What do you actually do? - Look for E Test fails (see below) and lots of computer work. Very little supervising happens here.
Compensation - Supervise Diesel Mechanics, work 10 hours more than them per week and earn $10 per hour less, without the chance of overtime pay or any shift premium. (They make $40 ph. If you made this your salary would be $119000 but it will actually be $85-88000).
Working routine - 4x 12.5 hour shifts, with 3 days off. 50 hours per week, no overtime pay, no night shift premium. If you are new, prepare to spend a lot of time working night shifts. Your first day off will be spent catching up on sleep, you will not have time to do anything other than work and sleep on your on-shift days.
Training - Very poor, considered trained when you are needed to cover a shift solo but will also be held accountable for every mistake you made after not being properly trained.
Leadership - "Consequence Leadership - Leadership the CP way" Essentially, CP believes that the only reason their employees will do things is because of fear of the consequences if they don't. This is absolutely a fear culture. It doesn't foster open and honest reporting and is detrimental to safety as employees fear that reporting an incident or near miss will result in punishment. This is mostly true as the system is not a just one. Senior Leaders always push for you to emphasize the consequences of not doing something, or doing it incorrectly and this only works to irritate the employees, reducing output.
Safety - CP places a huge emphasis on safety though the medium of Efficiency Testing. Essentially you are required to record that you observed 18 instances of employees following safety rules, and also record 2 instances of employees not complying to safety rules (Fails). This results in a fear culture and blame culture, where employees are afraid to report incidents and near misses due to fear of punishment. At the time of leaving, all fails no matter how minor, would immediately go to investigation and the only purpose of a drill down is to apply blame and do nothing about the root cause.
Integrity - The numbers are the most important thing. If the shop count is high, you are pretty much forced to set very unrealistic targets to get the count below constraint. You are then either encouraged to lie and say you achieved, or get in trouble for missing releases. Leave your integrity at home.
Staff turnover - Very high turnover of staff. When I started I was told that there had been something in the region of 8 supervisors trained by one guy in the department who had quit. Its easy to see why there is a retention problem, I don't understand why the company wont address it.
Career outlook - If you want to be on the phone 24 hours a day then a career in the Mechanical Locomotive department is what you need!
