Good and Bad Training

The training on my externship was very crazy. I had to sit in a room with everyone that got hired to the hotel. It was a waste of my time to sit there for two days strait listening to all of the history of the hotel and all of the, mainly front of the house, standards that they are known for. Once that boring stuff was done I got into the kitchen. I was very excited about this. Everyone was really nice, except for my trainer. He did not really help me. He kind of half showed me how to work on the sauté station, probably like an hour, then he left me go on the line and went into the back and fooled around with our Sous Chef. When an order came in he expected me to know exactly what to do and to just do it, even with the things he didn’t show me how they wanted them to be done. I quickly learned how to do everything just because he left me, but that didn’t feel right. I have learned that he should have watched me more and helped me out and actually taught me. I did very well on sauté and I ended up taking the station over for a few months.

After a while, Chef decided that it was time for me to move around the kitchen. But before I left sauté he had me train the new girl in our kitchen to take over sauté. This was easy for me because I had to pretty much learn everything on my own and I got yelled at by chef every time that I did something wrong. Unlike my trainer, I was there for her and helped her whenever she needed me to. When it was time for me to move, Chef placed me on the grill station. He feels that this station is sacred and does not let externs or apprentices on the grill, but he thought with the right trainer I would do great, and he was correct. My trainer was a lot better this time. She actually stood there and watched what I was doing and helped me out with whatever I needed. Now she did have the times when she wouldn’t help me but that was only because I was using her as a crutch and I would ask her a question every time a ticket came in. But she knew that I could do it and I did just fine.

I will always remember how bad of a trainer my first one was and how good of a trainer my second one was. When I have the chance to train someone again, I am going to base my training skills off of the second one, not the first.