Induction programme was announced by the India’s second largest automobile major for its new recruits. Around 65 of us from various cross functions gathered at the state of the art conference room. When the programme coordinator started explaining about the week’s schedule etc the tone of his led us to a logical question? Was it an induction programme for its executives or a high school classroom? Latter looked the obvious answer. Such things apart, a few observations emanating out of the training are:
§ An address by the MD at the beginning of such programme definitely eggs on the confidence of the new joiners and we expected the popular MD to do so. But to our dismay the day started with a dull and drab introduction by an HR person.
§ Each and Every speaker stressed on the fact (with enormous amount of pride) that this company had been making profits since inception and declaring dividends. Great track record but which is better? Unbroken trend of profitability for the past 60 years coupled with static number 2 position in the vehicles segment or a 5-10 years of loss due to high finance other costs arising out due to aggressive buys/ decisions and becoming the market leader? Depends on the tone at the top. My opinion is that this is a very risk averse company. It also made us wonder whether the layoffs, wage cuts were really required or was it done to maintain profitability? This company sits on a lot of cash even in extremely good times!!!
§ We were looking forward to a session by strategic sourcing department. Wow what a department! To our disappointment, strategic sourcing department was none other than the purchase department!!!
§ All the presentations had lots of pie diagrams, graphs etc which were in most cases very difficult to comprehend and all simple processes had been jargonized beyond anyone’s imagination. Why not keep simple things simple? (How would one feel if depreciation is substituted by “non cash revenue charge on the fixed assets of the company”?) What is the problem in using narratives? Does the IITian way of doing things give people a satisfaction of doing sophisticated work? A psychiatrist should be able to answer this.Due to the training I missed this month’s tax executives forum . A huge price to pay for an ill structured training.
2 comments:
I fail to understand the word 'training' and induction. Even the present firm I am in, had conducted some sort of a training programme for 10 days. One session was on the captions used for our firm. Those were simple terms associated with thinking. But all of us were asked to give different meanings to it. This did not train me in anyway. Also, I hate this session of objectives where we had to share what we have set for ourselves. Hell! Honestly I have never really given a thought to my objective now. Life is just going on.I still feeling like doing many things and not one thing!
Training is given to existing people/employees and induction is given to new recruits :-).. Thats my understanding.
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