Disappointment with Major Industry Player - Background Investigator CACI International Employee Review

To preface first I’ve worked in an office setting for 15 years, you tend to learn a lot about how businesses run even if it’s second hand knowledge from departments you haven’t worked directly in, you learn what’s best practice for a lot of things and what generally doesn’t work for a company’s bottom line. I’m undergoing NIRT training to be a background investigator and the whole process was unusual from the day I began. They start you off in onboarding which takes a few weeks, they set you up with all of the IT stuff you need including any prerequisite training needed before you begin NIRT. The initial issues began with a series of tech issues not being correctly vetted by IT and any other departments. There were frequent miscommunication coming from multiple sources and delayed tracking of what a new employee needed, often issues that went unchecked eventually surfaced and exacerbated things. When NIRT training itself began those tech issues persisted for the next 3.5 weeks causing me to be behind my peers and being unable to fully focus on training, half of my training consisted of me playing catch up, it’s a miracle I went as far as my 4th week of training (it’s 5 weeks in total). I passed all exams except the final exam (I wasn’t allowed to take the final), all hands-on assignments, many quizzes, and submitted my writing assignments. Calling IT help desk during appointed breaks and in the middle of training, and doing past due homework on breaks or during training never felt fair and put me at a disadvantage the entire time. There’s a severe lack of communication coming from management and trainers. Managers seem to lack the communication aspect of their jobs and tend to either give stock responses to complex issues or pass off issues as the trainee’s fault despite us being in the learning process and having everything thrown at us at once, “drinking from the fire hose”, combined with the above issues. The trainers themselves do not follow up with trainees frequently on any outstanding issues, they only follow-up on Fridays around noon expecting close of business resolutions. The responses you get from trying to reason with late requests are unhelpful with no room to meet in the middle, and guidance received from trainers are borderline antagonistic. CACI does not have itself together with the administrative side of things. Any and all IT setup should have been done during the onboarding process, all tech issues should have been resolved by the time NIRT began. Trainers should have been more communicative with anything that could have put a trainees progress at risk, there’s a lot of turnover with investigators due to case metrics and CACI are frequently understaffed with investigators, so they can’t afford to let trainees fall through the cracks. It’d be helpful for managers and trainers to understand the human side of running a business, relying a lot on template responses is not the way to handle outlying issues, and anyone in HR will tell you throwing the book at someone all of the time is generally a bad idea especially for minor issues. I can’t recommend working for this company, it’s unfortunate because after getting laid off I actually did want to try and become an investigator, but for the life of me I can’t support the way they handle onboard new employees, communicate with trainees and handle conflict resolution. These are fundamental aspects of running a company and a business of their size has no excuse for it.