What???
"In order to ensure the best practice, employee complete a series of 'refresher' training modules across a hot of topics on an annual basis."
Was the spokesperson located in Mumbai by any chance?
Capita IT Services boss Peter Hands has handed his staff a joyful end-of-year gift: an order to complete about a dozen mandatory training courses by 31 December. The big cheese's memo caps off a year in which Capita froze bonuses and pay rises, threatened to outsource jobs to India, and went head to head with Unite over …
I work for Crapita in one of their Regulated Business Divisions. These training courses are a joke that a chimp has 1 in 3 chance of passing on the first run. An utter waste of an hour (55 minutes while the course loads, 5 minutes to tick boxes of 10 - 20 questions.)
Or a cunning plan to find any staff who have not completed the mandatory training in breach of their contract and therefore dismissable without going through the redundancy process.
Some of these corporates can play dirty when they want to get rid of people at the least possible expense.
Hello, you're through to the Capita Customer Service Desk. How may I help?
..
So you're saying your priority 1 system has been down for 3 hours, and you want to know when It'll be fixed. Hold one for one minute and I'll check for you.
..
Ok, I've checked with the operations team and they are all doing compulsory health and safety training, sorry there won't be any engineers available until after 31st December. Thank you for choosing Capita IT services.
Employees at an IT firm are being asked to do some internal training courses, and yes, granted, the timelines are quite short. BUT, is that really news, deserving of an article on an (inter)national IT news site?
Maybe I should write in next time our system sends me an email to take the annual refresher of our mandatory internal courses.
Well given this is a large company who have been trying to offload staff, with some dubious practices, who have now demanded staff complete mandatory training in the next week and a half (allowing for public holidays), I'd say it falls in the sites remit.
Of course you may not see it this way and good luck to you as you try and reduce your headcount
It's newsworthy, since its happening in a company who's got a hard-on for removing it IT staff, outsourcing their jobs to India, and expects their entire workforce to complete courses like 'Customer Services' during the holiday season, whilst screwing over most of it's own employees in the process.
It's not called Crapita for nothing.
Same crap as everyone else, how to lift a perfectly square, evenly weighted box. How to sit on a chair that isn't knackered (or been nicked and replaced with a broken one), how you are supposed to be nice to complete dickheads, overcoming the urge to hit with a baseball bat.
Welcome to the world of corporate bullshit box ticking.
The trouble with common sense is...
... that it isn't really that common.
Now we ALL know how to lift things. We ALL know to get out in a fire. We ALL know about Anti Money Laundering, about treating customers fairly and about not giving our passwords to people in the street.
Yet over the next few weeks we'll probably all have a good laugh at some TV programmes showing idiots with no common sense doing stupid things. Common sense really isn't that common, and if you're one of the people who moan about the "stupid mandatory training", you're probably one of the people its actually aimed at.
Personally I'd bring back the old Public Information Films, and put them on ten times more often.
Now, who wants to reminisce over Tufty, the Green Cross Code and Charlie Says ...
The Green Cross code, if I remember rightly, was modernist vagueness compared with the old Kerb Drill. "Look left, look right, and look left again...". Or maybe it was the other way round, I was never quite sure. Peer frantically in all directions, then walk across, don't run: if you have to run you must have got it wrong, maybe for the last time.
I got fed up with the inevitable panic at the end of each quarter, so now I do them at the beginning. Then the end comes round, everyone else swears a lot. I just tell them the answers so they don't need to read all the purile crap that they force you to read before you can do the assessment. Mind numbing crap that it is.......
I work in a financial related industry and things like Foreign and corrupt practices act and anti bribery act are driving a lot of companies to metaphorically sh1t themselves. It is an absolute mine field with a lot of grey areas.
However as long as a company can prove they have made a good effort to ensure their employees abide by the rules and training, they have an out (mostly)
BTW, Capita are not the best. We deal with them and they are farcical, especially if the problem is technical.