www.thegrindstone.com: Listen, I know. I know that employee orientation is boring and seems pointless, but it’s actually pretty important—especially if it’s your first job out of college. Here are the key things to take note of during employee orientation instead of sipping your latte and staring into space while a stranger handles paperwork that could affect your entire life.
3 comments:
I feel like I have heard a lot of people talk about employee orientation, or perhaps rather training, where it takes a week of sitting in rooms with 50 other people with someone talking at you about the rules of the company. But the advice given in this article I think is extremely useful and makes complete sense. Even though I am sophomore in college and won’t have a job like this this for at least two more years it is helpful to know what to look out for. Often times, these are things that are part of a job hunt, knowing what you want is helpful in knowing what jobs you should put on your list. Also, these are often topics you don’t want to address in an interview because they imply you already have the job and are jumping the gun. So, I figured that you should ask them once you got the job, but I didn’t know when, so it is helpful to know that is acceptable to ask these during the orientation.
This article makes me a little bit frustrated that there are people that would get all the way to an employee orientation without knowing their actual benefits in the first place. While I'm sure if your job has obvious benefits from the get go, that may be enough for you to accept an offer without asking too many questions, I'm sure not sure how you could go into most jobs without considering your benefits or at least asking the question of what your benefits are at all. From what I understand, most employee orientations are also more about internal policy rather than how to redeem benefits, mixed in with a little bit of mingling amongst employees to make the corporation feel "hip". If it's universal that companies are having problems with engagement during orientations, perhaps they should actually attempt to change the structure of them rather than throwing in a couple of "cool" activities.
These are all really good questions to be asking when you have a new job. I agree with Ben: asking these in the interview would presuppose that you have the job. From what I understand, job orientation is all about getting these questions answered because you might not have another good reason to sit down with HR than during your orientation. Especially if this is your first job out of college and you haven't necessarily had to think about setting up a 401k or life insurance or any of the other things on this list. Even though I don’t have to think about this for two years most likely, knowing that I should come prepared to orientation with these questions will be a load off my back when I do have to deal with it. really you should be finding out these things before you accept the job because the benefits will be part of the reason you take it, but should you miss some things, it’s good to know when the best time to ask about it is.
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