Son's awful experience in first week of job

[ArmyofMunn]

Sorry this is long but I wanted to get it all down!

My 18DS started his first full time job last week. He has A Levels but is not degree educated and was taken on as one of four, the other three being in their mid-to late twenties and two of them with degrees. It was with a financial services company and paid £4K more per year plus commission than another job he’d also been offered, so he was very pleased.

He spent last week and the first two days of this week completing training for the job and he's been coming home each day saying how much he loves it - the training, the people, the office, the role etc. The training has been intense, involving two powerpoint presentations per day to prove he understood the training, but in which he said he kept coming second from top.

This week, following the training, he’s had to do three mock calls to a fake customer (his line manager) and he apparently made three ‘breaches’ in total, all involving not noticing that the customer had used some wrong letters during the security checks of emails and addresses etc. He thought he’d done well though as he was confident and affable and just thought next time he’d get the breaches right. He was shocked therefore to be taken into a room after his final call by two managers and told that because of the breaches he hasn’t passed his probation week and would have to leave and couldn’t appeal!

He’s completely shocked. The company didn’t tell him that his first week was probationary and he also remembers reading clearly that breaches by employees in their first month should not be regarded as breaches. He unfortunately read this on their own system so he can’t access it now, and his employer has his contract, so he can’t check that over either.

I just think this is an absolutely terrible way to treat an employee and my son is struggling to understand how the breaches he made were so serious as to warrant being asked to leave. He did ask to opt out of their employee life insurance and pension scheme, so I’m wondering if that just didn’t go down well with them!

Does anyone on here have experience of this type of thing? Are companies allowed to treat people like this these days?

You wouldn't call it corporate bullshit if a scammer cleaned out your bank account because the person at the bank didn't do the checks properly.

This is a harsh lesson for him, but that's what life and work are like. The harsh lessons often end up being the most beneficial.

This. It sounds like his mistake was on the legal stuff that has to be perfect, and to mess that up three times suggests he isn’t suited to a role where mistakes are that important.

Sorry OP. It might be worth asking for ancopy of his contract but I doubt he’ll get anywhere, if he’s only been there a week and they want him to go, he’s going to have to go.

Exactly, it's worth checking the contract for correct notice and payment due.

I'm wondering how he could have actually made this mistake though, I'd have thought staff were taken through a series of screens where they were required to input data (obviously not knowing any complete customer passwords or paddcodes which they are not given access to) and it would be impossible to move forward with the call as you couldn't do anything on the screen until the correct data, provided by the customer, was inserted.

Usually as a customer you have to input the data using your telephone keypad even before you speak to a member of staff. These systems should as human error proof as possible.

I'm wondering how he could have actually made this mistake though, I'd have thought staff were taken through a series of screens where they were required to input data (obviously not knowing any complete customer passwords or paddcodes which they are not given access to) and it would be impossible to move forward with the call as you couldn't do anything on the screen until the correct data, provided by the customer, was inserted.

Not all companies have this system, lots have to manually check and match the answers the customer gives.
It’s also good practice to ensure staff have a clear understanding of security and take it seriously so it could be that the system you mention is set up in practice but they do it differently for training. It means any new starters who can’t grasp basic security checks aren’t taken further by the company.

My son had a very bad experience with an apprenticeship that he started after year 11. He was let go after two weeks, for various issues only some of which were his responsibility. The government wants less people to go to university and more into apprenticeships but there needs to be more recognition that 16 or 18 year old are not fully formed adults and vocational training needs to be supportive. Students are pretty spoon-fed at GCSE or sixth form but a lot of apprenticeships are pretty brutal. I think a lot of people on this thread have been pretty harsh about your still very young son.

This is pretty shocking. Any employer worth their salt would support him through this training, not fire him after failing an assessment. That is really brutal and horrible. I'm sorry, I don't have anything helpful on the legality, but I would suggest that perhaps he will eventually come to see this as a lucky escape.

I think it’s firm but fair.

If 18 was old enough to fight in two world wars then it’s old enough to get security information correct.

How long exactly should they keep paying someone they can't let near a customer call at all because the second they do they're going to have a security breach that they have to report externally?

It's not an employer's job to nursemaid legal adults. He straight up didn't listen to what he was being told. Not once, but several times.

Any employer worth their salt would support him through this training, not fire him after failing an assessment. I'm sorry but he has had more than a week of training and has three times failed the most basic of requirements which is checking that he has a genuine customer on the phone. The OP confirmed that he had been told after each mistake and he continued to make the same error. How many more chances should he have been given? I'm sure the employer thought that if he couldn't get the first step right he was unlikely to ever be trusted to offer accurate advice to customers.

Has he been paid for the "training"? Did his contract say anything about them recouping training costs within a given time period? Did he join a union?

PFB

Maybe he was relying too much on being a nice person and having good people skills.

Therefore he didn't realise that the attention to detail on what they were actually asking the employees to discriminate on the customers letters.

Also, in fairness to himself, he is so young that he wouldn't be as used to seeing ID documents, emails or business letters so might find it hard to distinguish what exactly he is looking for.

And again because of his youth and enthusiasm - he didn't want to look foolish by asking when he didn't really understand what was being asked of him.
There are very few 18 yr olds out there who are mature and self-aware enough to say in a new job 'oh sorry I didn't get that, is their names we are to double check or the date on the letters'.

X 100

^ This

@Liorae and @CrampMcBastard you're coming across as very juvenile - toddle off.

How any attempts should they have given him before they let him go?

Also, in fairness to himself, he is so young that he wouldn't be as used to seeing ID documents, emails or business letters so might find it hard to distinguish what exactly he is looking for. There are no documents involved? It was phone calls and what he was checking was that the person on the end of the phone is giving their name and answering their security questions correctly, it's pretty basic and fundamental stuff.

They didn't fire him after failing the first assessment though. They gave him feedback. He then failed the second assessment. They gave him the same feedback. He then failed the third assessment. How many chances should he get for probably the most important part of the training?

Yes name them please, I would like to know my investments were in a company that was concerned about security and that I wasn’t being persuaded to buy products by a careless 18 year old.

I’d be inclined to say that if he can’t read their passwords correctly for the security checks, has he read the employee terms right? Employers can’t have someone working for them making very silly little mistakes like this all the time - he obviously didn’t learn after the first mistake to take more care!

Unfortunately, if your son can’t demonstrate that he has understood the training (he hasn’t if he repeated the same mistake three times despite feedback), a financial services business can’t be expected to keep him on in the hope he gets the hang of it eventually…

The breach circumstances referred to is when an employee has successfully completed initial training, and is let loose on the general public. Sadly, your son hasn’t been able to demonstrate he would be competent enough to proceed onto dealing with real customers…

It's pretty serious to get security wrong three times in a test environment. He hasn't even managed to pass the training let alone the probationary period; they probably thought there's no point continuing if he got the same serious thing wrong three times.

I do feel for him, it's hard when your confidence is knocked like this - but this is a truly fundamental part of working in a call centre for a financial institution.

I thibk he dodged a very dodgy bullet. But I'd request a copy of the contract and then contact Acas for advice