Via the Washington Post Federal Eye Blog. This may partly explain why TSA procedures vary so much from airport to airport.

U.S. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson released a DHS Inspector General's report on TSA's training program for screeners. The chart on page 27 is worth the price of admission: new hires get 80 hours of coursework and 60+ hours of on-the-job training. (Or about half the length of my long-ago Air Force basic training.) The report is here:

http://www.dhs.gov/xoig/assets/mgmtr...1-05_Oct10.pdf

What the IG found was, no surprise, disorganization. Some quick points:

• TSA established a training division in 2006, but it "did not assume leadership until 2009"
• There is no written procedure for updating training courses
• There are no measures of training program effectiveness
• During OJT, a new screener is most likely to have only one person monitoring him or her
• Employees often don't train on the equipment they will be using
• Some training computers are far from checkpoints, while others are located inside checkpoint areas, where trainees are surrounded by distractions
• Employees are not given adequate time to finish computer-based lessons, so they rush through them

No wonder that when encountering a TSO, YMMV.