New job, same old induction, rues Matthew Partridge.
This week I start a new job, woo! Obviously, I’m very excited about this. It’s been a long time in the planning and negotiating, and finally getting to walk into a new office with new colleagues and new challenges is exciting.
New jobs come with new admin, but even that I’m excited about. I’ll need to book in having my photo taken so I can have an ID card that doesn’t look like I am being held at gunpoint over a tank of spiders. I’ll need to order new business cards, sort out a new email signature and of course work out where the best coffee is made on campus. All very exciting.
But alongside all that excitement comes one looming cloud of new job ‘doom’. The inevitable mandatory online training (cue movie lighting).
According to my starter pack, I have nine mandatory online training modules to complete, which have a combined estimated time of eight hours. This will be eight tortuous, mind-numbing, frustratingly boring hours of “click for next slide” and “select the right answer”.
Now, back in the old days when online mandatory training was just starting out, you could whiz through these no problem. Years of playing the game Starcraft and honing my average actions per minute to a healthy 120 meant I could click through an hour-long fire safety module in just a couple of minutes and skip right to what colour extinguisher does what.
But alongside all that excitement comes one looming cloud of new job ‘doom’. The inevitable mandatory online training (cue movie lighting)
Unfortunately, someone cottoned on to this, and you now get a fixed time-per-slide you have to look at it for. In one case, I had a system which measured how long you spent in a particular training programme. If it was too short, it would make you do it again. That was particularly frustrating as I read quite quickly and even when Idid properly it still claimed I was too fast and had to do it again!
The other way of making you take them slowly (and allegedly thoughtfully) is to include a smattering of multiple choice questions or in some cases a Where’s Wally style click-the-image question. These are very much only to ensure you are still alive and you’ve not got a metronome to press the mouse.
You can tell this as the questions are easy and the choices astonishingly obvious. For example, in one fire safety quiz about electrical fires one of the options was “I would kick the fire”. In another about travel safety, it asked if I wanted to “save money by sleeping in my rental car”. I’m amazed I wasn’t asked to drag coloured shapes into the right holes.
Personally, I think if they wanted to get people to stay paying attention, they should use their greatest asset: unintentionally hilarious stock images. My personal favourite is one which showed a cartoon of a person clutching their eye in pain next to the training material explaining why we should always ensure our keyboard is ergonomically positioned. It’s still not enough to stop me wanting to click through it as fast as possible but it does make it slightly more tolerable.
Now, as I write this out, I wonder how well an AI would do at clicking through the training modules. According to AI adverts they can book me flights, hotels and even plan my wedding, so surely they can manage an online survey. I bet if I gave it my university username and password, it’d get my two-hour cybersecurity training done no problem.
Dr Matthew Partridge is senior enterprise fellow and director of outreach at the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, University of Southampton. He also draws silly cartoons as ErrantScience
