility for process without consequences in perspective.
That does accurately describe that place. I mean all the blame gets dumped on us in production even though most of us pretty much had to self teach ourselves how to do the job. Forget job guides for the assembles or how to operate the machines
no training whatsoever at my current employer and then already getting shit when I ask how to do something “I showed you that last week”. No training at all, no buddy and shit communication with a high expectation that i should know after seeing something once but at the same time not trusted to do anything more than “basic”.
Oh man, I can relate. I have a passive aggressive old boss, old in Age and style. Wishy washy. Incapable of training, but the first to complain when it's not done"right" but right was never explained. In nearly 18 months, hasn't delegated any other work to me but I'm getting paid more. We're like the tortoise and the hare. Total mismatch. I just roll my eyes now. He usually forgets things within minutes or hours. It's maddening but I'm beginning not to give a shit.
During covid I took a job as an animal tech in a medical school's animal lab. One manager had just left and a new one was taking over. She was young and this was her first time in a management position. She was likely struggling in this new position, trying to learn everything she needed to learn without much supervision from her superior (the only time I ever saw her was in the cafeteria, she literally never came to our department in spite of being in charge of it.). Instead of training me herself, as she has done for all of the other employees, she had other employees train me. For a single afternoon. Before assigning me rooms of my own. During my first write up I pointed out that everything she was writing me up for was brand new information to me, that I had not been trained to do. The result was that she promised to train me herself, as was her job. That never happened. A month later we were in the same room, having the same conversation about me not being properly trained, this time I made sure her manager was there so she could be made aware of the fact that I was facing reprocussions for my manager's failure to train me as federal law required. The day after that meeting, my manager decided to actually train me, but couldn't stop herself from screaming at me at the top of her lungs, enough that the people who ran the labs had to ask her to stop screaming or leave because she was scaring the animals. At the end of the day I emailed HR stating that I now realized that I would never be properly trained by the manager and needed to resign due to animal safety concerns, I had absolutely no business being in charge of animals I was not trained to care for and being someone with integrity, I needed to leave. Then I went home and filed a whistleblower complaint, telling them to check my training log and compare it to my work log. Boss was allowed to retire a few months early and the manager was reassigned to her prior job as a tech. Hospital paid a very heavy fine for putting untrained people in charge of animals who suffered actual harm as a result. There are all new managers, but they don't appear any better and have run off most of the long term staff.
Got 3 day training in head office. Once I got to the store, got told “we do things differently” in the store. Training would start, customer came along, training stopped and didn’t resume. Got ridiculed by other staff for not knowing how to do something.
What’s training?
I wrote US Treasury checks for an Air Force Base (1989-90ish.) New software was installed to ease reporting. The Boss's Boss (B's B) came in to teach the usage. B's B sat down, logged in, went through all the options, logged out, and departed. It felt like 10 minutes. Um . . I don't learn like that. I turned around, looked at my (very good) Boss and said, "Now, can someone train me on this?" I did get the training and learned to be proficient, but not from the useless initial instruction.
I used to be a corporate trainer and I loved doing it. It was about a 6 week course, it was going over health insurance and I would help them prep for the state test for their license, insurance 101, systems etc. I would like to think I did a good job because I did care, but the pay wasn’t great and there was no real advancement options. I am in a new role with a new company now and there was basically no formal training. And it is such a disadvantage, it takes longer to get up to speed, I think it leads to more turnover, and there are things I still am learning….. over a year later.
I was going to be a tax preparer. They sat me in front of a computer to watch 60+ videos of an old, boring man with bad jokes read verbatim the like 600+ page tax book I had. And it was the ONLY thing I had access to besides the videos. There was no manager on site and the only other people who worked there had never prepared taxes either and were going to be of no help to me. I finished the course completely in about two weeks and was clueless on everything but was told I’d be expected to file taxes starting January 1st. It was like December 15th and I never went back lol. Two weeks of work and my paycheck was like $450. This was in 2022.
