Training Experiences

Over the years I have been sent through a handful of different training courses and I can definitely relate that their quality can vary considerably. When I worked at a Safeway for a Summer I had to sit through a series of training videos that quizzed on different topics. They covered everything from workplace safety to how to handle money to sexual harassment training and more. They almost always gave you a quiz beforehand and a quiz afterwards which had questions relating to the topics covered in the video. In some ways their structure was very reminiscent of the sort of pre and post performance measuring that was touched upon this week in the lecture Evaluating Training Effectiveness. Unfortunately, my experience with this training was quite bad due to how it required you to sit through many hours of training videos and readings in a room with nothing but an (old) computer screen. The topics were rarely very illuminating, mostly consisting of things that are quite obvious to most people, such as not harassing people or that it is a bad idea to scale aisle shelves like you’re rock climbing. While this sort of training is understandable from a liability standpoint, it can still become rather burdensome when thrown at you all at once.

The environment in which the training took place was also not comfortable and the topics were generally dull, resulting in an experience that was forgettable in the long run and frustrating to undergo in the short. Beyond that the whole onboarding process in general was not very well put together, as once you finished the very uninspired training quizzes you were thrown into your grouping of coworkers and largely left to your own devices.

In contrast to the Safeway training I have been through, I recall that when I worked for the city pool during high school most of their training was hands-on and involved you going through many of the motions that you would when you actually began working. Additionally, everyone who was working for the pool was introduced to each other multiple times beforehand and given the opportunity to build rapport. The experience was far better and resulted in less conflicts and a better understanding of the position, demonstrating many of the benefits that were described in the Onboarding and Socialization lecture. At Safeway the first time I met my direct coworkers was on my first day actually working and there wasn’t any training for the actual role. This caused a lot of headaches for almost everyone involved and contrasted sharply with the far superior onboarding process that I had previously seen.

References:

Myers L., Lecture 2 Evaluating Training Effectiveness, https://canvas.oregonstate.edu/courses/1936538/pages/week-6-learning-materials?module_item_id=23510039

Myers L., Lecture 3 Onboarding and Socialization, https://canvas.oregonstate.edu/courses/1936538/pages/week-6-learning-materials?module_item_id=23510039