Ahhh shit, Maid, I’ve been there. In fact, I got fired from my last job, and like yours, that job didn’t have a lot of OJT either. They just kind of threw you in and blamed you for everything. Meh, it was teaching English at an idiot hakwon somewhere in Korea, and I missed my wife anyway, so no big loss.
In any case, I agree with asking about training in the job interview. In addition, I’ve learned to show up for your first day of work with a pen and notebook and take down everything they tell you to do. Then start asking questions about what is expected of you–documenting the answers as you do so–and don’t stop asking questions until you are 100% certain–and I do mean one-hundred percent certain–about what is expected of you and exactly how you are accomplish it, or barring that, when and how you will get trained to perform that task. Then do it, just like they tell you to do it.
It’s all about documentation. For what it’s worth, quite a few jobs absolutely suck at training employees, which has always mystified me, by the way. Why the hell would you hire someone off the street and then not bother to teach the fucking job he was hired to do?!. In fact, I can safely say that in just about all my part-time, temp/internship/hack jobs I was pretty well trained, but at all my professional jobs, they just kind of shook my hand, pointed to the work and sort of gave it up to fate. In about half the instances, things turned out fine, and the other half? While that hakwon was the first job I was actually fired from, there was little love lost between us.
First, sorry about the job. It sucks to lose a job, whether it’s being fired or reduction in force. Been through 6 jobs in the past 10 years because of mergers or bankruptcies.
Second, get together the position posting you answered and were hired for, the employee handbook they gave you when you started and any documentation you received about your job and responsibilities. If you do not find the task included as part of your regular duties you might have a way to fight them if they deny unemployment. However, if there is a single reference to the task or if the position includes a phrase like “additional duties” then you are up a creek. It won’t matter whether they only told you about it once in passing and then said, “Don’t worry about it. You hardly ever need to do it.” You had been told about a part of your job and it is your responsibilities to do everything, no matter how trivial.
Go to the unemployment office ASAP. Then get to a temp agency. If they deny the unemployment you can at least work a temp job to bring in some money while you look for something permanent.
Depending on the level of experience and education the person claimed on the resume or during the interview, training may be more superfluous than at other jobs. My training has been minimal since my MBA (7 yrs ago) and its because I am expected to come to the job as a professional, and if I had questions, I had to ask. If I didn’t know how to use a software program, I had to ask. If I wasn’t sure where to get the data for a report, I had to ask.
Sorry AmericanMaid it does suck that you are in this situation, but having an MBA means much higher expectations, IMHO.
But wait! You are an MBA! Aren’t we supposed to just know everything on day one of work?
What I’ve been finding as one of the challenges of being a managment-level MBA in a new job is that I’m treated both as a genius and imbecile, according to the convenience of my superiors.
I’d like to get some perspective; was it a million dollar error on a task involving ten billion dollars? That’s not all that bad. If it was on a task involving one thousand dollars, that’s really bad.
IAC, where were the checks and balances? Where I work, we don’t let people get into the position of blowing a million dollars without any oversight. We have, you know, TPS reports to file every week…
you get fired because the only other option is to fire your manager for being such a total moron. really its managements fault here but as usual its the workers who get the blame
I’ve been working with my current employer for almost a year now and I still understand very little of my responsibilities. The “training” is computer based, obsolete, and irrelevant. Management rarely has an answer for my questions and when they do it’s obviously made up on the fly. My coworkers have advised me to simply guess (because they don’t know either), so that’s what I’ve been doing. Essentially the training plan is “do whatever you think is best and if you did it wrong you’ll hear about it tomorrow, unless the next person up the chain isn’t working tomorrow in which case nobody will know it was you who screwed up because that would require communication and we don’t do that here.” This isn’t about subjective stuff either, but plain old procedural crap like where that report goes or how to get my next assignment when I finish this one.
So far I haven’t guessed wrong, but who knows what the future may bring. The OP has my sympathies.
I have no idea how UI works in your situation, but it could be a problem if they can prove just cause. I’m not a lawyer, but I’d talk to one about this issue.
My last job was like that. They hired me and then the next day my boss, a director, quit. His boss, the VP of the group showed zero interest in discussing my responsibilities until she wanted something. Then she would throw a temper tantrum if I didn’t know what she wanted.
The entire year I was there, the company was going through massive layoffs. There was a good 3 month period after they “retired” my VP where I had no boss and no bosses boss. Then they hired a new director to replace the old one. Then they laid off all the other directors. Then the managers (including me). Apparently the staff have now been outsourced to India.
Question 1: Does your job involve MONEY? Or put money at risk?
Suggestion: Then be extremely meticulous about your job functions, even when other people tell you that they aren’t important or fail to check up on you.
Depends on who you are in the company too. If you were a mailroom clerk asked to overnight materials to a sales rep in the feild so he could demo a million dollar product install 2 days later (say a large enterprise software install) and you sent it regular ground, the sales rep is going to blame the loss of a million dollar sale on you, you are toast.
If you are upper management and routinely make judgement calls that can swing a couple million in labor/materials, its more of an oops.
Either way, a million is serious money for any employee to fuck up on and you have to have a pretty serious pay grade for it not to be a firing offense.
Well, Jesus, you guys, that sucks. I had no idea I’d been somewhat lucky to avoid that. If anything, I’ve been in jobs where micro-management was the watchword.
An intern a friend of mine was looking after cost his company several million pounds in his first week on the job, and all he did was type a few too many 0s. It happens.
How do I say this delicately, and without coming across as a jerk? As an MBA with an advanced degree in business administration, do you not have some responsibility to understand your duties (or ask until you do understand them), why you’re doing them, and the consequences of them not being done?
To be fair, they *did *post it in the Pit. If they wanted or expected only sympathetic answers, the board guidelines clearly show that that thread should have gone in MPSIMS (even if it’s neither mundane nor pointless).
Actually, as a grownup professional person, you have that responsibility.
I’m trying really hard to understand what happened here. Were you somehow unclear on the nature of your job? Whatever this task is that you were asked to do “every couple of months, no big deal”, did you not, upon learning how to do the particular task and bit of reflection, see how this task fit into the bigger picture?
