bad first job
Posted: Tue Jan 24, 2017 8:20 am
Hi everyone,
Just looking for words of wisdome I think. I just resigned from my first ever job in childcare. I have given it a week for my emotions to calm down, but i'm worried about whether i've made the right career choice. i loved study! I loved most of my prac experiences, the first was really hard, but I've been told that is normal for people new to the industry. The other 2 were terrific, and I'm yet to do my final prac, which is now eating away at my thoughts. I love working with children, the way they absorb knowledge, the excitement of melting ice and eating their favourite fruits for morning tea. I can't handle the management staff. I walked in and was told to go for it. No direction, no information...so I asked and received the most horrid of looks. Apparently I should know what to do. From there everything I did was criticized, the management team were all over me, my decisions to talk through an altercation with children who were trying to bite each other rather than send them to the naughty chair, allowing children to chose the boks THEY wanted to read at group time, going off on 'tangents' which i leant of as 'emergent curriculum' at school...not giving management a word for word description of my weekly activities, dot points are NOT acceptable. My lack of comunication skills...now I know I'm not easy to talk to sometimes, aren't we all?? I got on really well with the casuals and cert III staff, even the ECT's from other centres run by the same organisation, i found our management team REALLY hard to talk to-they would walk off on you while you were talking to them, stare at you when you asked a question, but not answer, contantly go on about people who go to uni being know it alls who have no place in childrens services, have this attitude not only towards staff, but children...if you don't ask the right question, you will not get an answer. 'Do we have more paper' the answer will be yes...and left at that...that child may not know to ask 'cani have more paper please'...why not model what they can ask rather than answer and walk off?? This is so similar to my first prac experience it is scary. I have gone over in my head a thousand times what I was doing wrong, and I still struggle to see it. How did I do so well in two centres and fail so miserably as soon as I was given a job of my own? Am i really difficult to communicate with, it's come up in one of my prac experiences that I need to improve, the second and third I was passed without even a comment in regard to it- apart from I got on well with all staff members...why isn't my planning up to standard, dot points save me time, and they get their point across- what book, what literacy focus, what numeracy focus, fine motor skills, art experience. This was acceptable for prac, and for the supervising teachers at ALL prac placements. How have I passed my course so well, and then been completely shot down in a real workplace? Is long day care like this everqhere, or have I just found a really crappy place to work- on a side note, i was told that this centre has had 6 ECT's in the past 2.5 years...while this made me feel slightly better, I'm still worried i'm not up to standard.
Amanda
Just looking for words of wisdome I think. I just resigned from my first ever job in childcare. I have given it a week for my emotions to calm down, but i'm worried about whether i've made the right career choice. i loved study! I loved most of my prac experiences, the first was really hard, but I've been told that is normal for people new to the industry. The other 2 were terrific, and I'm yet to do my final prac, which is now eating away at my thoughts. I love working with children, the way they absorb knowledge, the excitement of melting ice and eating their favourite fruits for morning tea. I can't handle the management staff. I walked in and was told to go for it. No direction, no information...so I asked and received the most horrid of looks. Apparently I should know what to do. From there everything I did was criticized, the management team were all over me, my decisions to talk through an altercation with children who were trying to bite each other rather than send them to the naughty chair, allowing children to chose the boks THEY wanted to read at group time, going off on 'tangents' which i leant of as 'emergent curriculum' at school...not giving management a word for word description of my weekly activities, dot points are NOT acceptable. My lack of comunication skills...now I know I'm not easy to talk to sometimes, aren't we all?? I got on really well with the casuals and cert III staff, even the ECT's from other centres run by the same organisation, i found our management team REALLY hard to talk to-they would walk off on you while you were talking to them, stare at you when you asked a question, but not answer, contantly go on about people who go to uni being know it alls who have no place in childrens services, have this attitude not only towards staff, but children...if you don't ask the right question, you will not get an answer. 'Do we have more paper' the answer will be yes...and left at that...that child may not know to ask 'cani have more paper please'...why not model what they can ask rather than answer and walk off?? This is so similar to my first prac experience it is scary. I have gone over in my head a thousand times what I was doing wrong, and I still struggle to see it. How did I do so well in two centres and fail so miserably as soon as I was given a job of my own? Am i really difficult to communicate with, it's come up in one of my prac experiences that I need to improve, the second and third I was passed without even a comment in regard to it- apart from I got on well with all staff members...why isn't my planning up to standard, dot points save me time, and they get their point across- what book, what literacy focus, what numeracy focus, fine motor skills, art experience. This was acceptable for prac, and for the supervising teachers at ALL prac placements. How have I passed my course so well, and then been completely shot down in a real workplace? Is long day care like this everqhere, or have I just found a really crappy place to work- on a side note, i was told that this centre has had 6 ECT's in the past 2.5 years...while this made me feel slightly better, I'm still worried i'm not up to standard.
Amanda
! Some centres should not be operating due to the way they treat STAFF as well as the way they manage issues. To parents and children, some centres are very good however to the staff they fail miserably by having this control and authority. Management is there to guide and support staff working in their centre but not like this. 
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