by ·Comments Off on The UK youth work ethic: The simplest mystery

This post is filed under “r” for “rant”

Jamie Oliver made the media jump around in excitement and caused small disgruntled and self righteous youth eruptions around Facebook a few days ago in an interview with Good Housekeeping by saying that his restaurants would be unable to run if it wasn’t for the help of young foreign workers to pick up the slack of the UK’s own home-grown talent.

Claims that the UK’s youth workers lack a work ethic, lack ambition, are lazy and generally “wet behind the ears” as he put it were predictably met by protestations from hundreds of genuinely hard working young workers who disagreed with him. As with any inflammatory statement, there is no right or wrong answer here and both sides have merit, but I’ve been thinking about those young workers that are actually apparently lazy and all I can really think is “it’s really not their fault”.

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by ·Comments Off on Process Maps

A process map is meant to make a process more obvious by displaying it in a visual form.  I occasionally have to do this in my current role.

Things like this baffle me:

A process map apparently can't just have two boxes. That's less of a process and more of an event I suppose.

This is not from my company and I’m not saying who it’s from, other than it’s from a regulated financial services firm, all of which are potentially facing some slightly stricter complaint handling requirements fairly soon.

 It seems mostly unnecessary.  The obvious diagram for me would just be “complaint received” followed by “log complaint”, but maybe that’s just me.

I see this quite a lot at the moment.  Documents that have a purpose and are a business requirement often take so long getting to the point and so much longer talking around the point that by the time they’re finished and published, nobody in their right mind is ever going to read them, much less update them.  In fact, the only people that will read them are going to be regulators inspecting a business, by which point you have provided your own noose by producing process documentation that nobody has read, nobody updates and most likely does not reflect your current business practises.

All the same, inexperienced staff like myself look at these things for inspiration on how they should be doing things and feel their productions are inferior if they don’t have a similar word count, so the cycle repeats. 

 

by ·Comments Off on Patronizing at Work Day

Apparently today is “Learning at Work Day” organised by the campaign for Learning, as part of Adult Learners’ week. 

On our desks this morning, we found little “quiz sheets” to test our mathematical skills.  These involved such complicated mathematical problems as a join the connected statements question including “Breaks at work in one day = Lunch time plus tea breaks” and “Hours at work in a week = Hours worked per day times days worked per week” and many more questions I would be insulted by if I was taking my year-six SATs again.

This looks to be part of the same sort of government scheme / scam as the woeful business NVQ system whereby instead of teaching you better skills, they work out which skills you already have and give you a certificate accordingly.

Also included on this patronizing piece of bumpf are a few little whistful quotes that have absolutely no bearing on mathematics.  This one in particular stood out:

 “Today, be aware of how you are spending your 1,440 beautiful moments, and spend them wisely.”   -Anon

Is it really that advisable to put something like that on a piece of literature that is being disseminated among office workers? 

Additional Notes:

Adult learning always sounds much more fun than it is.

 

by ·Comments Off on Being Creative with Job Applications

I’m constantly fascinated by the paradox that sits at the heart of job hunting. We are encouraged to make our CV and covering letter stand out from the crowd and display unique qualities, but in the process make sure it looks the same as all the others and follows a certain convention. Maybe it’s not as dramatic as I’m alluding to, but regardless, there is a certain procedure that one follows for applying for new jobs.

Sometimes however, it appears that you just need to forget about everything you’ve been told and wing it a little.Image borrowed from Doublefine's website

Tim Schafer, the absolute hero of a game developer for many ordinary geeks such as myself has posted his application to the Lucasfilm games division on his website to celebrate his twenty years in the games development industry and it’s really worth a read, if only for the realisation that this actually worked.

Tim Schafer, for those who would know the work but not the name, was the mastermind behind Grim Fandango, an adventure game taking the afterlife equivalent of a travel agent on a sprawling journey through the land of the dead, Psychonauts, a platform game where you controlled a boy who ran away from the circus to attend a summer camp for psychics, and the upcoming Brutal Legend starring a roadie trapped in a heavy metal themed fantasy world. He is nothing short of an inspirational genius. Had he not taken an oddball approach to applying to Lucasfilm, the gaming world would have been a somewhat duller place.

What I find interesting is that he considers himself to have been massively under qualified for the job that he was offered.  This strikes a chord with me as I am constantly driven to a state of melancholy when job descriptions for things that I would love to do seem incredibly far away from my actual abilities.

I should really have learnt this lesson long ago when I applied for my current job and was informed by the job listing that I needed to be “fully literate in Microsoft Excel”. What that actually translated to was to know what the icon looked like.