first week of training

This week I trained an employee from another department. As with all new trainees at the court, I started her out sorting mail and sending it on to the right departments. Usually, a new trainee would be paired up with an experienced worker, and would spend two weeks just opening and sorting mail. The trainees I've seen have mastered the mail sorting after about three days, so I want to move the training along faster.

I planned to accelerate the training process by moving trainees on from sorting mail to taking mailed in payments after three days. So the trainee would have started taking payments on Friday. However, the challenge that I didn't expect was that we were too shorthanded to have her perform a new function slowly. We had so much mail to sort, so many mailed in payments to process, and not enough employees to do the work. I had to see customers at a window and didn't have the time to explain the payment taking process to the trainee. We just couldn't afford to have her taking payments without supervision because it would take time to correct her mistakes.

I have a new plan for Monday. Training is the priority, so no matter how busy we are, I'll make sure the trainee learns to take mail payments. This means I have to take a few hours in the morning to teach and watch her perform the task. My other duties will just have to wait, and I can stay late to accomplish them. As it is, my supervisor is out, so I'm covering for him, and I'll probably have to work overtime anyway.

It has occurred to me that the training may have originally been scheduled to take such a long time to account for unexpected delays, like being shorthanded. Maybe my plan to speed it up is not practical, considering the limited time I have to supervise new trainees and still accomplish my own duties. I'm not going to give up on my goal of speeding up the training, but I am open to the idea that training is scheduled a certain way because the people who set up the training learned from their experience. Now I'm learning from my experience, too.