I got my "Investors in People" badge the other day. Everyone gets one, since the underground is officially part of the Investors in People scheme, which seems to consist mainly of giving people badges, like Blue Peter. This is to signify all the training they give us. "How nice," said one alert customer. "Pity it's not investors in signals."
I suppose the underground is, at a push, an investor in people, although the training it hands out tends to be the minimum needed to allow you to do the job and, as anyone who has tried to leave the underground will tell you, it is very short on transferable skills.
After the initial training there is an annual test of rules (ATOR). To comply with the railway inspectorate, everybody needs to renew their licence to work on the underground. This licence establishes that the person has at least a threadbare understanding of types of fires, safety on the track and how escalators and lifts work.
Unfortunately, were people actually to fail the test there would be all sorts of staffing problems, so they started giving out the answer sheet 28 days in advance and then revising the paper with you on the day before you did it.
Some trainers were stricter than others. One stayed in the room for almost the entire test, which made looking at the answer sheet harder than usual. Another made a cursory effort to prevent people looking at each other's papers, but as we were crammed into a small classroom, this wasn't very effective. If you failed the test at the first go, they gave you an intensive course after everyone else had gone home. The one person I have heard of who failed even that turned out to have dementia, which was probably worth knowing.
This sorry charade appears to have finally met its end and only a very truncated ATOR remains for lower grades. In its place comes what is known as "competence assurance," which entails a manager following you around for a few hours checking that you can use the PA system, walk in a straight line and string a sentence together (though this one is not compulsory).
While this almost entirely does away with the need for a week at the training school, they haven't quite got out of the habit yet, so each year you toddle along, wondering how much more banal it can get this time.
Alongside the run of the mill eyesight and hearing tests, and a chance to prove that you can cross a dummy piece of track without tripping over and cracking your skull, comes the "vision thing." This is where the upper management attempts to pass some of their corporate concept down to the plebs.
Top of the consultants' battery of ideas comes the mission statement—"A world-class tube for a world-class city," which begs any number of questions. The trainer who led our vision quest this year told us that we were lucky, as we would only have to do the course once. Some people, it seemed, would have to do it twice, because they were behind on arranging next year's course.
The underground seems to have noticed that something is up with the training schools, since they've recently made 40 or so of the instructors redundant. This despite having a huge backlog of people waiting to train to be drivers and supervisors. Quite why the trainers, of all the cushy jobs on the underground, should suddenly get it in the neck is unclear, but it may be due to their habit of often letting us go home soon after lunch.
The main benefit of these courses is not the training but the chance to meet people from different grades and different stations. Ideally, management would like to keep this to a minimum, but since they can't take everyone out of the same station, they just have to put up with it.
The only other place you can do that is union meetings. But there aren't many political goings-on at training, just the chance to meet some old-timers whom you haven't met and hear some stories that you haven't heard before. Not the jokes, though, which are all the same.
For instance, it was at one of these courses that I discovered that the reason the dot matrix boards never show a train more than 14 minutes away is because if it shows 15 minutes people can claim their fares back under the customer charter. And in a discussion about whether platforms, and therefore the trains, could be made longer (to which the short answer is no) we heard about the 12-carriage train, created when one train rolled back into another.
Going on my last training session revived happy memories of the four-week course they gave us when I first joined, a course which included all kinds of strange sections, including a portion covering—in the loosest sense of the word—"transactional analysis," which was supposed to help us deal with the angry and upset public. There was even a nod towards Maslow's hierarchy of needs: a sly personality questionnaire aimed, at a guess, at weeding out any psychopaths and undergraduate fodder. But there was almost nothing about how to use the station radios.
Of course, at the time, I had no idea how irrelevant it was and lapped it up as evidence that I wasn't, as friends had suggested, committing my future to a brain-dead career with few prospects.
