You know…..it doesn’t reflect well on your company when you, as an Assistant Store Manager and department head, tell a brand new barely hired employee that you hired her specifically because you could tell she’s competent enough to be dropped onto the sales floor with less than one days worth of training and no help. Especially since I over-heard the HR head tell said ASM, after the FIRST day it happened, that doing that was against company policy. Yes, it happened again.
And I really do mean “dropped on the sales floor with no help” and one days worth of training. I “shadowed” on register for less than 4hours and completed less than 6hours of “online training” before being put in a register enclosure with no other trained cashier within hand-waving distance. Sure, the “supervisor on duty” was “only a phone call away”…..which means that if I need their physical presence at the register its going to take them 5 minutes to get to me…..
I suppose its a compliment, but its one I don’t want or need thank you very much. She got damn lucky frankly. Its been 5, almost 6, years since I last ran a register in that kind of environment. If I wasn’t as computer literate as I am, and as good as I am at learning new systems with no training, she’d have been royally screwed. I have more than enough experience to recognize the HUGE list of things that could have (and still could) go wrong.
It doesn’t help that the assistant supervisors are not only OK with this whole mess (cause it gets them out of having to run a register due to someone’s stupidity in planning for college kids back to school), but they have no problem berating me when I do or say something that isn’t correct because this company does that differently than the ones I worked for before…..
As of when I left work yesterday I’ve had less than 4hours of “shadowing” time, and barely 8hours of “online training”. If the same mess happens again today, not only will this job not last over 2-3years like I’d hoped, but it won’t even last 2 weeks!
If that is how they run your company, then I say don’t stay any longer than it takes to find another company to work for. It has been my experience that these situations don’t get better, they get worse. Deal with the stress as long as you have to, but when you get the opportunity, get the hell out and go to work for a group that doesn’t have its head up its collective backside!
I’m sorry you’re in this situation. Been there and done that. It really sucks!
Mark
That is the current plan!
I don’t know what company you’re working for, but I guess it answers the questions that Hubba and I have been asking each other about whether or not retail companies are doing any training anymore. :-/
I’ve spent far to much of my life working retail. Some companies are better than others. Whats especially frustrating here is this company has a good training plan/policy, and the management is totally ignoring it…..