Contracting? Expanding? Don’t Underestimate the Tremendous Value of Your Worker’s Cumulative Process Expertise
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Paraphrased many times and in many ways, the meaning is the same. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” W. Edwards Deming put it more succinctly, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t what you are doing.”
How often do you hear an employer critically examining their system of worker selection, development and maximization? Has anyone tried to describe your firm’s strategy for developing new-hires once on board, or developing incumbent workers to something more than a fraction of what everyone expects of them? Does it sometimes seem that all you have to train your workers to be their best once hired is, “Bob, this is Jim. Why don’t you show him around?” Don’t be embarrassed; it is more common than you think.
“Decisions that look good on this quarter’s balance sheet too often are made without realizing that the short-term gain grossly underestimates the long-term losses yet to be realized; reduced capacity, loss of historical expertise that made the business thrive and degradation of work process compliance.”
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Has anyone tried to calculate the enormous hidden, but real, cost of unused worker capacity, manifesting itself as hiring too many people when workers you already have hired never had a formal. structured, deliberate development plan? Or how low worker productivity, lower than expected quantity and quality of work, lack of compliance with work processes, quality plans and safety requirements, eats into profits?
For capital investments, on the other hand, textbooks have been written on how to classify them, and how to predict and measure return-on-investment. It is unthinkable for a firm to invest in a $1,000,000 piece of machinery and be satisfied with it putting out 50% less than advertised. Yet, the same principles should apply to the investment in workers. Why would anyone be satisfied with every worker hired only being trained and capable of performing 30-50% of their job? Still, decisions are made to keep the underperforming equipment and not funding the training of the operators to run it…until backed against the wall and the decision is made to cut the “cost” of the workers themselves. Read More
Thinking Past the Assessment – Unfinished Goals and Unrealized Expectations
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Literally speaking, an “assessment” is the process of measuring the value, quality and/or quantity of something. There are many types of assessments, and methods for assessing. In theory, it is the process of evaluating one thing against a set of criteria to determine the match/mismatch.
There are assessments for risk, for taxes, vulnerability. There are psychological, health, and political assessments. There is a group of educational assessments that measure a variety of outcomes such as educational attainment – assessments of course content mastery, assessment of grade level attainment, assessments of Scholastic Aptitude Tests (“SAT”) that compare a student to their peers nationally and a variety of college readiness exams.
“Determining that you, indeed, hired the right person for the job will not automatically ensure the person is successful in learning and mastering the job. The most important step in the employment process is seeing to it that the individual’s core knowledge, skills and abilities are applied in learning and mastering the tasks which they were hired to perform. That is where the money is made. “
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Educational assessments have been adapted for use in workforce development and employment, used to assess a prospective employee’s suitability for a job opening, with limited success. They often measure more of what, if anything, a student learned and retained before graduating than how they match the employer’s actual job opening. Psychological assessments have been adapted to measure a prospective employee’s sociability to the workplace, morphing into a new category called “psychometric assessments.”
We have seen a growth in the employment assessment industry over the past 2 decades, particularly after 9-11. Read More
The Employers Have the Most Advanced Equipment Available for Training
by Frank Gibson, Workforce Development Advisor, retired from The Ohio State University – Alber Enterprise Center
Community and technical colleges, career centers and joint vocational schools have always struggled with how to make a positive difference in workforce training. They often bear the brunt of criticism for the “skills gap” employers report when, in reality, employers share equally in the responsibility. Educational institutions have only the resources and capacity to provide core skill training upon which only employers can then provide on-the-job training to drive trainees to the job mastery needed.
Educational institutions are often tempted to assume more of the employer’s role in worker development but run into budget, feasibility and practicality limitations. This distracts them from their very important role of maintaining perpetually relevant core skill and related technical instruction that a high-quality technical education requires. Trying to provide all things to all employers never was the role of educational institutions so they should not take it too personally when good-intentioned efforts do not reach the expectations for them.
click here to expandThese institutions are often encouraged to use their limited resources to buy equipment or build facilities in order to support “customized, hands-on training.” The employer already has the facility and the latest technology in that community. The hard part has been convincing the employer that the school has a viable strategy that makes the employer want to imbed structured on-the-job training into the onsite natural order of learning the job. It would be even harder to convince them a training program, targeting a specific job of theirs, can be more effective offsite at a training facility than onsite.
Technology shifts so fast these days, and the focus of workforce training is so volatile, that it makes little sense for educational institutions to purchase equipment for training when only a few employers have similar equipment and the equipment may be obsolete before the school gets through the purchasing, installation and instructor training stages let alone before someone completes a 2-year training program. In addition, the company or companies that were targeted for this training might be acquired, closed or moved – leaving before any return on the investment of time, money and facilities are realized. Read More
Tips for Establishing Your Company’s Training Strategy – Practical, Measurable, Extremely Economical and Scalable
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
For most companies, an in-house training center doesn’t have to be brick and mortar, and doesn’t necessarily require additional equipment and personnel to support it. It is about focusing the resources already available to develop workers faster and to a much higher level of capacity. This does not happen by throwing dollars or classes at the problem; if that were the case many employers who did so would have solved the “skills gap” problem. It takes a more deliberate approach than that to achieve the outcome that has been out of reach, for many, for decades.
In previous articles, such as in the May, 2016 issue of the Proactive Technologies Report, “A Simple Solution to Skill Gaps – New-Hires and Incumbents” I described a simple, easy to implement strategy for developing new-hires and incumbent workers to full capacity. I emphasized that by focusing on the outcome, the proper inputs become clearer. But by focusing on the inputs, the connection to the outcome may not necessarily be clear. Any use of irrelevant, improper or ineffective worker development inputs means unnecessary costs with low or no return, wasted time and additional opportunity costs.
click here to expandOver the years, I have noticed that many employers’ idea of a worker training strategy is a hodge-podge of classroom and online training. This seems to be based on the assumption that all of the right people have been hired, they all have mastered the tasks of the job and that a few classes will drive each worker’s performance to higher levels.
Where does this assumption come from? Why do employers collectively settle for this type of model even though decades of experience and day to day worker performance offer many clues that this model of worker training is not as effective as hoped? Too often the feedback from workers attending classes is, “I don’t know why the company had me attend that class.” “That was a waste of time.” In an informal way, this is a form of “content validation,” or in this case “invalidation.”
“Conceptually, a better overall approach is simple, accurate, efficient and effective. If an employer isn’t including these simple steps in their worker selection, development and performance evaluation strategy they might be wasting company time, money and resources.”
This legacy approach is a comfortable model to explain. Everyone has attended school; some higher education as well. It is what we grew up with and the sentiment has become acceptance from familiarity. Some accept this approach because they are unaware of better alternatives. Read More
Read the full February, 2023 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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