An Exercise in Patience (read extreme boredom)

[pcjunkie]

I really hope my company hasn't spent a lot of money on online training modules, because, frankly, most of them suck ass. Now, I will admit there are hundreds of these online training modules available, so there is the potential for there to be good modules. However, my sample of ten so far has yielded ten duds. Perhaps the more advanced or

Comments

[moosesocks]

This essay seems to brush up against what you're talking about.

Before starting my job last summer (at a government lab), I was required to sit through about a dozen training modules that sounded more or less similar to what pcjunkie experienced.

Unfortunately, these modules concerned industrial safety, which makes it all the more alarming that they contained virtually no information, and were laden with buzzwords. As I understand it, Health & Safety managers have taken the same approach as project management, instituting as much of their own jargon and proprietary knowledge as possible.

This is particularly troubling, considering that the effectiveness of their jobs (and thus the safety of the workers) depends upon their ability to communicate clearly. Unfortunately, they seem focused instead on justifying their existence.

Academia is an entirely different beast that (ironically) doesn't seem to have been studied or discussed all that much. Over the past few weeks, a few reports of severe safety hazards and general mistreatment of graduate students and postdocs have begun to surface. Also, what happens when a university has a brilliant researcher who ignores established procedures, and also happens to be a bit of an ass? Very rarely would anybody in academia be fired for this sort of thing, and when it does, a huge controversy will erupt.