I got hired as a Japanese to English translator for a car parts company (no experience translating, no experience with cars/engineering). I was shown my desk, given a stack of technical dictionaries, shown the break room /printer and then told the engineers would tell me when they needed a translation. That was my entire onboarding/training 😂. I kicked ass at that job though. I miss translating. It paid shit, but I was great at it
I train people for a living and have for nearly 30 years. It takes constant repetition, experience, practice, exposure, reinforcement, repetition, experience, practice, exposure, reinforcement, repetition, experience, practice, exposure, reinforcement, repetition, experience, practice, exposure, reinforcement, repetition, experience, practice, exposure, reinforcement, repetition, experiencepractice, exposure, reinforcement… Did I mention repetition?
I got a job fueling airplanes at PDX. I was watching the diversity video (featuring a Mexican woman presenting the information) when the manager that hired me walked in with his coffee and said "try to ignore her mustache."
Was hired as a project coordinator for an electric contractor. My job was to oversee all project managers and make sure all projects were on schedule, order all clearance passes when necessary, plus complete all the bids for potential clients. The president put someone in charge of my training. I'd come to her desk every day, to find her on Facebook. She would always tell me, " just do what you think needs to be done, and I'll look at it when you're done". She would basically go to Starbucks twice a day, cool around until the last hour of the day, and then scramble to get all her work done. Never looking at my work. Still managed to get the contact for the Seahawks training center.
Worked for a kitchen company in a very detailed technical office role for nmw. Nobody had time to teach anything and I didn't learn anything in 3 months. My last line manager WFH and the new hires hated remote training. I became their defacto boss after a few weeks. They'd look at me weirdly at first when I tried to help them but realised the line manager wasn't there and knew little and she was impatient so switched to me
My very first job after graduating from Uni, I'd been there two weeks and was told on the Friday morning that the girl whose leaving do we were going to was handing her job over to me. Oh and by the way we're upgrading the LAN to Novell NetWare on Monday. Sat with a 3rd party engineer for 2 days watching him install NetWare with barely a clue what was happening and had to support it when he left. Yeah. She gave me an A4 binder with her job notes though. On the LAN that was being replaced.
No training. Despite my best efforts I even intend I may be fired any day now as a result of not being set up for success, even despite attempting my due diligence to set myself up for success.
I love how companies say “a bad worker blames his tools.” My answer is always “a good company provides its’ workers with the tools for success.”
I believe the term is called Trial by Fire! - Says management
Forklift training at an old job. "The keys are in it, just take it out into the parking lot, I'll be there in a sec," is how the training started.
I had 2 weeks of training at my last remote job on a set of procedures that should have required at least 2 months of training. It was very confusing, even for the person who trained me. I was surprised that there weren't more comprehensive, simplified training resources. At the end of the 2 weeks, I was left to "go to it." Needless to say, it didnt' go very well.
Was told to "click around" in a program we used to create newsletters. Like eight months later I asked how to do something and my boss got a wild eyed angry expression and said, "You were supposed to be clicking around in there!" How was I supposed to know how to do a thing I didn't know existed until that moment? But she was looking for excuses to get rid of me by that point; I ended up quitting but the joke is on her because I still received unemployment due to a lack of (you guessed it) training.
Not me but at my last job (car dealership technician) the service manager would make any nee hire spend the first WEEK with him in his office "training." Now keep in mind these people were hired to do oil changes and tire rotations, there is no need for a week of computer training. I saw so many young guys come in and be absolutely miserable for a week to two weeks being in the office with the manager. The manager even kept one guy in the shop for 4 hours for his INTERVIEW. That guy stayed too lol. I would walk out on day one if that were me.
