Work It Out: Student workers aren't disposable
When I was hired over the summer to call alumni and solicit donations, the extent of my training was a single mock phone call with my supervisor and getting handed a script. In the fall, the same job trained a room full of new hires with even less: a PowerPoint presentation mostly full of canned cheer and fluff about how important alumni relationships are and a five-minute window for student callers to partner up and pretend to be making calls to each other. I didn’t have time to get through half of my script before time was up. My partner, a new hire that had no idea how to make a call, didn’t get to run through a practice at all. A week later, we were put to work on the phones.
I’m not the only one that fumbled through the first few weeks at my job at Hofstra, un-trained and learning as I went. I know people that work all over campus – in offices, in Resident Safety booths, at the Swim Center and even at the new Starbucks – and a lack of training is one thing they all have in common.
Resident Safety Representatives are given only a short PowerPoint presentation before being put alone in the booth for their first shift. Swim Center lifeguards have to pay out of pocket for their own CPR training. A friend hired at the new Starbucks in the Student Center had to rely on previous barista experience on her first day when a sudden influx of customers meant she was left to make drinks alone.
When student workers are thrown at a job with no training, they’re expected to quit before the semester is up. That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When workers are under-trained, they’re not able to do their jobs correctly, and that slows everyone down. Since student labor is essential to the functioning of Hofstra every day, it doesn’t make sense that it’s a totally normal experience for someone to be thrown into work without knowing what they’re doing or without having the necessary training provided to them.
Getting proper training is also just a matter of treating employees right. When you’re properly trained, you feel more like a valuable employee instead of someone just desperate for an $8-per-hour wage. I know if I had been fully trained, I wouldn’t have been so nervous to go to work for the first two weeks that I couldn’t eat breakfast. Employees that feel good about their job tend to stick around longer, meaning there will be less turnover and eventually less training will need to be done overall.
There doesn’t have to be a stressful cycle of hiring students, not training them and thus making them miserable at work, then having them quit before the year is out. Valuing student employees and giving us the training we deserve makes everyone’s life better, and in the long run will make the entire University run more smoothly. So why are students still scrambling to figure out how to do the jobs that keep Hofstra running? It’s time student workers are given the training we need and deserve, because Hofstra wouldn’t be able to function without us.
