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It is a big beginning. Yes, the arrival of the trainee certainly is. She is upsetting hierarchy, setting a new pace for business, flooding the market, and creating a trainee economy. This may be the era of shortages, but it is also the age of youth. Welcome to the total makeover, the absolute GenXification, of the workplace.

But life in the trainee economy comes with a lot of hiccups, muckups, and screwups. Every time you don’t get your morning newspaper, or get the wrong one, you know whom to blame. But the list of surprises doesn’t end there. Your relationship manager does not know you from Adam; your favourite restaurant changes its staff faster than its menu; your organisation has no middle layer, only newcomers and top management; and training has become your primary key result area.

Simply put, your success depends on the way you mould the trainee. Every organisation is learning to live with the trainee. Goa Portuguesa, a hip Mahim resto, has come to grips with the idea comfortably. You will see a trainee with a small sign clipped to his shirt, informing you that he is a trainee, and that he will do his best. If that does not convince you of the emergence of a new supply chain, you should visit a (trainee) shrink.

The T-word is ubiquitous. But office lingo is still not keeping with the times. In a few months from now, offices will be filled with these buzz-words:
T20: a trainee whose core competence is speed, speed, speed
T-Rex: a trainee’s trainer, who may be doing his last job.
T2: a trainee who has graduated to a trainer.
T3: a trainee who has displaced a boss
Tina: trainee is the new alternative
My friend GC has a lot to say on the ecosystem that is redefing and testing co-existence. Says he: “It is good return on investment; you can easily mould a trainee the way you want to.” In other words, you can teach a young pup lots of new tricks. You can fit a trainee to the job; you can move her from task to task; you can create a flexible company; and you can add raw, continuous energy to the organisation. Trainees like to sprint; loyalists like to do a marathon. And, nowadays, all success depends on the sprint. After all, sprint, not stamina, is strategy.

Significantly, the discipline of management is up for grabs. For years, management gurus have been advocating re-engineering, value migration, supply-chain reconfiguration, quick response time, and smartsizing; but nothing has moved. In the last 12 months, the humble trainee has not only helped create a hierarchical upheaval, she has helped shorten the supply chain. This is not a ‘blue-ocean’ strategy; this is a green-pond strategy, where a trainee jumps into the pool and surfaces with a coin. Nobody knows why such a simple thing was never tried before. Perhaps the templatised world was waiting for a saviour. The saviour has arrived with an SMS: go4it.

Needless to say, bosses no longer suffer from BP; they suffer from TP (trainee pressure). If a trainee waiter, a trainee stewardess, a trainee brand manager or even a trainee apprentice falters, she hurts the brand. Which is why you see bosses running up and down the supply chain on a trainee-spotting spree. Interestingly, as managers have realised, organisations are now learning to institutionalise processes, something they did not emphasise before. They are codifying tasks, simplifying work-maps, quantifying input and output, and focusing on execution. They are bringing the rigour of learning to the workplace.

But training can inspire the organisation. It inspired Michelangelo in Irving Stone’s Agony and Ecstasy, a historical novel. Michelangelo, an apprentice to the Florentine maestro Ghirlandaio, gets some sage advice from his mentor: “If a peasant woman brings you a basket that she wants ornamented, do it as beautifully as you can; for, in its modest way, it is as important as a fresco on a palace wall.”

Surely, traineeship is heading full steam. It is reinvigorating the organisation; it is challenging the system. Even if you do not buy that argument, remember: America has. It is willing to give a big, fat chance to inexperience. Indeed, it is willing to risk change.

Email: vinaykamat@dnaindia.net