Everything they told us during training at HQ about what working in a store would be like, is NOT the case. Especially efficiency.
Lidl has most of the people training overseas staying in no frills hotels for months at a time because they have a contract with this hotel. Most of us have no kitchen, no laundry, no breakfast. Think staying at a super 8 or motel 6 for months at a time. Living in a different country with a different culture alone is hard enough. It makes being to work on time, being healthy and prepared for the day nearly impossible.
When training at HQ we didn't get our flights and accommodation info until less than a week before we left. Some of my colleagues are isolated, far from other colleagues. Most of us are not paired in similar locations to the areas we will be working in back home in the states. For example someone from a small town in the states is training in a high traffic London store and someone from a city in the states is working in a small village.
The hours are long and expectations are high. Not only are we expected to take 70% of training responsibility for ourselves but we are expected to fix the stores and step on the toes of our training teams in the UK. So we are brand new to this company, most of us new to the grocery industry and we are expected to train at the same time as telling our trainers how to fix their stores.
The inconsistency of training really makes me worried for the success of Lidl US stores. We will all be going back with completely different ideas of how a Lidl store should be run, many of us not prepared at all to run our own store and train an entire team on how to.