Don't Start at the Bottom: Vet Assistant Review - Vet Assistant Pender Veterinary Center Employee Review

Although they advertise that they prefer to "build you up" from the bottom rather than hiring people with loads of experience, the training program is nearly non-existent. They leave the "responsibility" of your training on as many as 5 different Assistants, who may only have one or two months seniority under their belts. They do not instruct the Assistants on how to train their new underlings; if you're lucky, you'll have a very experienced and good teacher once in a while. As things are, unfortunately, about 70-80% of your learning actually comes from the doctors and technicians correcting your mistakes on the spot. Each individual doctor and technician expects you to know how to get the job the way THEY want; it is not uncommon to be told to do a task one way by one superior, and then to get chastised and "corrected" by another while doing it just the way you were asked to. There is overall not enough consistency during training, and superiors are not very patient with the required learning curve. The result of this is that only those who are able to catch on extremely quickly, who happen to get scheduled with decent Assistant mentors, or who already know what they're doing, are able to stay; all others are prematurely weeded out for "poor work quality" when they are still just learning, usually by the end of the first three months of working there. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to make a difference whether you've got a great attitude or work ethic either. Thus, their turnover rate is insanely high. I understand that there is basically the same problem for those learning to become their Customer Service Representatives, or "CSR's".