As a cleaning worker, you may be one of the lucky people who have stable employment that compensates you at a rate that sustains you and your families. It may also provide you health insurance and retirement benefits. Still, you are not in the most secure position, if you are not taking charge of your own career progression.
In fact, cleaning workers are notorious for not having a path to career progression. Even the most well-intentioned employers have been challenged when they attempt to provide janitorial workers with meaningful employee development.
There is a glass ceiling in virtually all organizations, that confines the janitors and housekeepers below the job title of manager. “We have virtually no training and development for our cleaning workers,” a CEO said to us recently. “We know that we need to train them and we can’t avoid it indefinitely, but we’ve always ignored cleaning training and we will continue ignoring it at least for a while.” Economic realities are economic realities, and this CEO knows that it’s a financial Band-Aid right now to not do training.
Even in the best of times, budgets for cleaning workers participating in workshops, conferences, schools, and training programs tends to be allocated to other segments of the company like management.
If you believe management is “cause” and all else is “effect” perhaps this can make sense, but how can a self-motivated cleaning worker experience his or her own career progression? Now there is the (OS1) Professional Passport program, a new solution for individuals who want to take charge of their own career path.
