Hm...Yes, I agree--extreme expectation mismatch with the workplace. This employee would be like me going to work for a hospital and then being angry that I didn't get Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day off.

The thing is, while it's every co-worker's job to help new staff, it isn't every co-worker's job to teach new staff. So she was getting help just fine, but she should have had a specific person to talk to and should have requested specific time to meet for instruction if she wanted to be taught how to do something. I don't know if she expected trainers to drop everything to teach her, or what.

Sometimes, you do have to just figure it out for yourself. When I first was promoted to my current job, my trainer's idea of training was to sit me down at a computer and watch me as I went through the process of creating purchase orders. Seriously, she pretty much just sat in a chair beside me and said nothing, once I saw how to follow the screen prompts.

I didn't consider it great teaching, but I did figure out how to create POs in our computer system, and she was there for me to ask questions of. Unfortunately, I was so unimpressed by her teaching style that I concluded I'd be better off just figuring out what I needed to know because the software was user-friendly enough that I could do it that way. So that's what I did.

I think it might have helped this employee if she had written down her questions. For example, "Okay, I read the SharePoint link you gave me. So what is X and how do I do Y?"

If people aren't giving you the kind of help you need, you have to communicate your needs to them. You can't just keep your frustration bottled up inside so you can explode during the exit interview. I don't know to what extent she was trying to communicate, though.