Training Workers for a Moving Target

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

In an article in HR Dive entitled “How employers could improve job outcomes for young adults: Certain degree programs and on-the-job training could open access to high-demand jobs,” Anthony Carnevale, the lead author of a recent report and director of Center on Education and the Workforce, said in a statement, “Pathways to good jobs are especially strengthened through comprehensive policy efforts that layer effective interventions on top of one another.”

“Some of these pathway changes involve increasing educational attainment, especially progressing toward attainment of a bachelor’s degree. Others replace or combine classroom learning with on-the-job learning, capitalizing on the growth that occurs when workers gain access to jobs in high-demand fields that equip them with both general and sector-specific skills, competencies, and domain knowledge”

It must be understood that the recent report, and other reports over the last decades attempting to provide guidance for better labor force development, explores solutions from the educator and policymaker’s perspective; using the traditional tools and approaches to education to prepare workers who can enter the labor pool with more to offer employers.

When education talks about “on-the-job training,” they are more likely referring to “on-the-job learning,” which is just a change of venue for traditional class or online learning. While important and necessary for preparing future and returning workers for the labor pool, too little time and discovery is spent on the employer’s role in developing the workers they themselves need to perform unique tasks for their operation. When a trainee’s core and industry-sector skills (industry-specific) are enhanced with task-based structured on-the-job training – by an employer’s subject matter expert delivered one-on-one in a deliberate transfer of expertise – the workers learning efforts prior to employment or concurrent with employment are preserved through direct application, before they erode from non-use.

Historically, employers have provided a tepid interest and response to the training process, relying too much on education to do the job only employers can do and relying on internal, informal, unstructured and undocumented one-on-one training to do the rest. This is partly because so much hype circulates around “new and improved” attempts by education to address the urgent need that employers continually voice. This may, also, be due to many employers’ denial about how weak and often ineffective the employer’s internal method of training new-hires, cross-training incumbent workers and upskilling incumbents for changing processes and technology are. Workers have been caught in a “Ground Hog Day” (I am talking about the Bill Murray movie, not disrespecting the little critter) loop for decades.

Employers complain about not finding the workers with they need with the skills needed, education and government officials jump into action with the tools they have and within the jurisdictional limits they are constrained by, years go by while both sides wait for results and the potential worker scrambling to complete the program only to find those jobs they were training for have been outsourced to an overseas firm, leaving them only with student loan debt. Employers realize their original concern hasn’t been addressed and the cycle starts again. I have personally witnessed this since the 1980”s as explained in many of my articles.

The solution is simple. It has been staring employers in the face for years. While informal, haphazard and ad hoc on-the-job training (i.e. the ubiquitous “Bob, this is Susan. Why don’t you show her around” approach to training workers in-house that has become the de facto employer standard) has worked to a marginal and unexplainable, unmeasurable and undocumented level of “success,” employer’s expressions of dissatisfaction with the productivity and quality of their collective workforce and difficulty in adding new workers has also become a standard. Products are shipped or services seem to be delivered, but explaining the process of how workers are trained once hired and how it can be measured or improved upon is illusive, but the employer’s pronouncements of disappointment are continuous.

Maybe it is time for employers to take a hard, introspective examination of what they have been accustomed to calling “training” to see if there is anything really there that they can be happy about. Maybe they will find the problem has not been with education and government agencies that frustratingly attempt every time to assuage the employer’s expressed anxiety. Maybe the problem has been with employers relying on internal staff without the knowledge and experience to set-up, implement, document and report progress to “handle” the incoming worker issue and waiting year after year, decade after decade, for learning meant for the labor pool to save them. It is sad that this disconnect still is used as a reason to outsource jobs to countries where the same issues apply but the low-wage labor supply helps employers to kick the training can down the road, and to insource workers from countries where there focus on learning might be equivalent to ours. U.S. employers have all the labor needed, just lacking a serious effort to train them.

