I did want to post a little more about training issues. This is because the temporary employees that are being hired right now do not have the advantage of the kind of training that the tenured employees had in years past.
Previously, an advisor would be hired, go to hire and process and the very next day they started food stamp training. Normally, food stamp training would be about 3 weeks- which was policy and learning how to do a food stamp case on Saverr/GWS (the operating system that actually works, vs TIERS)......
Once the trainees finished Food Stamp Training, they would then interview within the confines of the training unit. There were Worker IV's that were exclusively part of the Training Unit whose only jobs were to mentor new workers, sit in on interviews, read and review their cases prior to the case being processed (so that if their case was wrong, they can fix it before the case actually processed and benefits got issued), and explain mistakes and errors.
After this, they'd go back to classroom training to learn TANF (formerly AFDC) - and the process would repeat itself again. Completely protected while you learn the job.
Medicaid was last. Rinse, repeat.
Now? New temp workers are going to Food Stamp training for a month or less and they come back to the office and are expected to jump right in. Instead of a fulltime mentor (tenured worker), they have someone assigned to them to go to for questions- but it's not the same. Because tenured workers? Are scheduled to the gills. The other option is to mark them off the schedule, but that pushes applications back since they aren't scheduled.
It's not fair to the tenured staff, and it's certainly not fair to the temporary advisors.
Nevermind the fact that as a temporary advisor, they are still out there looking for a permanent job. Why? Because who wants a lifelong temp job with no permanent status? It's so unfair to the new people coming in.
As with everything else that has happened, they (HHSC) will either pay now or pay later. Either the State needs to commit to training new people correctly and completely NOW- or continue to train new people over and over.
Sneak preview the all-new Yahoo.com. It's not radically different. Just radically better.
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