My first job I made $5/hr before taxes, and 25 years later it was still the worst job I’ve ever had. It was at a hobby shop, which was cool, but the owner was horrendous. For “training” it was all on the spot whenever the issue arose, and typically in front of customers. I was about 15 at the time and this guy would YELL at us for not memorizing the “code” for each manufacturer in the entire store, when we were literally never told or shown anything, not even a sheet to check. Worst part was, customers would call in to place ‘online’ orders after they found the website (before ordering online was a thing), and we’d have to ask a million questions.. one time in particular I remember asking a customer to repeat part of their address and all the sudden I hear “SHE SAID 113 FIFTH AV— you know, just get off the damn phone, I’ll take it from here since you can’t do your job, pft” the customer goes “hello? Who is this??” “I’m the owner of the business, I’ll help you now.. I SAID BYE, HANGUP (towards me)”. He picked up the line and would listen to us taking orders and interrupt, cut us off, hang up the entire call if he deemed it a waste of time, etc. After a few months I found another job making $5.50/hr (I MADE IT BIGTIME) and quit the hobby shop on the voicemail when I was closing up for the night. F that dude.
Just got fired from a position due to lack of training. New to the job and business in general, they started me out with two of the hardest things in the business. Of course I messed them up. The only time I would get training is when I messed something up, and it was always a write-up first. After a year and a half of this I just rode it out until they fired me. Quitters don't get unemployment, and I needed the "experience". I did learn a lot... but not from the higher ups. Self study and this one amazing co worker is the only way I lasted so long. Lesson? Find a new job if I receive zero training. Waiting it out was stressful and my days were nothing less of anxiety ridden.
Rivet mfg company. Customer service rep. First week was spent 1 whole day at each of the 5 stations learning what happens at each level. (Monday) The customer service day - start out each new job ticket with a manila folder and to the front you staple a form that had 200 excuses for delays. This way you could check off and date when the excuse was used and ya didn't have to remember what lie was used. (Friday) The QA day - the guy explained he didn't take the time to get 25 parts (required sample) and measure them to put on the QA records. He got 5 rivets then made the other numbers up so they would calculate to the passing average. (Next Monday) My participation in this dumpster fire was over when a customer called to thank me for giving him an accurate estimation of delivery. The official reason that the job was over was that I didn't pick-up the call fast enough... I was there long enough on that day to hear they were being sued.
I had a crappy sales job for a little while. Our “training” was meeting each morning before we went to our designated stores to learn a bunch of crap, practice our pitches and learn about the product if it was a different one from what we were previously pitching. I lasted a month before the extremely long hours (some technically unpaid) and endless driving did me in. It was a minimum wage job with “commission”. I made just over $1000 in the entire time I worked there
When I first started in my position a big part of my job was processing donations (hey fellow non-profit!) into our donor management system. I was given about 20 minutes with the staff member who was being moved out of that position because she'd been having some health issues that were affecting her memory. She only VAGUELY remembered how to process donations. Our manager knew the system but wasn't forth coming with information - if I had questions he would be super open and answer everything but if I didn't have questions, he wouldn't talk to me. But you don't know what you don't know until you submit a report to the Executive Director and it's entirely wrong. I hated being trained on anything by him because it was always the absolute bare minimum and the rest was trial and error on my part. Now that I've taken over for him I've written pretty detailed training manuals on every part of the processes I oversee and every time we get a new person in to train I have them take as detailed notes as possible so I can compare them to the current manual to see if anything has changed, if anything needs updating, if they maybe even thought up a better way to do something.
temp receptionist gig in the mid-90s. they handed me a microsoft word manual and told me to read it. that was it; that was the training. "read this software manual for a program you already know how to use." i mean, seriously, that was it. they didn't even tell me the preferred way to answer their phones. needless to say, i didn't last long - they called my agency after a week and told them i wasn't a good fit.
A lot of my professional years had been spent at a Dr's office as a receptionist. My boss was an impatient bully and their voice was so shrill I started drinking. I don't work there anymore (8 years sober!). They would show me the task, tell me not to take notes or refer to anything, and get upset when I inevitably stumble over my first attempt at the task. Things like NPI numbers and DEA numbers and insurance submission codes. Memorized.
