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I'm a client and internal trainer for a financial software company and, overall, I like my job and coworkers. Still, coming from being a TA at a university to Corporate America has been a huge adjustment and there are some things that baffle me and piss me off. 1. Why is there an acronym for every goddamn thing under the sun? Sometimes meetings turn into alphabet soup, it's ridiculous. When I first started my job, I had to learn and certify on the basics of our system, its infrastructure, modules, etc. No problem. I also had to take three tests on acronyms. The first was a match test, the next was a fill in the blank test, and the third was an oral test. My mentor had to read out the word, and I had to explain it in my own words. Everything has an acronym. Departments, job titles, the software names, absolutely everything. People can have the same acronym for completely different things across departments. How we manage to understand each other, I don't know. 2. Somebody in the thread already said this, but I'm gonna reiterate that this is like high school 2.0 sometimes. On my floor alone, there are 5 married couples. They hold hands, get lunch together, and IM each other over our internal IM client. Eventually, after a few years of this, they cheat on each other--with someone who works at the same company. A few weeks ago, someone's husband found out that his wife was cheating on him with someone else from our company. He vandalized her car with acronyms related to our company such as ("Name of company" adulteress, I'm a "name of company" whore, etc.). A few days after this, he pistol whipped her and, thankfully, is in jail now. Usually it doesn't get to that point, but the amount of "Musical Spouses" here is unreal. I honestly don't understand how people do it. It would cramp my style if my hypothetical spouse worked in the same building, floor, and department as I did. One of my coworkers will IM her husband all day if she doesn't have anything to do. 3. I hate being a default project manager when other people drop the ball. If I were asked to do some of this stuff in advance (send documentation to the client, set up a location for the training, etc.) I wouldn't mind...but the day before? Or even the day of, in same cases? If I'm gonna project manage, at least pay me as if I were a project manager. I also hate meetings where very basic questions such as "So where is the training gonna be? How many clients will be there? What type of education do they want?" are all answered with "I dunno.  " I also hate it when project managers promise the client the moon and the stars and then are nowhere to be found when the client is pissed that they didn't get all the things that they were promised. Some of that could have happened if I and the other trainers had been informed in advance that the clients were expecting certain things, but when I don't know that there are these high expectations, I can't really make that happen. 4. I also hate how everything is training's fault. Didn't get that development you wanted? Blame the trainer. Didn't get everything that the project analyst and manager promised you, even though they have no loving idea what training will do? Yeah. Training's fault. It goes on and on. It's annoying, and you just have to suck it up because the PM and the PA aren't there. You are. Other than those complaints, I like my job and my coworkers. v  v
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Apr 21, 2010 23:50
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 00:54 |
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monsieur fatso posted:Haha! Casual Fridays own, gently caress the haters.  I started my job in September and, in that time, we've had 1 month of casual days. One week for employee appreciation, another week immediately following that for United Way ($5 donation), the last two weeks of December were casual, and next week will be casual as well ($5 donation to our scholarship fund for children of employees).
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Apr 22, 2010 00:18
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Wagoneer posted:So who hears and visualizes this 12 times per day?  It's even better when your SMEs (or Smees, I guess) don't agree.
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Apr 27, 2010 02:08
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fosborb posted:I guess that is a benefit for being the only SME of my department. I'd say a downside is that means if I ever slip up it's all entirely on my head but hey its not like anyone cares enough to notice when I'm wrong. I have two SMEs who are both supposed to be mentoring me on the topic I'm currently learning and the next topic I'm learning. They have gotten into passive aggressive bitchfests in the middle of people's trainings before because they both love to be right. Separately, they're great people. In a training, 
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Apr 27, 2010 03:17
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fosborb posted:How do two people even train at once? Do they crowd around your cube as you try to follow their directions? That seems doomed to fail from the very beginning. Well I'm a corporate internal and client trainer, so in order to be able to train clients, I have to certify on whatever it is I'm supposed to be learning. A certification training requires the presence of at least one manager and one SME and no less than five people. Basically the idea is to act as if you're really training a client (powerpoint, learning aids, the works). If 2 of your 5 are the SMEs and they don't agree, and they don't train it the same way, and they don't have the same information, and if they've taught it or explained it to you differently...it's a pain in the rear end. It becomes a huge problem when you're trying to learn it and need ask them questions. Sometimes they will give you two completely different answers and the manuals that we have is ambiguous as all hell sometimes. Morby fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Apr 27, 2010 |
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Apr 27, 2010 04:15
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 00:54 |
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For the most part I've stayed out of this thread, but today something happened that really pissed me off. It is now 5:11PM EST. I just left work after having been there since 3:30AM EST. I'm a trainer for a software company that sells its systems to many multinational companies. In order to advertize our training services, we've been offering free web training to our clients on certain specific topics. Because we have clients in Europe, we also have a UK training team. The trainings were to be at 10AM GMT, 10AM EST, and 3PM EST. UK trainers would handle the 10AM GMT sessions, and US trainers would handle the rest. This would be fine and dandy except that the UK team member that trains my topic is terrible. This one guy in the UK has been assigned to learn my topic at least as long as I've been at the company (and we're coming up on two years in a few months). The training would have covered what he already knows from previous trainings that he's done on another topic, and 3 other screens. The screens were highlighted with the specific aspects that needed to be discussed for the purposes of this training. If he'd talked to me or one of the other SMEs (I hate that phrase) for an hour, he would have been fine enough to do the training himself. ...Except he never did that. So, because we had European clients to sign up, I and another coworker of mine had to get up this morning and train them. I wouldn't have minded it so much if he'd made an effort to actually learn the poo poo, but he never did. He didn't ask anybody for help, he didn't talk to anyone about it, he just basically said "lol I can't train that, bro!" and left it on our laps. It really bugs me because it's just not fair that I have to suffer for his inability (or unwillingness) to learn three goddamn screens. What drives me nuts about my department is that the US and the UK teams are not held to the same standards. If I had done half of that poo poo, my managers would have at least had a stern talk with me about it and would probably have made me sit in and do what I could. But the trainers in the UK? They have carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want, it seems. I've been in meetings with another UK trainer who has said "I'm not able to perform any outstanding tasks from this meeting because I'm assigned to _______" and no one says a word in protest. If I tried to do that, it would have been a huge, horrible issue. In every other way, my department is pretty great to work with. The US folks are cool to work with, there's no one I actively hate. There's stupid corporate bullshit (team meetings, performance reviews, and acronyms upon acronyms), but it's not a terrible job by any means. In fact the managers let us go home and take a longer lunch today, and have told us we have comp time for this morning (but I would have preferred the sleep). Now I feel better. Morby fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Jun 14, 2011 |
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Jun 14, 2011 22:10
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