There are several givens that should be considered by all parties in the workforce/worker development puzzle:

• Education has the tools, resources and jurisdiction to develop future and returning workers to a high level of general core skills and general industry skills, at best. Employers should never expect new-hires that immediately can perform every task that the position requires to a level of mastery without being trained how the employer wants them performed;
  • Education is limited in its capability to customize their general learning programs for every employer to make a difference.
  • “Customized training” to education usually means “customized learning.”
• Only employers can provide the targeted process-based task training that the new-hire and cross-training incumbents need to quickly and completely master the job classification.
  • If employers are insistent about relying on informal, ad hoc, unstructured, undocumented one-on-one training to drive new-hires and incumbent workers to full job mastery, they should accept the disappointing outcome and stop blaming education or the workers.
    • If any of company’s machines performed below manufacturer’s specifications, they would probably be outraged, but critically investigate the problem and find a quick solution.
    • Why are employer’s so comfortable accepting that most of their incumbent workers have been receiving a declining subset of the original “subject matter expert’s” capabilities and new-hires are sometimes on their own to find a way to learn the tasks of the job? If in doubt, ask your organization 5 questions:

1. 1. Can you explain the process new-hires go through, once hired, when assigned to the job for which they were hired for OJT?
   2. Can you tell me for each job classification: a) what are the tasks that make up the job classification, b) what is the agreed upon “best practice” for each task, c) for each assigned worker, which tasks have they mastered?
   3. How long does it take us to train each worker to full job mastery? Do we have an estimate of the labor cost/opportunity costs associated with the process and the expected return on worker investment?
   4. What are our plans for adapting our workers to changes such as market expansion, contraction and improvements in technology?
   5. How are we fixed for an aging workforce? Have we analyzed the best practice process for the job tasks for each job to capture the wealth of task-based expertise before it leaves us and to accelerate the training of replacements?
   6. How does our organization value the training process and the expertise of the workers we developed? Do we have a training budget? How do we quantify the investment we make with our informal on-the-job training each employee in every job receives? Do we have any metrics to measure value and know how effective we are in delivering a return in worker investment? When presented adversity, is the training budget and our developed workers first on the chopping block?

• The U.S. wastes billions of workforce development and education dollars every year trying to provide something that an employer will never appreciate, and employers waste billions every year on employees not or improperly trained yielding lower worker capacity, lower work quantity and quality, lower compliance – turning what should undoubtedly be classified as an “investment” into a “cost.” Workers are left confused, sometimes traumatized.
• Is our company a firm that can lead its way out of this unwarranted and fixable condition?

European countries have been using a collaborative approach to worker development from pre-k through graduate degrees. Apprenticeships are built around the employer’s need and supplies the employer with graduates who can succeed at their operation or at an operation down the road. Workers have a sense of direction, a pathway to get there and the intentional focus of the employer to help them arrive at a destination fulfilling to both. The key difference between the U.S. and European forms of worker development is not the amount of money spent, it is the clarity of focus, the continuous improvement of what is already demonstrated to be working well, and the employer’s structured on-the-job training collaboration.

In the U.S. we have a countrywide hodge-podge of approaches that keep our economy stumbling. We have changed from the world’s largest exporter of manufactured goods in the 1980’s to a world’s largest net importer.  Prior to the 1990’s, many of this country’s seaports were backed-up, loading ships with U.S. made goods bound for overseas buyers. Now it is the opposite.

Employers and government leaders opine about the need to create more skilled workers with little follow-up; employers continue their ‘hands-off” approach and government leaders shy away from sound policies that stabilize manufacturing long enough for a student to complete a two or four year program and immediately experience deliberate, structured on-the-job training to start them off on the road to success wherever the path takes them.

While we wait for a sound national system of worker development, a well-designed, employer-based structured on-the-job training program can make up for the unavailability or inadequacies of community educational programs that are meant to help close the “skills gap.” Conversely, well designed educational and vocational programs cannot close the skills gap if employers have no structured on-the-job training programs in place to make the connection between “core skills” to “applying and mastering” the tasks the employer requires to be performed.

As is often said, “if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” If one insists on remaining as the latter, there is no need for complaining.

Check out Proactive Technologies’ structured on-the-job training system approach to see how it might work at your firm, your family of facilities or your region. Contact a Proactive Technologies representative today to schedule a GoToMeeting videoconference briefing to your computer. This can be followed up with an onsite presentation for you and your colleagues. A 13-minute promo briefing is available at the Proactive Technologies website and provides an overview to get you started and to help you explain it to your staff. As always, onsite presentations are available as well.