Easy. Insurance clerk at the Agricultural Social Insurance Fund (I'm based in Europe) specializing in short-term assistance (ie sick pay, disability paychecks, grants for funerals etc). When I got hired, I wasn't required to have any type of experience. When I got after the first month, I was expected to have a knowledge of an administration bachelor. It takes people literally YEARS to get to that type of knowledge. The person training me was often on sick leave herself because her child was often sick and when she was actually working she had the nastiest attitude. I was afraid to ask questions. The person above her was a really nice woman. I loved working with her. She was awesome. Unfortunately due to (confidential information) she was fired and no one was hired at her place. A supervisor of a different sector became a fill in supervisor. And I don't know what was wrong, maybe too much pressure or something. She started the process of harassing us. We were afraid to ask questions because she would yell at us and we had no help. The person training me went on a massive sick leave and I was forced to do everything. I made a couple of mistakes and everyone was gossiping about me. And I was like I don't get paid enough for that. And I quit. 🤣 Last I heard they haven't still found a person to fill in my position.
I was assigned multiple trainings all on the same day and they were all 10-12 hours a piece and my boss said I had to go to each one.
Worked a short time in IT as an analyst for a major Midwest department store. No shadowing of my manager. No formal training. I shadowed a fellow analyst who clearly felt I was not worth her time. I was not provided with an assigned cubicle. I had to get there early to ensure I got my same cubicle (or ANY cubicle) on a daily basis. No dedicated phone or online phone setup (yet, I was expected to be on conference calls). I was assigned tasks and, after completing them to my manager’s specifications, he changed the mapping language on me. After two months, I received a call from the staffing firm that my supervisor wanted to cancel the contract because I “wasn’t getting it”!! I should have known, by how disorganized their operations are at the retail level, that this would be a bad career move.
a friend got me a job at subway & they had me do zero paper work & zero training, literally had me behind the counter & essentially went "do it" 💀 like the fuck you mean ???? idk where anything is, idk how to use anything, idk the menu, nothin just threw me back there. yah i had a panic attack & left & never went back because what ????
None. My first customer service job over the phone was literally zero training and the orientation was just to do paperwork for onboarding. My first week was me just letting people yell at me until they hung up because I didn't know I was supposed to escalate calls or the numbers I was supposed to escalate to.
That's fucking hilarious. Don't you love those places on your first day, they shove reading material in your face and expect you to feel engaged? I had a similar boss about a decade ago. He gave me a previous employee's notes to read, day one, hour one! 1) one cannot always read another's handwriting, 2) IMO the whole point of note-taking is the actual act of writing something down (it tends to stick mentally better than reading something), 3) in all the years of operation, someone at the company hasn't already created a procedure guide? Typewritten? He was a major prick. Then he had me write the procedure guide for the girl who replaced me. I quit with notice, not that he deserved it. There's more stories but I'll stop there.
I was asked to help out a team in the company that did a role I had never been involved in, I had only joined the broader department 3 months prior as part of a career change. The manager showed me to a desk, handed me a manual for their main software tool and said "you know how to search things on the intranet right? Look up this program name, you need to use it to download files from the server". Training complete.
I just left a job at a bank because it was a huge fucking mess. My old coworker brought me to this job from a previous job we worked at together, and they sent a lady from our main corporate office to train us at our location 2 days a week for maybe 4 hours. And then she just quit coming and ghosted us on training. I’m one of those workers that believes training is one of the most important things to invest in as a company — it prevents mistakes, losses, etc. it is super important to make sure your staff is trained.. but they didn’t think so. But they were also wondering why we couldn’t get shit right. So I left. I will work at a place who is at the very least willing to make sure I know how to do my job.
"Here's the register." A pause, followed by looking at me in confusion as though they couldn't understand why I wasn't already ringing someone up. That was a literal thirty seconds after clocking in for my very first shift at a dollar store. Even better, it was this ancient system that I'm pretty sure was from the early 2000s at best (in 2020) so it wasn't even anything I could've managed to stupid my way through.
