Ramamurthyn and M.Sayeed,
Thank you for your comments. I understand exactly what you are saying and like many people, I too was once a fresher starting out with no knowledge. I certainly did not come from a management school and I do not have a degree or much education really. Everything I know, I have learnt while working. So I understand.
Maybe things are different in Australia than they are in India. We would not place a fresher in a job where they are expected to have detailed knowledge. When I started my working life, I started as a mail boy and file clerk and learned the processes of the higher jobs before I was posted to them. In most cases when I received promotion, I had someone on hand to teach me the new work, at least at the beginning. There were always other people in the office to ask if I got stuck. There was no internet or Google or CiteHR or anything like that back in my early days. Yes I am old :-(
As India charges forward, I feel industry and commerce is doing a disservice to it's people by not putting in place the necessary processes to develop and train the future workforce. HR is a complex area - and even more so in India, I expect. I do not understand all the things that are discussed here, eg, PF, Gratuity etc etc. They seem to be peculiarly Indian things. But if you have HR staff that do not understand then how do the workers know that they are getting their proper entitlements. I hope you understand what I mean. Your HR staff need to be trained by seniors in the company from Day 1. The most successful companies in India's future will be the ones that recognise this basic fact.
I agree that we Seniors should help and mentor the new people coming along. But we do not help these people by spoon feeding them either. To grow and develop, the freshers must learn how to research and find answers for themselves as we did when we learnt. Everyone expects instant answers now and we must resist that and encourage the freshers to work things out and come to us when they are truly stuck or there is a question that cannot be answered by Google.
Freshers today have a wealth of knowledge at their disposal that we never had in our day. We must encourage them to use it. If not, CiteHR members are wasting their time posting valuable materials here if no-one uses it.
Yes, I do get frustrated because we constantly reinvent the wheel instead of adding to the existing knowledge. Surely other members see as I do that questions about HR Manuals for example get asked 3 and 4 times every week. Over and over again it is the same stuff. It is all here, tons of it, ready to be used.
I hope you will join me in encouraging the freshers to use the resources already here and not to keep asking the same questions because they may be too lazy to do a simple search. The owners of CiteHR have made it easy to find information. Let's all work to encourage better use of it.