Heh! An old joke: What will you never hear a PhD say? “I don’t know”.
Interchange ‘MBA’ with ‘PhD’ as you like. Way to perpetrate a stereotype there, AmericanMaid!
Good news! I will be eligible for unemployment. My former employer will not contest my claim. On the mixed news side, staffing agencies are all over me. My experience with staffing firms has been varied but any job would be nice. If it’s contract, that’s fine!
Also, I am looking into getting therapy since I basically got myself fired in the worst employment market in decades. Yeah, a leetle mental health check-up there! I found a health insurance that will only cost me $40/month and has amazing benefits (Network Health for MA residents).
I hope this isn’t taken as part of a pile-on, but this is what jumps out at me.
As an MBA, you’re not trained to alert management–you’re trained to be management. You should be at the level now that whenever you raise a problem, you should expect to be asked: “so, what have you done to fix it?” or at the very least, “so what is your proposal?” Speaking as an MBA myself, I can tell you that going to senior management with an issue and not having a solution readily at hand makes them vewy, vewy angwy. It makes them start actively asking themselves, “if I have to deal with this crap myself, why am I paying this fool $XXXX per year?”
Even if the organization seems dysfunctional, that’s how you should be approaching your job and thinking of yourself, IMO.
Awesome. Hope you find something soon–and that the new place is a better fit.
I got this bullshit too, only it would have been seven million in my case. Fortunately someone more competent was able to save the situation, so whatever it was I was supposed to have done, or left undone, didn’t end up being the crisis it would have been. If we had really been about to lose seven million. For whatever it was I did or didn’t do. Because my boss couldn’t tell me what it was. I worked on several disparate assignments, and I was never able to figure it out. I’d been with this company for nine years, always gotten decent reviews, but had been involuntarily transferred to a different department two years before.
The OP may be able to get unemployment, “fired for cause” doesn’t necessarily mean not being able to do the job; it often means deliberate or malicious misconduct, such as pilfering or embezzlement, sexual harrassment, and so on. On the other hand, the work history of the OP could be a problem. If you don’t mind my asking, what happened at the earlier jobs? Were you laid off or fired?
I hear you on the training problems. I was transferred to second tier support. I was trained in minute detail as to who I should call for a particular problem, but not at all on how the systems worked. And woe betide me if I called the wrong person.
Mrs. Cad had to fire someone while working in California, a state where (at least 10 years ago) it was nearly impossible to NOT get unemployment. You would have to practically rape a customer while shooting a kid and yelling “FUCK ALL <fill in racial slur here>!” before they would even investigate the company’s objection to the claim. Most of the time it wasn’t worth the trouble so companies almost never fought it. When Mrs. Cad went out on maternity leave, her first officer (she was the security manager) spent the entire time screwing off and screwing up. What really pissed her off is how he would make personal comments about her while she was gone. Mrs. Cad had everything documented but that doesn’t mean anything in California so she asked my advice on how to write it up so he couldn’t get unemployment. I suggested that she add that one of the causes for firing was “barratry”
- The unemployment person at the hearing said that she had never seen that before. We think she actually thought it was a nice touch.
- He lost his case.
The other two jobs I was laid off - November 2007 and February 2008. This was my first firing.
This is the part I don’t understand. I know she has the degree, but how could she, or anyone, jump into it and start managing people and projects, without some more systematic training in the company’s operations? If I had an MBA perhaps I would understand it better. In the world of IT I’ve had some very frustrating experiences because prior knowledge of some business logic on my part was just assumed. For example, for a dispute processing system I didn’t know that it’s a two step process that normally requires two people–one to do the initial approval and promote the issue up for resolution, and another person to actually fire off the check (or credit). The person training me nearly went mad with frustration until we got it straightened out. Sometimes you can’t ask questions because you don’t know what questions to ask.
