The last time I had formal training was when I worked for Ford Motor Company. When I worked for Ford, I was in the service department working as a Service Lot Attendant. What we did was we would move around vehicles as the arrived and left for service. There was an overflow lot and the main service building and we would drive vehicles in between the two allowing for the Service Technicians to perform scheduled maintenance on vehicles that have come in for service.
In order for us Service Lot Attendants to perform our jobs safely and efficiently, training was needed. Because this was my first “professional” job, it was especially needed to be trained. I did not know proper procedures, proper safety protocols, proper material handling methods and much more. In order to attain the skills required to perform the job properly, the Ford dealership that I was working for mandated that I go through training as a new Lot Attendant. This meant that I was to sit through well over 20 hours worth of training.
This 20 hours worth of training consisted of the necessary protocols required to perform the job efficiently and safely. If I am going to be honest however, this process was rather mundane and did not comprise of many of the “real life” techniques and points of awareness needed to properly perform the job. I will use an example of a situation that I had to go through to explain what I mean. On the dealership lot, adjacent to the service center, is a wash bay used to clean vehicles that arrive at the dealership regardless of if they are there for service or if the vehicle is a new vehicle. This wash bay is located across from another wash bay by a small pathway which measured approximately 50 feet across. This posed a serious hazard when it came to vehicles possibly striking each other due to the close proximity of the driveways for the wash bays. As a result, I had accidentally reversed the Ford truck I was driving into the Ford van that was behind me. This created a rather interesting predicament as now I had to deal with the fallout of the situation. There was never any training given to deal with or to prevent situations such as this. Had there been some sort of training, it is very possible that this event would have never occurred. This example is a situation in which it can be shown that training specific to the job needs to be created to account for the unique situations that could arise otherwise.
The example that I used is a great example of how formal training may not cover all of the bases required to create efficient and effective employees. As a result, a mentor program where senior Lot Attendants are helping to teach the new Lot Attendants would have been greatly beneficial to those of us who were new to the position. This is not the only situation where mentor programs would be beneficial in general. There were also aspects such as how to use the garbage compaction machine, how to handle used oil and much more where a mentor would have been useful both as someone to learn from and also someone to ask questions to.
In conclusion, the usage of a mentor program would not only allow for proper training, but it would also allow for employees to have a point of contact apart from the general manager as the managers may not have the patience, time or ability to explain all that needs to be learned. This can apply to most any job ranging from the food industry to the technology industry. Most any new employee would greatly benefit from having a mentor to be able to learn from and highlights the importance of allowing for mentors to exist within respective fields.
