ursangnome (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ursangnome) wrote2010-04-07 08:53 pm
ursangnome) wrote2010-04-07 08:53 pm
Entry tags:
Census Training 2 & 3: Boring, but Necessary
More on becoming a Crew Leader
First, some terminology and notes on Census organization:
I'm working on an "operation", called Non-Response Follow Up (since this is the Federal government, there's an acronym - NRFU, pronounced "nerfoo", which brings to mind the idea of census personnel taking part in a John Woo film but using foam dart guns, but I digress). There are three other operations currently being run out of our Local Census Office (LCO). Our job is to get census information from normal Housing Units (like, homes apartments, mobile homes and so on) that didn't send back census forms.
So, we have a Field Office Assistant Manager (FOAM?). He runs the NRFU operation for our Local Census Office (LCO). For our Early NRFU, we have three Field Operation Supervisors (FOSs). Each FOS has six or seven Crew Leaders (CLs), and each CL has 18 to 20 Enumerators*. So, our Early NRFU has about 400 Enumerators - and in the coming weeks another 1000+ people will take the field for NRFU from our LCO.
The Enumerator is the person who goes door-to-door trying to get information from addresses that did not return a census form. I'm a Crew Leader, and my job is to train the Enumerators, assign them work and manage them, and feed that up to my FOS.
So, on Day 2 of our training, we learned what it is the Enumerators are supposed to do - I've spent some time trying to think of witty ways to talk about it, but the basic fact of the matter is that it is dead boring stuff. They go to your door, knock, and try to convince you to take 5 to 10 minutes to get a bit of information on a form. The form is well-designed to be easy to follow and fill out. There are some bits of administrivia about how it gets done, but let us face it, folks, this is dry stuff.
Day 3 of the training was about some of the edge cases. F'rex: the Enumerator knocks on a door, and talks to someone who didn't live there on Census Day but also didn't file a census form from the address where they did live at that time. We then started in on what we Crew Leaders are supposed to do - this amounts to shuffling paper, and making sure proper notes are taken on where the paper has gotten shuffled.
Tomorrow - more on paper shuffling, and we get assigned our Crews.
*Despite the alphabet soup there, no, we don't call Enumerators "Es".
First, some terminology and notes on Census organization:
I'm working on an "operation", called Non-Response Follow Up (since this is the Federal government, there's an acronym - NRFU, pronounced "nerfoo", which brings to mind the idea of census personnel taking part in a John Woo film but using foam dart guns, but I digress). There are three other operations currently being run out of our Local Census Office (LCO). Our job is to get census information from normal Housing Units (like, homes apartments, mobile homes and so on) that didn't send back census forms.
So, we have a Field Office Assistant Manager (FOAM?). He runs the NRFU operation for our Local Census Office (LCO). For our Early NRFU, we have three Field Operation Supervisors (FOSs). Each FOS has six or seven Crew Leaders (CLs), and each CL has 18 to 20 Enumerators*. So, our Early NRFU has about 400 Enumerators - and in the coming weeks another 1000+ people will take the field for NRFU from our LCO.
The Enumerator is the person who goes door-to-door trying to get information from addresses that did not return a census form. I'm a Crew Leader, and my job is to train the Enumerators, assign them work and manage them, and feed that up to my FOS.
So, on Day 2 of our training, we learned what it is the Enumerators are supposed to do - I've spent some time trying to think of witty ways to talk about it, but the basic fact of the matter is that it is dead boring stuff. They go to your door, knock, and try to convince you to take 5 to 10 minutes to get a bit of information on a form. The form is well-designed to be easy to follow and fill out. There are some bits of administrivia about how it gets done, but let us face it, folks, this is dry stuff.
Day 3 of the training was about some of the edge cases. F'rex: the Enumerator knocks on a door, and talks to someone who didn't live there on Census Day but also didn't file a census form from the address where they did live at that time. We then started in on what we Crew Leaders are supposed to do - this amounts to shuffling paper, and making sure proper notes are taken on where the paper has gotten shuffled.
Tomorrow - more on paper shuffling, and we get assigned our Crews.
*Despite the alphabet soup there, no, we don't call Enumerators "Es".