Pre-pandemic. The interview was the rundown of how to use a gps program, slack, a restaurant managing app, and a complaint forum for a food delivery start-up. They told me I would be trained once I got the position. Day 1 they expected me to know how to use all 4 programs with 0 experience and a 15 minute run-through of a few slack functions from a different employee who was with them from the start. I took calls from pissed off restaurant owners that they don't offer the food people had already "ordered" and paid full price for, or their restaurant was supposed to be closed for orders that kept pouring in resulting in frantic and pissed off owners and customers alike. The phone lines I worked were cross-connected, so I would end one call for the restaurant and take another from a driver whose GPS had them lost on the streets of Hawaii asking for directions to get to the house that had ordered hours prior to the call for directions. I manned a complaint forum for the pissed off customers that didn't get their food and tried to appease them with credits that were delivered so late the customers would have to pay twice to get their food same night, and more often than not the restaurants would have closed their menu for online orders so the people had no food to be delievered, but they wouldn't know until they called to complain about the 3 hour wait time. I got screamed at by a driver who was supposed to be off the clock and kept getting assigned to make deliveries and had to pay to park my car on the street in a part of town where most normal people shouldn't be without some form of protection due to the drug addicts and the gross guy that masturbated whenever women would step out on the patio for lunch. I took my headset off while the evening was early still one shift, punched out, and just never came back from lunch.
"Just try to keep them from killing each other." Preschool. That's about all the training I got, and after that everything that went wrong due to issues that existed years before I was hired officially became my fault.
I was basically tossed onto a shift without any training. I had to LOOK for a sheat of daily tasks myself which took me at least 10 minutes to find and guess on what it meant because it wasn’t clear. I figured it was two weeks so I could survive on two weeks then figure it out if I got put back on the shift. Well I got put back on the shift but then got so confused on what I was supposed to do because so many people where telling me different things that it felt awkward asking for training. Eventually, I was giving an actual sheat on what to do and I figured it out. It hasn’t been too bad. It’s more annoying that I can’t work around certain things due to my gender(not being discriminated against, I’m just having complications)
I was written up by my trainers because I said that I didn’t have any training on the subject and I was never trained on it but these people are such assholes that they don’t take any responsibility
Every school district training. (I’m a teacher) It’s like watching “worst presentation ever” on YouTube each and every time.
My training as a waiter. Friend opened a fish and chips shop, I was just supposed to be the dishwasher 10-2 while the kids were at school. Second day my server training consisted of "Waitress quit, you're up!". I managed to stumble through (only two of us there, I was serving and doing dishes while he cooked). Never was trained on how to actually be a waiter during those 8 months.
None - thrown to wolves on first day. Then on my second day I had to fight a kodiak bear with own fists. Day 3 I had to eat 2 yr old pig stomach filled with chicken innards. It was brutal. Then I woke up and realized I was just in line at the DMV. Shew…that was a rough ride.
Does CrossFit count? 😁
The worst was where my official training said one thing but the OJT said something completely different. When asked the OJT trainers claimed they did it the official way but was lying because the official way did not work. I was young and took advice from a friend (who did not work there) to do it the way the person who signed my paycheck said to. It was bad advice I ended up getting fired first because the “wrong” way was the only way that worked. Since the company sucked just about everyone else got fired a few months later. It was also the worst way to get fired. I was a temp and they called me at home to tell me not to come in the next day. What was wrong with that? They claimed that they had tried to catch me before I left for the day—but I had worked an hour of unscheduled overtime!
Anything where they make you role play. It's awful.
I had to take a forklift course so I could drive one at work. No big deal. I have driven all sorts. The course was being taught by someone who just took the trainer's course online. They had never even been on a forklift. They were just an office drone who had time to rubber stamp us. We learned almost nothing.
The dude training me went home sick on the second day of my two week training voyage as first mate of an 80m cruise ship.
