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The Postal Service has introduced Blue and LiteBlue pages with resources to help educate employees about the coronavirus pandemic. Both pages feature videos and Link articles on the topic, as well as workplace posters and information sheets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC
HERO is not an acronym. The name is meant to underscore how the platform puts you in control of every step of your career. • You should start using HERO now. If you have an ACE ID and password, USPS wants you to log into the HERO site and explore the system. • More information is available.
The Postal Service has introduced HERO, a system that will allow you to manage your career development activities from a single online platform. Here’s what you should know: • HERO is one platform with multiple capabilities. You can use HERO to receive training, apply for job openings, enter performance goals and more.
There are various possible online exams that are used to evaluate candidates for different positions in the post office.
They are used to judge the aptitude of potential candidates and determine how well-suited they would be to carry out tasks in postal service roles. They evaluate characteristics and skills such as teamwork, accuracy, efficiency, communication, problem-solving, your personality, and more. You may need to take one or more of these tests depending on which position you are applying to.
The 476 exam is the exam you will take if you are applying for a mail processing role. These can include roles such as Mail Processing Clerks and Data Conversion Operators. This test is very similar to the previous one 475 for mail handlers.
To pass the USPS exams you must receive a score of at least 70%. If you score under this, your score will be invalid and you will be ineligible for roles at the company. If you don’t reach this score you will, unfortunately, be unable to retake the test for at least one year.
To get a high score, the best thing we recommend is practice, practice, practice. If you are worried about your mail handler exam, get the 475 test prep pack to try simulation tests and study guides. Take USPS Practice Test.
The work scenarios section of the exam is to measure your situational judgment. What does this mean exactly? The questions will present you with hypothetical work situations to judge how you would react behaviorally in response to each.
You will need to answer these with how you would most likely react in each situation. There will be 9 questions that should take around 11 minutes to answer.
Amtrak and the USPS share a number of remarkable similarities. Both the passenger railroad operator [1] and the mail carrier [2] were created by laws passed in 1970. The first trains managed by Amtrak ran on May 1, 1971, two months before the USPS carried its first letters. Both are nominally independent extensions of the federal government that provide subsidized transportation services to the American public. And both are built around the idea of cross-subsidizing service in expensive-to-serve places with profits from areas they serve cheaply.
Amtrak and the USPS also differ in some important ways. The former is a government-controlled corporation, the latter part of the executive branch. Amtrak inherited a product, passenger rail service, that was already well into its decline. It was created in an effort to save U.S. freight rail from ongoing losses of government-required passenger service in the age of mass automobile ownership. Amtrak’s managers and the policymakers who empowered them knew their job was one of managing decline from the outset. Hard decisions about which services would continue and which ones would not were made at the beginning, and Amtrak administrators have long argued [3] for the ability to control costs further by eliminating some of the company’s money-losing services.
This prosperity limited conflict between postal interests. Growth meant there was little reason to plan in advance for new technologies that would cause the agency’s main product to become obsolete for many uses. Planning would have meant saving for the future, including preparing for future pension liabilities and new vehicles and machines, rebalancing its real estate portfolio and making clear to employees that the nature of postal work was going to change as the USPS makes use of new technologies that improve productivity.
Advance preparation is more important for the USPS than for Amtrak. The postal service has an obligation to provide universal service to every part of the country, while Amtrak and its predecessor railroads have never been required to be present in America’s most remote and costly to serve places.
Now, with a quorum [15] finally on the postal board, we await recommended changes to the USPS operating model. We can hope the board members take a few lessons from Amtrak, which has worked hard to make the most out of the assets it has while providing the service Congress expects.
For its first three decades, Amtrak pension funds could only be invested in U.S. government bonds, just like the USPS, but that changed in 2001 [10], when rail interests came together to allow railroad pensions to be invested in other things that could yield better returns, allowing Amtrak to save less than before. Rail regulators did their part by allowing [11] lighter, cheaper European train models for U.S. passenger service. Amtrak has profited from its real estate, with public-private partnerships in the works to develop new commercial buildings and improve train stations in major cities nationwide [12]. And regulators have allowed Amtrak to maintain flexibility by not mandating minimum staffing levels for passenger trains.
But the USPS didn’t prepare. By 2006, when the most recent significant postal reform [5] was passed, mail volumes had begun their decline, but only by about 1 percent per year. The USPS hadn’t saved enough for its employee’s pensions and healthcare in retirement. The law mandated the agency do so, but with mail already in decline, it has not socked the money away as Congress had hoped. By starting to save too late, the USPS has not been able to invest as a company in a fast-changing business needs to. It has delayed purchasing new mail trucks for years, with letter carriers forced to work in vehicles that lack air conditioning and have a tendency to catch on fire [6], beyond being too small to carry more than a handful of packages. Similarly, post offices haven’t changed much in the last few decades. Many aren’t large enough to function with the package-centric mail mix we see today. Furthermore, the USPS receives pushback [7] each time it tries to change the tasks [8] postal workers do.
HERO is not an acronym. The name is meant to underscore how the platform puts you in control of every step of your career. • You should start using HERO now. If you have an ACE ID and password, USPS wants you to log into the HERO site and explore the system. • More information is available.
The Postal Service has introduced HERO, a system that will allow you to manage your career development activities from a single online platform. Here’s what you should know: • HERO is one platform with multiple capabilities. You can use HERO to receive training, apply for job openings, enter performance goals and more.