business
My internship at Putnam was an experienced that I was very proud of. It was great to work at Putnam and it was also great to leave Putnam. Some of the times that I spent at Putnam were beneficial to me because it represented a beginning of my professional life. However, there were times when I became frustrated while training and working at Putnam. The process of training did not prepare me for work. Therefore, I did struggle while taking calls. Nonetheless, my experienced at Putnam gradually became better as I learned more.
Training was terrible for 98% of the time. Even though the processing of training was terrible, I would like to mention that all the trainer were nice people who were very knowledgeable but lack the ability to develop a training strategy to prepare us for the actual work. For example, when learning how to search around the company’s intranet, there was too much emphasis on searching for items that were not considered to be part of a frequent call. When I was actually taking calls, I have to learn how to search for items myself that were relevant to most of the calls. Also, there were long hours of listening to the lady explaining to us how to talk on the phone instead of us practicing how to talk. Another problem was that there was very little focus on information that was going to be a frequent call such as ARP. ARP involved using sophisticated computer system to track checks. The trainer did not teach me how to do it on the system. He basically explained it to us just only by words and no example. In addition, the rest of the interns and I spend 4-5 hours straight listening to one of our trainers explaining to us about retirement plan. The bad part of this was that I later on discovered that very few calls were relevant to retirement plan. Only the basic retirement information was important and most of it was not. This upset me because I believe that I could use some of that time to really prepare myself for actual calls. Another thing was that there was too much emphasis on reading rather than practicing. I spend hours and sometime the whole day just reading chapters that they gave us. The chapters tells us how to form transactions, but I spend so little time practicing. Furthermore, part of my training was to sit down with other representatives and basically listen to their calls. I have to admit that it was very scary listening to other people taking calls. I really did not understand to what the shareholders were saying. It was like listening to a different language. When the representatives perform transaction on the computer, it was very confusing for me to watch and understand [next page]