How do you do it?
I have Lynda.com account and have them watch and practice what about you guys?
Training is tough if they don't understand printing. I have a 20 plus year guy working in the shop 6 years now and if I could fire him I would. He causes more head aches. Traning in my opinion should be for your work flow not the job.When you hire a prepress guy they should know what needs to be done but may need to train on your process to do it. If they don't get basics in the first month they are not going to get it.IMO.
I kind of agree with LoganBlade. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time to train. It's not fair, but most new hires need to have experience. We will train on how we work, our workflow etc. but they gotta know a little bit.
Haven't had a new employee start in my company for well over 5 years. How I did it back then is they got a day or two to work with me then slap them down with some "easier" jobs without looking over their shoulder until output.
Painful but that's how I was trained here too.
Ohhhhh yeah! I have had nothing but trouble with this one. The "powers that be" don't want to pay much for help. That usually leaves me hiring people in their 20s, fresh out of the graphics classes at the local community college. The nice thing about these people is they usually start with a good attitude, (we fix that for 'em) and they can learn the computer stuff very quickly, but.... they have NO printing background. This is the hardest thing to teach. I started in bindery and the pressroom so I have seen the machines run. It is soooo hard to try to find someone that can comprehend the difference between paginating something for offline assembly as opposed to a multi-web signature. I create mock-ups, and even take them out and let them watch the press run but end up babysitting when it comes to press logistics. >:(
Oh gawd, only in the past couple of years I've learned it takes a special breed to work in prepress and stick with it. When training someone or meeting a new employee, I can usually tell within one hour if they have what it takes.
A couple of years ago I had to train one of those "fresh out of the graphics classes at the local community college" types. The extent of her experience was knowing how to color boxes in Illustrator and type in Quark, and I was asked to train her as my back up. Not only was she dumber than a box of rocks - she just DID NOT WANT TO LEARN. This is the most frustrating thing. Showing her how to impose sheets in InDesign "OMG, this is hard. I don't want to do it..." Trying to explain how to manage fonts - CLUELESS. The best part was when I turned her loose for a couple hours to work alone and after returning from lunch I noticed one of the internal hard drive icons (named Squirrel Drive, of course) missing from the Mac desktop - luckily it was easy to remount with Disk Utility. But even better was the next time I used Sherlock/Find it had the last query still typed in and it was...."Squirl drive" (not even spelled correctly). Presumably she just decided to delete one of the hard drives (why?) and then tried to find it. After one day with this girl I told Bossman she was not right for the job, so she ended up being a CSR with a "degree in Graphic Design". MORON.
I have so many more stories. There are a lot of stupid people out there and I hate wasting time trying to teach them things they refuse to learn.
Quote from: gnubler on September 10, 2007, 01:06:01 PMAfter one day with this girl I told Bossman she was not right for the job, so she ended up being a CSR with a "degree in Graphic Design". MORON.
I think she worked here too...
Was she real good looking?
You know how it is - hot, blonde, and DUMB. Before my Bossman hired her, she had been fired after two weeks in another shop because they couldn't stand her putting on a full face of makeup while sitting at her desk. Oh, that and she was heroin addict.
I once MARRIED "The hot dumb 22 year old, office girl from Cali"...
Most expensive piece of.... well... you get the picture. ;D
Quote from: LoganBlade on September 10, 2007, 10:56:09 AMTraining is tough if they don't understand printing. I have a 20 plus year guy working in the shop 6 years now and if I could fire him I would. He causes more head aches. Traning in my opinion should be for your work flow not the job.When you hire a prepress guy they should know what needs to be done but may need to train on your process to do it. If they don't get basics in the first month they are not going to get it.IMO.
Man! sounds like your talkin bout the guy I'm training, he has been in prepress 25 years
and still don't even know to spread or choke!!!!
I want to fire him but he whent to HS with the co-owner...Arrrggggg!!!
Oh yeah.....I'm goin into my 5th year training with him.
Wow, I have experienced just about all of the same things people have posted here.
With the exception of marrying one of them...
I've been very lucky in most of the places I've worked, I've had a direct say in whether a person got hired or not. I've been able to pick pretty good ones so far...
Let's see if my record holds.
We just hired a young person out of art school here a couple of weeks ago. The only complaint I have is that she's not used to our pace of work, which is generally frenetic. But, I think she will catch on to that too.
We had a person here several years ago who was a friend of one of my co-workers, (this was before they let me screen prospects), and we found out the hard way that she was a non-stop talker. Yak, yak, yak. While her mouth ran, her hands stopped. We hired her on to handle our overflow, and she made it worse! Finally, after a year, they let her go. I can't say I was too disappointed.
employed some bloke with 30 years experience - he lasted a week saying he couldnt keep up, it was too much to learn - and that he didnt like me
nice......i shot him, and emplyed another chap with 20 yrs experience and he's doing ok. he was an artpro head but now he loves illy. i have him working ok - overcomplicates things sometimes but he is fine now.
I have one here started with 20+ years experience
At first he was great only had to show him ins and outs of Preps, but then he got carried away and started getting adventurous, next thing a couple of jobs come out wrong, no real problem just let it go as learn from your mistakes and don't do it again. Now he's a total idiot who can't even switch on his monitor without saying "do you think I should?"
Seen it so many times confidence goes and operator goes soon after.
we don't get "new" people, just recycled ones.
haha!
I haven't had a new hire in so long I'm not sure what I would do first.
I would think in most cases, you really only need to teach them job procedures and not so much "how to turn on a computer and work in Photoshop".
Wow...training new people...
It's been a while since we've had "new people." We can't even seem to keep the old ones!
New and improved workflows have slashed and burned our department, so all we have are people with lots of experience....
The most recent thing to do is buy boxes of self-training DVDs of all stripes and say "train on your down time."
I agree with a post above but I usually gave them 3 months to "get it" besides we had a 3 month probationary period were I could can them with out a reason.
Once they show aptitude then I would do the online courses or seminars.