Pros
Pay during training is $17 and goes up to $20 an hour. However you are scheduled to work less than 20 hours a week. Only employees who work 20 hours or more are eligible for benefits. They only schedule you for 2 shifts a week so you won't be able to qualify for benefits. I completed all the CrisisLink trainings which has multiple chapters, meetings, required certifications, and videos which are all great but need to be way more detailed and longer. The PRS trainers however are SUPER wonderful and nice. They offer you excellent feedback, tell you what you can work on better, and offer support while you're in the training. The job itself is very rewarding, being able to make a caller feel heard, empathizing with the callers, and making sure they stay safe at the end of the call can brighten your call. Then again, it really depends on the types of callers you get.
Cons
Most of the PRS CrisisLink training focuses on asking Risk Assessment questions, and trying to access suicide risk in callers rather than focusing on emotional support/empathizing with callers. Emotional Support is covered mostly in Chapter One but it's an art form that needs to be taught in more detail. New Crisis Workers are caught to prioritize assessing suicide risk more in the training. The Zoom training meetings need to be longer and provide more real life call situations/recordings that a new crisis worker may face. SIMmersion is an okay training tool they use but it MAINLY focuses on asking Risk Assessment questions and not on emotional support. Most of the callers on the actual job require emotional support 98% of the time but the training doesn't go into detail with that, it just provide some examples of how to reflect their feelings and provides a feeling wheel. That's it. That's not going to be enough for a new crisis worker if they have a Level 3 or Level 4 caller on the line at imminent risk who has access to pills or a weapon, or requires an intervention. New Crisis Workers thrown into that situation will not feel ready to handle those types of calls after the training PRS Inc. provides. Reflecting the caller's feelings using the feeling wheel will not be enough to talk a caller with suicidal ideation off the ledge during an intervention. That's why the training on emotional support needs to be better. The training does not cover handling interventions in much detail that's why new crisis workers might feel under prepared handling that type of call. PRS Inc. has begun hiring at home part time crisis workers, and everyone meets through Zoom calls and talks through Microsoft Teams. When communication between management and new crisis workers is needed the most, it's not provided. At home crisis workers are not made aware of pending decisions that affect them, and HR is not great at creating schedules for training at times because they have so many new workers to make schedules for. When a new crisis worker who is still in training needs to improve in a certain area on a call, or they are still learning and are receiving guidance from their trainers; upper management does not communicate with the new crisis worker through Zoom or Microsoft Teams to exchange dialogue about what specifically they need to improve on with their callers instead they WILL terminate new crisis workers who they feel have not completely mastered their training without even offering them a chance to grow and improve. You have up to 5 On the Job training opportunities and 1 Supported Shift, and if you do make a mistake on a call during your training period that they feel you can't improve from or come back from they will fire you during your training. Mind you, getting this job in the first place is an EXTREMELY tedious and long process. I'm talking you have to get 3 professional references, and contact your past employers to verify the past days you worked with them. You have to scan a completed I-9 form and have a witness sign it in order to get your first paycheck, they don't make that easy either. The process just trying to get this job was so mentally draining, and frankly not worth it after you experience how cut-throat upper management is, and how they make all of their decisions without communicating with you. They don't value retention and offering more training and support to the new crisis workers they have. Instead they view everyone as disposable and will not even give a crisis worker a chance to improve once they feel you made a error on a call. It can be a very small error too, such as not offering enough emotional support on a call or forgetting to ask some crucial Risk Assessment questions. Those errors will get you terminated. Management has to realize the crisis workers are simply following the expectations they learn during their 3 week training. WE are the product of what you've caught us, if we don't do something right on a call or meet their expectations during a call then there is something wrong with YOUR training. Cover that during your trainings, make the trainings longer, invest your time and energy into making every crisis worker who does well on 90% of their calls the absolutely best crisis worker they can be. Instead what they do is, "Oh you didn't do this enough during the call, or that enough? Okay you're fired." They don't provide room for growth or improvement that each crisis worker is capable of because at the end of the day ALL of the PRS Crisis Workers are disposable and replaceable to them.