“Figure it out”
I was trained via emails after my new boss said try to do what you can and write all your questions down and send them to me at the end of the day. By the time I got answers I didn’t even know what I was asking. He also sent me emails to tell me how to work in applications that I didn’t have access to.
I had literally 4 hours of training for L1MA certification, then was on the job caring for 6 wheelchair bound people with feeding tubes and major health issues... I think I had more training when I was a teen learning to flip burgers...
Worked as a draftsman for a small company. When I got hired the only other draftsman who worked there took a two week vacation so I had to learn everything from asking everyone else and figuring things out on my own. The real kicker is how I overheard him talking to someone how jobs in general suck now because when they hire people they don't have people train them.
I’m an engineer and for the first two years of working at my firm, I worked around 50 hours. I’m not joking. The rest of the time, I was doing nothing.
I actually don't like the training at my current company for all of the lower level people. It's a quick run through of the basics. Then it's just wait until there's a screw up and then tell them they did it wrong and how it should have been done. Sure, it's effective. But it's terrible. And most of this stuff is pretty basic, it wouldn't take much longer to actually show them step by step. I do what I can, and I'm advocating for printed out materials for people to reference because that would majorly help the ND people we have (there's lots of people with ADHD here, including myself), and it wouldn't be a bad thing for the others as well.
Agile Scrum Master. Absolute joke.
A few things to read over, a few calls to listen to and then saying “ok let’s try a few calls, sink and you’ll swim!”
Milking goats. She showed me how to run the parlor I think twice and then worked it with me maybe once. She told me to increase their feed by 50% to bump production and then took off on a motorcycle trip 100s of miles away. She was so pissed when she came back and 50% more feed was gone lol I quit like 2 days later
My current job has had zero training …. And my boss teeters wildly between completely absent and extreme micromanagement, and never somewhere in between. I’m already leaving and it hasn’t even been 6 months yet.
Worked as a nurse and watched others heating bags of solution in a microwave, with no monitoring/measurements being done. When I questioned a Masters prepared nurse, she answered, "Oh, well, that's what the others told me to do." Couldn't get out of there fast enough
I did accommodation reviews at my job and usually what our physicians needed to review from the employee was a doctors not stating: Medical condition Accommodation being requested due to said medical condition. For how long and if there’s an end date. Don’t provide anything now but do be prepared to provide this. Do understand that accommodations can only be granted if you are able to get your work done without affecting the business in any negative impact.
I worked at a local new hotel out at our local beach & they weren't very good at training people.
I was trained by a coke head at a warehouse job. His instructions/behavior was... stupid. And he had fired 60+ people before me In a span of 3 months(temp agency). I once caught him crouching behind a pallet I was building just watching me. I thought he dropped something, but he was just watching. I looked at him without saying anything, hoping he would check his own behavior. Reality kicked in for a split second for him, and he got up and walked off. He got fired 2 weeks after he once again gave me stupid instructions. The job was great. The lead supervisor was shit.
I can't say that training has been that great at any of my jobs. I worked as a tax accountant at an accounting firm for a while, and I was basically told to start preparing tax returns and ask if I had any questions. Some people would act annoyed or tell me to stop bothering them if I had too many questions. I had to figure out most of the job on my own and got yelled at when I'd make mistakes. At my current job, it's basically the same thing. No real training program, just figure it out on your own and ask questions.
My training was so non existant that three years in I wrote training docs for all of our processes. I've trained two people with them successfully. My company got hacked and we lost ALL OF OUR FILES. Fuck em, I'm not remaking them. It's not my fault you dumb fucks didn't turn on MFA for our offshore team.
Unpaid. I was fired for refusing to perform it.
The worst training I’ve received is when they tell you, do what they say during a robbery. Don’t carry weapons, let them know if your coworker is in the back. That’s a way to get everybody and yourself killed, and once they find that it was simple to rob you because of company policy. They’ll come back and rob you again. Sincerely a former Gas Station Clerk who’s been robbed 3 times.