Friday, March 20, 2009

My training experience

45 hours of work in 4 days... my brain is very, very tired. And thanks to some technical difficulties with some of our training equipment, we didn't even completely finish the course. We will be finishing our workbooks ourselves over the weekend. Theoretically, we will be teaching our crews this material starting next Friday, so we don't have a whole lot of time to make sure we truly understand everything.

Thankfully, I didn't find most of it to be too difficult, it was just a lot of information. Some of my classmates were struggling, which makes me a little hesitant about how quickly our team members will catch on. As I mentioned before, I took a [required] test in December to basically see if my intelligence level was high enough to do this job. There were 28 questions on the test, they had practice tests available for you to take prior to the exam itself, and most of them were fairly common sense questions in the first place. There was no reason someone couldn't pass this test. Some of the fellow test takers at the time made my eyes expand a little, when they couldn't even figure out how to fill in the answer on the answer key. (Clue: color in the bubble in front of the answer you think is correct) Two of the crew leaders in my training class had been recruiters and said you only had to answer 9 of the 28 to be considered passing. 9?!?! Oh.... dear.... I would have thought 20 to be a more reasonable number. Hopefully, their first selections are from the pool of higher-scoring people!

So anyway, I'm sorry I didn't give better updates along the way. I was not expecting to have quite so much work time this week, with the occasional homework assignment as well. My poor supervisor is from Georgia and so has an extra hour of driving at the beginning and ending of his day, plus additional paperwork to do to make sure we get our work assignments and get paid. I do not envy him in the slightest. I was literally dreaming of streets and houses by Wednesday night, but he was so tired that he was nodding off while doing some followup work and actually asked his wife what her address was to make sure it was properly recorded. I might be too tired to proof this post properly, but at least I still know where I live!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

....and how did you stumble across this job???!!!

Sandi said...

The church let one of the recruiters use our facilities to hold testing sessions, so they made an announcement at the end of service one week in case anyone was looking for a job. It was 2 weeks after I'd been laid off, so I was definitely interested. :) They didn't say what all types of positions they would have, though, just that you could apply "if you wanted to work with the US Census".

The people had to find places that would let them use the facilities for free, and their suggestions included libraries, meeting halls, and churches. Yes, the "so much for separation of church and state" thought crossed my mind, but I was happy they had used our church because I only sporadically read the newspaper so had not seen any adverts for it.