At my very first professional job, which was indexing insurance laws and regs, the very first thing they had you do was sit down and work through a beginner’s guide to how insurance works. The book looked like a Schaum’s outline but had more text; in the hundred-and-fifty or so pages therein I learned all about claims, underwriting, risk, moral and morale hazards, premiums, and retrocession. It took me perhaps two days to go through it, if that. I doubt that I learned enough to be an insurance agent, or a Lloyds underwriter, but I knew enough about it to be an indexer. It shouldn’t take a great deal of training, but a little bit of the right kind is essential.
Judging from this thread, you wouldn’t understand it any better, but you’d certainly pretend to.
Because a person with an MBA should have a fairly complete understanding of general business operations. I’m not really sure that I understand exactly what the OP screwed up, but it sounds like it was a fairly straightforward case of
a) important paperwork (a claim)
b) worth a lot of money
c) not meeting a deadline
An MBA should be able to put a and b together and realize that they need to not go to c.
What if it’s a maritime claim?
Snark is fun and all but it is a valid point that the OP should have been a lot more pro-active.
As I read it, a lot of her paperwork was routine and seemingly unremarkable, so she assumed this particular paperwork was also routine and not really worth getting worked up over.
Thats fine for a temp. A temp can just push paperwork about until told otherwise. However I would have expected an MBA to have some level of critical analysis towards their own job. What am I doing? WHY am I doing it? How can I do it better?
I don’t actually put much store by degrees, or MBA’s (even I got a degree for gods sake ;)), but I do think that people should be aware of the consequences of what they do at work, especially if they put forward a shiny certificate that says they have went off and studied about many of those processes and consequences.
heh-heh…insurance joke.
It could be a truck accident in Kansas and still be a marine claim.
If the typical MBA student gets that kind of practical training, I can understand your point. On the other hand, the degree which got me into the indexing job was an MLS. I’d say my two year program was 80% theory and 20% hands on practicalitities, i.e. actual cataloging of materials or providing reference material. And, in my case, four quarter units as a TA for the undergraduate research methods course. Knowing how to create the most effective index or catalog, and understanding some of the methods used to quantify the information value of a given word in a given document set only laid the foundation. I couldn’t have done that specific job at that specific company without on the job training. Are business processes so routine and/or uniform that this is never a valid issue with an MBA?
My seven-million-dollar almost catastrophe was probably the same sort of a, b, c situation. But it was never made clear to me that it was my responsibility, and I didn’t know to ask. I meant to point out earlier that they would never tell me to which of the several things I worked on it was connected, and to this day I still don’t know.
Further, in some offices or departments you get a calldown for “making the team look bad”-- that is, asking the wrong person, or asking a stupid question. Self-help books on job hunting today generally emphasize the lack of training and the resulting need to hit the ground running. When life at the office is a tightrope walk between not wanting to appear foolish but also asking sufficient questions, it’s a wonder more people don’t fall flat on their butts.
Maybe this will help clarify: I was trained on task A (working problematic claims in our computer system) in July of 2009. I was told by the person who was training me that this was an unimportant task and can be checked every couple of months. In September, I was trained on task B (running a report on claims with issues). I was clearly told that this report had to be run weekly. I did not make the connection © that the list of problematic claims (A) came from the weekly report (B) because I was trained by 2 different people 2 months apart. I was also not aware that problematic claims would be held up for months if I didn’t work them in our computer system.
While people with MBA’s are supposed to have a basic understanding of business principals, the particulars of every company and job varies.
When I worked for a major corporation I provide support to a week long training programs that were MANDATORY for every new executive in two different areas. These were folks with MBA’s and on average 10-20 years experience in the field, yet they had a week long training program when hired that taught them how our particular company ran these functions.
I don’t care who you are, how smart you are, or what your past training and experience is - it’s crazy to throw someone cold into a position, give them no information, prevent them from asking meaningful questions or asking for help/advice, then expect them to do well.
Is that what happened to the OP? No way for me to know, I wasn’t there - but I certainly have seen that kind of crap happen. And it always ends badly.