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The Story Behind
Lab-Training.com
Join us and you will gain something truly beyond what you can learn from books – Experience Beyond Books
By Dr Saurabh Arora
Over the past 15 years that I have been heading the contract services business at our company, my team has grown from just 30 people to more than 500, couple that with the healthy attrition rate that we see in our industry, I have literally taken hundreds of interviews to build and maintain a strong, high-performance team.
I have taken interviews and hired people at various stages of their career, right from beginners who are just trying to get a break into the industry, to experienced professionals with decades of experience under their belts.
For the beginners, the fact that they don’t have any experience often makes it exceptionally difficult for them to get their first job, to get that great start, getting the experience they need to further their careers.
“Getting a job and experience required to get it, is like the chicken and the egg situation”
Every organisation, including mine, wants the new employee to be productive from day one. We want our team members to start contributing towards the organisation goals, as soon as possible. And that is why more often than not organisations prefer to hire an experienced person who understands what needs to be done and can start delivering from day one.
As we go through the rigmarole of our formal education from school, to college, to masters and for the crazy ones, like me doing a Ph.D., we are bombarded with millions of concepts and facts that often, we feel, have no relevance to our real-life.
I’m still to find out why we were taught the Pythagoras theorem or calculus. And then suddenly we get a job, where we are required to use a whole bunch of those facts and concepts that we might have learnt more than a decade ago.
Interacting with all these people that I have hired and seeing them grow professionally and personally, as part of my team, I have realised what experience really means. I strongly believe that the only difference between an inexperienced beginner and experienced professional is the ability to use what we have learnt, to be able to apply all the fundamental concepts that we have all learnt as part of our formal education to our day-to-day work, to our life.
Now wouldn’t it be great if I knew in school itself, that I’m going to be doing normality and molarity calculations, day in and day out in the analytical lab, once I start with my job? I’m sure I would have paid more attention and would have remembered it by heart. Well this is just one example that comes to mind, there are literally hundreds of things that we have been taught over the years and never knew how we would use them in real life.
One way that has been used for a long time by organizations to give the beginners the required experience to start working independently, is to provide induction training. Induction training usually comprises of a few weeks of training. But not all organisations have structured induction training programmes and in most, the induction process is totally dependent on on-job training.
This site has been developed based on what we feel are the essential training modules for a scientist joining a lab. It has been designed to give the scientist a through fundamental understanding of working in a laboratory and all the associated processes, systems and procedures that we need to be able to understand, use and apply each day to be a productive member of the lab