Nearly every new employee (pretty much everybody but admin people) gets put through an excruciating 6-week training program, and they have to pass a very difficult certification test at the end of it to stay at the company. I've never seen anything remotely like it. The training period is an extremely stressful ordeal. Sure, they give you an iPad, but early on they drop a number of large documents for you to read and learn, and before you have enough time to get through them there's more, and then more and more after that. It's an impossibly large amount of information to assimilate. There are night study sessions you have to attend, and eventually you become completely obsessed with passing their certification, to the exclusion of everything else in your life, like your family. You have to learn every nook and cranny of their pretty large software application. For the certification, you have to be able to correctly execute 5 intricate, intentionally mis-ordered 30+-step procedures in their app, then answer a very long series of highly detailed multiple-choice questions. It smacks of age discrimination, as I think that only a young person would be able to successfully assimilate the gigantic amount of information they throw at you. (Nearly all of the surviving employees are younger than me; I'm 50. Being 50 should be an asset, not a liability, but not at kCura.) Because of what they put their new employees through, I feel that this company definitely does not belong on the Tribune's annual "best places to work" list that it always makes.
