They analyzed my every decision & question during training, until they were confident they knew I would eventually fail.
Pros
Company car, laptop, & cell phone. Cheap health insurance. Allows OT when needed, and pays for it. Lengthy training. Not penny pinchers.
Cons
The culture is odd. When asked about why they made promotions so difficult, the guy who was in charge of all of California asked us, "when you get a raise from X to X, how much more valuable are you to the company?" ....as if that was a perfectly reasonable reason to justify an almost impossible promotions process where in the first year, promotions dropped from about 100 to 2 in the state. Training was for three months, but after about one month, the training room was no longer a safe place to ask questions. Questions seemed to indicate to them that you weren't absorbing the material, even though they said that we wouldn't get it the first time, and it would take a year to feel comfortable. The trainer created a pretty loose, fun atmosphere, which made it great to come to work, but after about a month, he became very moody and made me feel awful every time I answered a question wrong. Ironically, the last time I had to "present" to him, he gave me great feedback and wasn't a jerk, but the office manager and my supervisor were there to rip me to shreds. Whenever I made a mistake or was given bad feedback, they would ask me about it. Almost every time I was able to clear it up, or knew immediately what my mistake was and verbally gave the correct answer, but I never got the impression that it mattered to them that I was able to correct myself afterwards. It was as if, even though I was training, my first try was all I got, and there wasn't an opportunity to learn form mistakes and build on knowledge. I trained with two and sometimes three other people, which when in the classroom, created an environment where there was a lot of sitting around. The whole job is about multitasking, but when in the classroom, the worst thing you could do was multitask. Pretty much anything except full attention even when the information wasn't beneficial was the worst thing you could do. I felt that if there was a smaller group, we could have accomplished a lot more and I wouldn't have felt compelled to try and multitask at "inappropriate" times. They initiated field rides where I would shadow another adjuster. This is where I got the short end of the stick. The other two people training with me were able to ride with guys who didn't have their own agenda, or impose their stress onto them, or throw them under the bus to the supervisor if they didn't understand something. I ended up with all of the above. Never while on a field ride was I given the impression that I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing, but they would give feedback that was damning. I did have field rides that were good, but they seemed to steer me towards riding with adjusters who weren't a good fit, personality-wise. They had 60% turnover the year before, so they were obsessed with finding indicators during training that failure was inevitable, instead of actually trying to teach and train. tl;dr - Promotions are impossible - The training room is not a safe place to ask questions - No opportunity to learn form mistakes - bipolar priorities during training - They don't have any standards for their field rides, either for the mentor or the mentee, so feedback varied widely because of a lack of stated expectations.
