A commonly said thing in business is that there's no such thing as a bad worker, just bad managers.

Of course, I have many reasons to disagree with that, but you can also argue that HR has job to do by ensuring that shit workers are ideally not hired and if absolutely necessary later on; fired.

I do recommend that workers don't stay in jobs where they aren't able to perform to their full potential, forever.

Hell, some good managers are even known to blatantly tell talented people that they are wasting their time at their relatively small company. It prevents long term dissatisfaction and de-motivation in the future and allows hungry young guys (that also have lower salary and benefit requirements) to progress.

I have many a time seen shit managers to try to hold people back and fail to provide them with what they need. It just leads to them jumping ship.

CLED Report on English Language Needs and Support for UIC Students.

Prepared by Dr. Irene Fung and Dr. Edith Yan of the TESL programme
June 2014

"e. Overall findings
Among the four types of optional activities provided by the ELC, the WRC tutoring service had the greatest percentage of occasional and regular attendance from the respondents, the highest mean rating of the usefulness of the service, and the lowest percentage of the service users who considered the service not at all useful. The reason why the tutoring service was well-received by students might be that the service could provide more direct assistance to the language of their assignments. The most frequent qualitative remarks that the respondents given regarding being unable to use the service was the difficulty to book the service online, instead of receiving no information from the ELC as they complained for other optional ELC activities. This indicated the high demand for the service and students paying close attention to the announcement of the ELC regarding the WRC tutoring service. Another point to note from the comments of some Year 3 and Year 4 respondents was the inadequacy of some writing tutors in providing feedback to essays produced by students of more senior year levels. It seemed that some tutors might not be able to give advice beyond the mechanics of essay writing or be patient to go through long and complicated essays. Some training might be needed to equip the writing tutors with the strategies of providing feedback to second language writing.

The English Corner, on the other hand, was the one among the optional types of activities provided by the ELC which received the lowest percentage of occasional and regular attendance from the respondents and the widest range of percentage (0% - 36%) of the participants who considered the type of activities not at all useful. The low percentage of occasional and regular attendance by the respondents for the English Corner 78 activities might be due to the limitation of the number of participants for each session to roughly ten. The wide range of percentage of participants who considered the English Corner activities not at all useful was because a very low portion of Year 1 participants (0% - 13%) evaluated the activities not useful but a relatively high proportion of Year 4 participants (15.1% - 36.4%) considered so. Perhaps the comment given by a Year 3 respondent might provide hints for the different trends of evaluating the usefulness of the English Corner activities by Year 1 and Year 4 participants, "In many year 3 students' mind, the English corner is designed for year 1 & 2 students." Year 3 and Year 4 students might not be interested in the conversation topics that geared more towards the life experience of Year 1 and Year 2 students.

Indeed, the Year 1 participants of all three Divisions tended to give higher mean rating than participants of other year levels on the usefulness of all the four types of optional activities provided by the ELC. Whenever significant differences were found between respondents of different year levels on the views of the usefulness of the English Corner activities, the Year 1 participants were always the cohort which gave a significant higher mean rating. It seems that the ELC optional activities could benefit students more if some of the activities could be set at two levels, one targeting at the interests of Year 1 and Year 2 students and another focusing on the needs of Year 3 and Year 4 students.

Another point to note from the findings was that the percentage of respondents who reported that they never or rarely attended the ELC activities tended to be high across all types of optional activities. Even for the more popular WRC tutoring service, more than half of the respondents (51.9% - 88.8%) across all year levels and all divisions said that they never or rarely use such a service. Some of the reasons that the respondents gave for not attending the ELC activities were not strong indeed, such as receiving no information about the ELC activities or the activities being scheduled at lunchtime. In fact, students could get the information about the ELC activities from the Centre’s announcements online. It seemed that many students had not established the habit of joining ELC activities for improve their English proficiency. More effort might be needed, such as English teachers promoting the ELC activities in their English classes, to encourage more students to participate in the activities.

The qualitative feedback also suggested that there were quite a number of students did not like the ELC activities to be held at lunchtime or evening time on weekdays. Saturday mornings might be another option to run the ELC activities without clashing with students' classes. With sufficient manpower, Saturday mornings could be set aside for students to relax and enjoy using English on campus. Student helpers of high cGPA and English scores, and of the third or fourth year of study could be hired to run activities targeting at Year 1 and Year 2 students, such as the WRC tutoring service and the English corner activities. Student helpers could become satisfactory writing tutors for tutees of their own Division after receiving training on providing feedback to second language writing."