Assessing Your Training Quality: See Yourself As Others See You

O wad some Power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us ...

These lines from "To A Louse On Seeing One On A Lady's Bonnett at Church," possibly the "Greatest Hit" of Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796), are relevant to ethics training. "Seeing ourselves as others see us" can be a welcome antidote to complacency as we try to comply with OGE's requirements for initial ethics orientation (5 C.F.R. § 2638.703). Getting feedback from trainees, or even better, having a neutral evaluator go through the training experience, can be an eye-opener. Here's a comment one new employee offered when asked about the initial ethics orientation offered by her agency:

As for my own experience with ethics training/the handout I received I have to say, it was pretty pathetic. If you look closely at the packet I was given, some of the pages are not even readable. I don’t know if the problem was with the printer or whatever, but it seems pretty useless to print out all those documents, if some of them, you can’t even read. There was basically no training whatsoever on ethics or the standards for things like breaks, lunches, what you should/should not talk about, etc. It was mostly a "give this a look" type thing.

Do you know how many new employees would rate your agency's initial ethics orientation as "pretty pathetic"?