Are civil servant training instructors tired from work?

In the civil service training class, my students would not believe that I had just stepped out of school and had not even received professional internal training. Their eyes were full of enthusiasm, and they firmly believed in the effectiveness of the training. If you see how popular the training courses are, you will believe that civil servant training is really a good business.

--1--

I was attracted by the recruitment banner with “annual salary of RMB 80,000 to RMB 200,000, unlimited”. In the second half of 2012, as a senior in college, I started looking for a job. A certain civil servant training institution conducts on-campus recruitment. My only impression of this institution was the introduction from the bookstore owner when I accompanied a student to buy a civil servant reference book.

Not to mention the annual salary of 200,000 yuan, the annual salary is 80,000 yuan, which is nearly 7,000 yuan per month. The salary expectation of our undergraduates is only 3,000 yuan, and it is already very good to find a job with 3,500 yuan.

The academic requirement for civil servant trainers is a master's degree. The principal of the Hunan branch who gave the lecture also said that undergraduates are also allowed, as long as they undergo internal training in their company before they can take up the job. I submitted my resume and was asked a few questions. I saw Principal Zhang check a box on my resume. Of course, I later discovered that almost all the students who submitted their resumes entered the next round of interviews. After a trial lecture, leaderless group discussion and other interview sessions, the president of the company conducted a remote video interview with me in Beijing. I think this company is very standardized, and I look forward to systematic internal training after joining.

In December 2012, because I had not graduated yet, I entered the training school as an intern, and my position was a theory teacher. At that time, there were more than 40 teachers in the Hunan branch, some of whom were graduate students, and the rest were undergraduates like me. There are four or five people who are senior. In the civil service training industry, a person with more than 2 years of work experience can be called a senior, and a person with more than one year of work experience can be called an old person. Because the work pressure is too high, staff turnover is very high.

New teachers are each given a textbook, which is the same as the one given to students when they register for classes. There is no reference book. We were also given a video account so that we could watch courses by famous teachers for free. In fact, it is an online school tutorial, which is exactly the same as the resources students have. I can only figure out how to teach on my own. The leaders will listen to our trial lectures, and if they think they are good enough, they can go out and give lectures. If they think they are not good, they can prepare again. The company doesn't care about how classes should be taught or how students should answer their questions. Teachers have reached a common understanding in private: speak if the explanation is clear, and do not touch if the explanation is unclear, unless the students keep asking.

In less than a month, I started teaching. Started a career in civil service training.

--2--

Although my position is as an application teacher, the classes we teach are entirely in accordance with the time and process of various civil service examinations. The written test of the national examination is at the end of the year, and the next most popular thing is the interview class. All the teachers were involved in interview training, so the first thing I did was to interview the leading teacher of the closed class.

I am mainly responsible for sitting there pretending to be an examiner, asking questions, and scoring the interview students. Closed classes, as the name suggests, mean that students eat and live together and teach intensively. After the busy national examination interview season, the provincial civil service examination has begun again. I transformed into the leading teacher of the closed class for the written examination, responsible for correcting papers and answering questions for the students. Sometimes students come to me and ask me why I gave this score to this question. To be honest, I don’t have much confidence to reply, so I can only be vague and confused.

The closed classes for the written examination are very large. One closed class for the written examination in Hangzhou that I led had 150 people. With so many people sharing the same room, board, exams, lectures, and evening self-study, it felt like I was back in high school.

Although I feel guilty about my business level, the company's business is getting more and more prosperous. For the 2013 Provincial Examination, Zhejiang Province alone opened 30-40 closed classes for the written examination, not counting the day classes, special classes and other courses. Our company accounts for more than half of the civil servant training market share in Hangzhou. Teachers began to spin around, and the quality of lectures naturally declined. Students would often complain. According to regulations, the teacher complained against would be suspended for three months. However, due to insufficient manpower, the school transferred the teacher to another place to continue teaching.

On the eve of Qingming Festival in 2013, only four months after I joined the job, I received a call from the school’s class scheduler, asking me to rush to Chenzhou, Hunan the next day to teach a four-day high-quality essay course. I was confused at that time. I only corrected papers for students in closed classes for written examinations. During the trial lectures, I only gave a superficial understanding of "what is essay theory". I have never prepared a lesson. How can I give a lecture the next day? I begged the teacher who arranged the classes and told me that I might not be able to attend. But the teacher who arranged the classes said, "No, you have to attend. Because there are no teachers at all." Just like that, I rushed to Chenzhou.

On the high-speed train to Chenzhou, I cried all the way. Because of nervousness and fear, I haven't eaten anything. When I came, I borrowed the courseware he made from my colleagues. But there are some places that I can't understand. Class starts at 9 o'clock the next morning. I don't know anything yet. How can I give a lecture? !

