Hey there. I'm somewhat of a team leader and I want to know what some people think of my trainees and my opinion.
I'm a production operator for a factory. 3 months into a job, my superior resigned, and I got unwillingly pushed into being the senior operator. I've worked at this place before but had nowhere near the knowledge and responsibility as I do now. I'm now at month 7.
The job requires that you show up on time everyday. It is a demanding job, and requires some intelligence and a lot of care, otherwise you could cost the company thousands of dollars a day. When you get good at the job though, it becomes IMO pretty easy and chill.
I've had 3 trainees the last 4 months. I feel that all of them are so useless, and everybody I explain my situation to agrees with me, but I'd like some global opinions, especially from here as I feel a lot of what I read here could be written by these trainees that I've had.
Trainee no.1 came in late on his second day. He proceeded to come in late 4/5 days, sometimes as late as THREE hours. He also proceeded to be a no-show for work 20% of days from your usual excuses of sickness and family and car not starting etc. He also lied about his skillsets as an engineer when at best he's probably a self-taught scrap mechanic. Also he 'broke his phone' and suddenly there's no way to contact him but he finds ways to contact us when he needs to let us know he can't make it to work. Besides that though, he works pretty hard and learns pretty fast. He's been with us for 4 months and he's still late at least 30mins every 2 days, and no-shows once a fortnight.
Trainee no.2 is perfectly punctual and communicative. Worked pretty hard for a few weeks before started getting lazy. Problem with him though, is after 2-3 weeks he began losing interest in the job as I suspect it's because he became demoralized from continuously making mistakes in his training. Eventually it came to a point he couldn't learn anything or be relied on to do anything right and he didn't give a damn about doing the job properly. Trainee no.1 learnt things 10x faster than him and cares maybe 20x more than he does, and that's not an exaggeration. He's not with us anymore.
Trainee no.3 is very experienced in the industry. Huge talker, promised the world, set high expectations. First week she worked pretty hard and showed promising signs. However she was late on her second day, and missed 2 days within the first 2 weeks. It's now week 4 and she's missed 6 days and has been late nearly everyday. She learns very slowly, seems to have ADHD, tries to undermine me in front of the bosses, is a hypocrite on what she preaches vs what she actually does, and is very bi-polar in her attitude towards me and some of her superiors. Also she's a druggie and excon. I've had a talk with my superiors + boss a few times and I think we're about to sack her.
So, I feel like they are all useless and were not meant for the job in this company. Especially the first and 3rd trainee as they have absolutely shocking attendance. Back in the city pre-covid, I probably would've been sacked if I was late 3 days in any order on my first 2 weeks. These guys are lucky to still be employed as the company seems to be desperate for people, I don't know what's going on in my boss's head, and I'm holding the strings as I can do the job when they aren't around. Also I feel like half the shit I read on here (posts and comments, especially the higher-rated ones) could've been conjured up by the 3rd trainee, whom I feel is the worst because she's all anti-authority and shit, when I feel she's the useless garbage that's not entitled to an opinion.
Am I justified to feel the way I do about these 3 trainees?