The Transfer of Training

The Transfer of Training

In my business I have three primary job positions, bartender, cook and waitress. When I first opened my business and started the hiring process I ran into a lot of problems with my employees and how they worked. Each one of my employees came with prior experience as a bartender, cook or waitress and each one assured me that they were good at what they did. In fact, the first bartender I actually hired for my business was a girl I knew from another bar that I would go to with my friends. At this bar she did her job well, or at least she did on the surface. After just a few days of her working for me I noticed that she basically disregarded all of the instructions I had given her and she started doing things her way. Problem was her way was not my way. After repeatedly explaining to her how I wanted things done in "my" bar she got mad one day and said, "Well that's not how I was trained at my last job". This is when I realized that I was going to face a potential problem with any employee I decided to hire with prior experience in their particular field.

My first bartender came with what is called a "Negative Transfer" of training (Noe, 2010). How she was trained previously was having a very bad influence on her work performance at my business. At first I did not understand her frustration or lack of willingness to be trained the way I wanted her trained. But humans are creatures of habit, and old habits die hard. Unfortunately I had to let her go and start looking for a new bartender. As I was going through the interview process I came up with a set of questions that would help me better determine if the prospective employee could be trained the way I wanted them to. Hiring somebody with absolutely no experience whatsoever was out of the question because full training takes years to accomplish. I needed somebody with the knowledge of how to make the wide variety of mixed drinks and be able to work the way I wanted them to. After a couple of weeks of interviews I came to the conclusion that I was not going to find this perfect employee, and that if I wanted a person to work the way I wanted them to I was just going to have to train them properly. "Positive Transfer" of training is what I needed to accomplish (Noe, 2010). Most people looking for a job come prepared to work hard and are ambitious when they are aware that the job offers advancement opportunities. However, most people are not prepared, or even know how to set aside their prior training from previous jobs and learn the skill necessary for their new position when they believe that their skills are good enough. So, the training process was not as easy as I or anybody else thinks. In order to achieve "Positive Transfer" of training I needed to incorporate a training method that allowed my employees to retain their prior skills while learning mine. In a way, I was setting out to augment their skills to make them better employees.

I did achieve