Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Online Training

one thing i actually miss from my time in sales is those endles online trainings.

they were never abot learning. it was all about pretending. the training team would upload a new course, send an email, and give us a deadline about a month away.

and for 29 whole days nobody on the sales team even looked at it. ignoring it was almost a point of pride. then on day 30 the alarms went off. an email from the boss, marked urgent, full of capital letters and exclamation marks. suddenly it was a crisis.

so we’d all log in, open the training, and click through slide after slide without reading a single word. nobody cared about the content. the only goal was to reach the quiz at the end.

most quizzes needed 80 percent or better to pass. we didn’t study, we just guessed. sometimes someone got lucky on the first try, and then they’d share the answers with everyone else. if you failed, no big deal. you could just keep trying until you passed.

once in a while the system only gave you three tries. that always made me laugh. like what’s supposed to happen if we fail all three? do we get fired on the spot? does the computer lock up forever? nothing ever happened, of course.

in the end, the whole thing was a game. not about learning, not about improving, just about checking a box. and somehow, that’s exactly what made it memorable.


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| 1291 views | | 7 replies (last September 25) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+1k5fk05kq

7 replies (most recent on top)

I retired a year ago. People that are still there said the garbage trainings have not stopped. I heard they tried to crack down on "garbage" trainings. But, it did not work. I remember the one on "interviewing". You could not conduct interviews unless you passed the training. Clicked through the COLT tests and did not change anything on how I did interviews.

I made suggestions like "Follow up on the impact of the trainings", "Create trainings that drive people to watch them" and etc.... Nothing was done. Training is an open sewer pipe of money never to be fixed. Comments in this post are consistent with what I heard over the years on training.

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Post ID: @17j+1k5fk05kq

Shout out to George.

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Post ID: @tp+1k5fk05kq

@b0 I remember busting out laughing at those at my desk.

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Post ID: @q5+1k5fk05kq

There’s not even a pretence that the training is needed and important for development. And occasionally we get training with ridiculous test questions “pick the answers that apply” with double negative meanings. It’s clearly all just a useless tick box exercise that takes tons of time out of an already extremely demanding set of roles.

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Post ID: @bg+1k5fk05kq

When I am assigned a twenty minute training video, I do it on a Thursday morning and claim it as the "work" I am doing for both that Thursday and the following Friday. No one can say anything or I'll just cry to HR that my team is not giving me the "space" to properly internalize the "critical" training material. Next move is to just elevate that to an entire week. Training is an essential part of our growth as employees!!

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Post ID: @ba+1k5fk05kq

The xual harassment training used to be hilarious. They would act out scenarios that where so far fetched it seemed like I was watching SNL.

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Post ID: @b0+1k5fk05kq

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