One of the most frustrating things about being good at your job is that you are inevitably going to be asked to teach others how to do the job. This is particularly true in office settings where turnover rates might be high and new people regularly need to be trained. The boss isn’t going to want to train those people and so may ask you to show so-and-so how to do things around the office.

What is most frustrating about this is that it often means that you have to teach people to do really basic things that you don’t think twice about during the course of your day. I remember one new person that I was training who couldn’t figure out how to use the electric paper cutter. I had to show her twice how the papercutter worked. And then she still managed to get confused and to try using our business card cutter for document cutting. It was a mess.

Of course, most trainees aren’t too bad. But it’s still frustrating to have to train someone else because it doesn’t usually mean that your duties get lessened at all. You still have to complete your same amount of work for the same amount of pay but you have to do so while spending time training the new person. If you find that you’re often asked to play this role, you might want to seriously think about asking for a raise!

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