After calming down, I decided to prepare only the content for the next day’s class that night. If you don’t understand anything, call your colleagues and ask. In the next few days, when I wasn't with my students, I was calling my colleagues. I thought angrily that the company is really extremely irresponsible.

--3--

I met my students for the first time. There are 50 students in this class. Looking around, there are some who are about the same age as me, and there are also a few uncles in their thirties. That day I was wearing a black suit, a white shirt, and a pair of 8cm high stiletto heels with pointed toes and inlaid metal. All the students paid much attention to me, and one student said to me: "Teacher, you are a very tasteful person." I was very happy. I put a lot of effort into this outfit. The more guilty I was, the more I paid attention to appearance. I had to give them a mature and professional feeling, and they were really fooled.

As long as there are no problems in the first half hour of a class, there will be no problems later. I designed some little jokes during the lecture, and I could feel the eager light in the students' eyes. They would take a pen and carefully record what I said, and they believed it deeply. After class, some students gathered around and asked questions. Some people will ask: "Teacher, you look so young. How old are you?" Others ask me if I am engaged if I wear a ring on my finger.

Although the company did not provide us with formal training, there were teachers who taught us this issue. He told me that if a student asks about his age, he should change the subject and say that although he looks young, he is actually older and has a lot of experience. In fact, I was born in 1989 and I don’t even have a boyfriend yet.

After the four-day course, only one day later, I was arranged to go to Guangzhou to teach the sprint class for the provincial examination. According to the introduction on our website, this is a course taught by famous teachers, which only takes one day. It is a highly compressed approach to application essay answering skills and is similar to a pre-exam prediction course. I cried and told the scheduler that I didn’t want to take the sprint class. The content of the Guangdong Provincial Examination is different from that of the Hunan Provincial Examination. I don’t understand the content to be taught. How can I give a lecture? !

I still went to Guangzhou. While on the road, I have been preparing lessons. During class, I was still looked down upon by students. I also know that I don’t speak well. A student sitting in the front row took out the test questions in class and started doing them, with a look of contempt on his face. '

I can't take care of this because I was arranged to give lectures in Meizhou again. At three o'clock in the morning, I arrived in Meizhou, took over the textbooks left by the company from the front desk of the Home Inn, and prepared for the class until 7 o'clock. After sleeping for an hour, I stood on the podium and lectured for six and a half hours. Students are looking at you eagerly, and you must give them everything you know. Our teachers have communicated privately and feel that the cost-effectiveness of civil servant training is very low. From the tuition courses worth a few hundred yuan to the so-called "one-time public service" courses worth tens of thousands of yuan, the price of the courses is not directly proportional to the teaching content. We can only try our best to teach students what we know and be worthy of our own conscience. After the provincial written test, registration for the interview class is booming. The school was short of manpower and began to recruit a large number of people, expanding the teaching staff to more than 200 people. Submit your resume and you will be hired after one interview. Many teachers are students from the three universities. In my opinion, just speak clearly.

After that, the training of political and legal police officers began again. In July, I was away on business for 29 days and only spent two days in Changsha.

My landlord called me thinking something had happened to me. I increasingly don’t understand why civil servant training is so popular? Why do so many people take the civil service exam?

--4--

After working for several months, I concluded that my students are divided into two categories. One type is those whose families have money and connections. When interacting after class, they will say that they have passed the written test and their families can find ways to make arrangements. The other type has no background. It's hard to find a job, so the civil service examination is relatively fair. After all, the written examination cannot be faked. But almost all students have one thing: civil servants have good benefits and don’t have to do much.

When we go to various places to preach, we will also analyze to students that you have three paths after graduation: taking the postgraduate entrance examination, working, and taking the civil service examination. It is difficult to find jobs for college graduates, and it is also difficult to find jobs after graduate students. Only those who take the civil service exam are stable, easy to work, well paid, and even have longer maternity leave than others. Why become a civil servant? Needless to say, everyone understands this.

I don’t really want to do it anymore. Always falling into deep self-blame. On the one hand, is it useful to have doubts about the curriculum theoretical system and speak so firmly? It may not work at all. On the other hand, my students all want to be in the system and enjoy the benefits. I send these people into the civil service system one by one, but they don’t want to work. What will China’s future be like?

My parents are not opposed to my resignation. They wanted me to take the civil service exam. In the eyes of outsiders, it must be easy for a civil servant trainer to take the civil service exam. This is not the case. A male colleague took the civil service examination and only got an average score in the written test. He was eliminated during the interview. He asked civil servants how to answer interview questions. Compared with people in the system, our answers to questions are naive and we take things for granted.

In September this year, I finally resigned and decided not to take the civil service exam. I want to go back to my hometown and become a primary school teacher, because children are innocent and cute, and teaching them to read and write is a more practical and meaningful thing.