back to article What did Capita ITS staff get for Xmas? Elf 'n' safety training

Capita IT Services boss Peter Hands has handed his staff a joyful end-of-year gift: an order to complete about a dozen mandatory training courses by 31 December. The big cheese's memo caps off a year in which Capita froze bonuses and pay rises, threatened to outsource jobs to India, and went head to head with Unite over …

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  1. Kool-Aid drinker
    WTF?

    What???

    "In order to ensure the best practice, employee complete a series of 'refresher' training modules across a hot of topics on an annual basis."

    Was the spokesperson located in Mumbai by any chance?

    1. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: What???

      No, the fault lies at our end. Apologies.

      C.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Luxury!!

    CGI has told me I shall be made redundant in January. Merry Xmas.

  3. Locky

    Compulsary Box Ticking Training

    They should be glad they aren't regulated by the FSA.....

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Compulsary Box Ticking Training

      I work for Crapita in one of their Regulated Business Divisions. These training courses are a joke that a chimp has 1 in 3 chance of passing on the first run. An utter waste of an hour (55 minutes while the course loads, 5 minutes to tick boxes of 10 - 20 questions.)

    2. R Varia

      Re: Compulsary Box Ticking Training

      Sound like standard FSA courses to me. Usually powerpoint presentation followed by 20 or so multiple choice questions of which 2 answers are obviously wrong

  4. Steve Foster
    FAIL

    D'oh moment

    as Hands realises that next week is Christmas, and that opportunites between now and December 31st for employees to participate in required training schemes are non-existent.

    1. John P

      Re: D'oh moment

      Or a cunning plan to find any staff who have not completed the mandatory training in breach of their contract and therefore dismissable without going through the redundancy process.

      Some of these corporates can play dirty when they want to get rid of people at the least possible expense.

  5. RainForestGuppy

    Service Levels?

    Hello, you're through to the Capita Customer Service Desk. How may I help?

    ..

    So you're saying your priority 1 system has been down for 3 hours, and you want to know when It'll be fixed. Hold one for one minute and I'll check for you.

    ..

    Ok, I've checked with the operations team and they are all doing compulsory health and safety training, sorry there won't be any engineers available until after 31st December. Thank you for choosing Capita IT services.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: Service Levels?

      Yes but at least the Service Desk will tell you that in an approved manner

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And of course, from January 2013 we'll be bombarded with emails to complete 2013's annual training. Personally, I make a point of not doing them.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Mine aren't due again until Q4 2013, and I'm hoping by then to have moved on somewhere else, doubling my salary in the process.

      1. Goldmember
        Thumb Up

        @AC 13:35

        "Mine aren't due again until Q4 2013, and I'm hoping by then to have moved on somewhere else, doubling my salary in the process."

        I'd recommend it. One of the best career moves I ever made, leaving that company.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Same here, with the addition of diversity and IT security training. The IT security training in particular is entertaining, it features depictions of hacking along these lines:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ (two idiots one keyboard from NCIS)

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    News?

    Employees at an IT firm are being asked to do some internal training courses, and yes, granted, the timelines are quite short. BUT, is that really news, deserving of an article on an (inter)national IT news site?

    Maybe I should write in next time our system sends me an email to take the annual refresher of our mandatory internal courses.

    1. David Neil
      Trollface

      Re: News?

      Well given this is a large company who have been trying to offload staff, with some dubious practices, who have now demanded staff complete mandatory training in the next week and a half (allowing for public holidays), I'd say it falls in the sites remit.

      Of course you may not see it this way and good luck to you as you try and reduce your headcount

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: News?

      It's newsworthy, since its happening in a company who's got a hard-on for removing it IT staff, outsourcing their jobs to India, and expects their entire workforce to complete courses like 'Customer Services' during the holiday season, whilst screwing over most of it's own employees in the process.

      It's not called Crapita for nothing.

  9. billse10
    Pint

    no surprises

    there's a reason Private Eye calls them Crapita.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So?

    Same crap as everyone else, how to lift a perfectly square, evenly weighted box. How to sit on a chair that isn't knackered (or been nicked and replaced with a broken one), how you are supposed to be nice to complete dickheads, overcoming the urge to hit with a baseball bat.

    Welcome to the world of corporate bullshit box ticking.

  11. Velv
    Mushroom

    The trouble with common sense is...

    ... that it isn't really that common.

    Now we ALL know how to lift things. We ALL know to get out in a fire. We ALL know about Anti Money Laundering, about treating customers fairly and about not giving our passwords to people in the street.

    Yet over the next few weeks we'll probably all have a good laugh at some TV programmes showing idiots with no common sense doing stupid things. Common sense really isn't that common, and if you're one of the people who moan about the "stupid mandatory training", you're probably one of the people its actually aimed at.

    Personally I'd bring back the old Public Information Films, and put them on ten times more often.

    Now, who wants to reminisce over Tufty, the Green Cross Code and Charlie Says ...

    1. Primus Secundus Tertius
      Pint

      The Old Kerb Drill

      The Green Cross code, if I remember rightly, was modernist vagueness compared with the old Kerb Drill. "Look left, look right, and look left again...". Or maybe it was the other way round, I was never quite sure. Peer frantically in all directions, then walk across, don't run: if you have to run you must have got it wrong, maybe for the last time.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We have them quarterly :-(

    I got fed up with the inevitable panic at the end of each quarter, so now I do them at the beginning. Then the end comes round, everyone else swears a lot. I just tell them the answers so they don't need to read all the purile crap that they force you to read before you can do the assessment. Mind numbing crap that it is.......

  13. Horridbloke
    Meh

    It's never urgent...

    ... until it is.

  14. MissingSecurity
    Devil

    Not that I agree crapita but...

    But your average punter probably needs a daily lesson just to log in the morning.

  15. sabba
    Thumb Down

    Capita...

    ...how to polish a turd 101.

  16. sabba
    Holmes

    Obviously this is an example of...

    'hands on management'. Perhaps that dick head ought to complete the courses as well. Although he does seem to have passed with flying colours the one on how to be a useless wanker.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You gotta do what you gotta do

    I work in a financial related industry and things like Foreign and corrupt practices act and anti bribery act are driving a lot of companies to metaphorically sh1t themselves. It is an absolute mine field with a lot of grey areas.

    However as long as a company can prove they have made a good effort to ensure their employees abide by the rules and training, they have an out (mostly)

    BTW, Capita are not the best. We deal with them and they are farcical, especially if the problem is technical.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One of the courses I had to do was "Diversity Awareness For Managers". I manage exactly 0 people....

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I found it quite farcical that I've been there for over 10 years, and now asked (sorry - forced) to do an 'Induction Course' WTF!

    1. sabba
      Joke

      An induction course...

      ...perhaps it's your magnetic personality!!

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