Personal Woes and Advice 6

[darkrose50]

Oh the training for my current job was horrible. I am an insurance agent. I literally fill out forms for a living. Training did not touch on filling out forms at all. No training on how to fill out this or that form, no documentation or manual. I did not even know that there were different forms for enrolling, and what they were called. This is a level of incompetence that is unbelievably astounding and dumbfounding.

We had customer service trainers fly in, and they trained us on how to talk nicely. We even had a 1/2 day on body language . . . we are 100% over the phone!

Those customer service trainers designed "manuals" on what they thought insurance agents would need. There should be no surprise that they were not worth the paper they were printed on. Seriously everyone threw them away, and when we had a new supervisor no one had one to show her how horrible they were. The whole set-up was pretty laughable, if you ask me.

Some people are just clueless, it takes time to acclimate. Your learning style might not match your co-workers learning style. I have seen audio leaners get frustrated at me for wanting to write things down . . . as if everyone can learn via hearing something said aloud once.

When bosses pick someone to learn from, often they pick the one that is best at the thing. Being good at a thing is not the same as being good at explaining the thing. The same is true for writing procedures. I often see procedures that might as well say "do the thing".

Figure out what your learning style is (styles are), and do the same for the co-worker training you. Let them know that people are different and that you need to work together to figure it out. Many folks are clueless about people being different, and some just don't care.