REGULAR
I was allowed fly solo and deliver training and technical advice in my own right. During this time I was schooled in such diverse topics as the pH scale, cleaning machinery types, janitorial equipment, floor and surface type recognition, infection control, hand hygiene, cleaning processes, floor care (stripping & polishing, sanding & sealing, grinding & vitrifying etc.), food safety, cleaning at height, CHIP & COSHH regulations, and so the list goes on.
Given the pace of modern business and the speed with which we are now expected to accomplish our objectives, an 18 month traineeship probably seems like an inordinately long period of time, particularly when you consider that I was not able or indeed permitted, to add any real value or raise any revenue until having completed it!
I am though very, very appreciative of having been through it as I believe it has provided me with an unshakeable foundation from which to build my career to the point it’s at now and hopefully beyond.
At the risk of sounding somewhat dramatic, I also increasingly feel that I am a member of a slowly dying breed. It’s always been true that those outside of our industry looking in do not understand the multifaceted nature of commercial cleaning – imagine if
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you will, my twenty year old self in the pub trying to explain the precise nature of my new job to the group of trainee accountants, solicitors, insurance brokers, management consultants, civil engineers and one trainee pilot, that constituted my social circle at the time!
As a naïve youngster in my early twenties I had absolutely no concept
of the size and scale of our industry, nor of its importance, complexity and probably above all else, technicality.
However I have begun to feel over the last five to ten years that a combination of natural wastage and the demand for productivity and therefore cost effectiveness above all else, has seen a real decline in the numbers of individuals with sound technical knowledge inside of our industry.
It has been my experience that when technically knowledgeable people retire or move on from a business, they are increasingly replaced by someone who has a different skill set but lacks
the technicality of their predecessor. There is an argument that says that the reason the new employee doesn’t have the knowledge is because it’s no longer required to fulfill the job role.
I’ve bemoaned in these pages before the fact that the practice of protecting resilient floor coverings via the application and ongoing maintenance of an emulsion polish film is rapidly on the wane. So too is the knowledge required to carry out the procedure correctly and effectively. Instead a lot of cleaning service providers prefer to run scrubber dryers filled with harsher than necessary chemicals across these floors in the name of getting the job done as quickly and cheaply as possible. The fact that this practice can prematurely age the floor is apparently by the by as the cost of its untimely replacement comes out of a separate budget pot to that of the constantly scrutinised cleaning service.
Whilst I understand the need to be competitive and commercially savvy, I think it would be a real shame to lose this long accrued knowledge altogether and something we would ultimately regret
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Tomorrow’s Cleaning August 2015 | 25
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