Week 6 – Blog: Individual Assignment

For my experiences, both happened while working at a golf course from age 17-19. Within our learning materials we talked about the process of on-boarding, in which a employee will help train a new employee by helping them get used to the experiences within the job, including socializing them with the “values, norms and required behaviors” needed to be successful within the workforce.

A beneficial experience I had that relates to the process of on-boarding was training to be a beverage cart girl. Within this, I rode the course with another cart girl who showed me the ropes along with gave me extremely helpful tips on dealing with golfers, driving the course and calculating final cost for a large order. She pressed the key behaviors(girly, happy, chatty) one needs to have to not only be successful but earn more tips to take home at the end of the day. She ran me through the phases of socialization, including anticipatory socialization, encountering and adapting by preparing me before meeting the golfers, mirroring how she acted around them, and showcasing how to de-escalate rude comments or urgent customers. Her teachings helped prepare me to run the cart on my own once our training was done.

A non-beneficial experience I had was within the training, or lack thereof, for serving at said golf course’s restaurant. As talked about in First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, the best managers are deliberate in their trainings, as shown in the quote “They work closely with each employee, taking note of the choices each makes, the way they all interact, who supports who, and why.” My manager did the opposite of this, pretty much throwing multiple tables at me at once and expecting me to learn as I went. Often when I had questions, he was either too busy or not in sight to help. Learning without training, especially within the serving industry, was very hard for me and it took a while for me to grow confident in my abilities.