The other day something fairly common happened at the Shitshow. A deadline was coming up for an online mandatory training module and all the managers were panicking to make sure everyone completed it. Nobody knew about it because it was only mentioned in one of those corporate emails that nobody ever reads. To complicate matters, there were no clear instructions on what to do or how to do it. Somehow, someone figured out how to do it and then instructions spread by word of mouth amongst the engineers after that. That’s usually how it works. Very efficient.
“Mandatory training” isn’t what you think it is. You’d think it’s something useful like: how to do your job better, how to outperform the competition, or how to learn from past mistakes. No, that type of training is mostly non-existent. Even if someone ever volunteered to offer that kind of training, everyone attending would have to do it on their own time (lunch break or after work), and nobody wants to do that.
“Mandatory training” is always liability related, and it is always useless. It should be called “Cover the Company’s Ass” training, or CCA, because its only purpose is to reduce the company’s liability by having a record that some sort of training was given. They also like to remind you that if you screw up, you will be held liable, not the company. The training doesn’t really prevent you from screwing up - it’s incredibly vague and almost everything is subjective. You can still easily screw up one of the countless forms, procedures, and disclaimers, but at least the company can prove they “trained” you, no matter how ineffective it was.
Because training in which I sign my rights away is mandatory, yet training on how to do my job is my own problem, I throw rocks.
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