Trainee lab technicians without a lab? How we kept them busy during the lockdown
As in many other professions, it is not easy for laboratory personnel and especially for trainees in this field to work outside their familiar professional environment. For laboratory trainees, two days of vocational school per week continue with distance learning tools, but the laboratory cannot be taken home. In the course of the corona crisis, new ways of making good use of home office time have been developed with great commitment and creativity.
"Should I take the pipettes home?" These or similar questions were perhaps asked by some at ETH Zurich when the laboratories were closed in mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic. At the time we had to stop, a so-called cantonal inter-company course (UEK) was being held in the biology training laboratory at ETH Zurich, with 21 trainees from various companies busy with experiments. Angela Leu and I organize cantonal and ETH internal courses for trainee lab technicians about seven months a year. We teach laboratory basics from different areas of biology to the trainees. For the rest of the year, we organize and supervise the training of our 19 trainees in the biology laboratories of various ETH departments.
The question we asked ourselves was, how can our students at home be meaningfully occupied? What impressed me very much was the great commitment and creativity that was sparked in response to this question. Since the shutdown, the supervisors have been in regular contact with their trainees and continue the theoretical part of the training. They use, for example, self-created worksheets on DNA sequence analysis and primer design, online tutorials on HPLC or training via zoom.
Even across different professions, the creativity in this exceptional situation is literally bubbling over. In total, ETH employs around 170 students in 15 different professions. Coordinated by the HR Vocational Training Department, the trainees created an online platform (www.lernmitmir.ethz.ch) within a very short time, through which a wide range of free online courses or tutoring is offered by trainees and vocational trainers. Part of the platform is public and accessible to students, for example offers for vocational orientation. Students who are in the process of choosing a profession will soon be able to attend online information events or taster apprenticeships and thus gain an insight into various professions from home.
This crisis is very demanding for all of us, but it does have its positive sides. For example, it strongly promotes the personal responsibility of the trainees and new exciting work and opportunities open for them as well as for us.