The Worker Development Puzzle… For Many
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
After many years of setting up and providing technical support for employer-based structured on the job training programs, I can say with confidence that most, if not all, employers have significant weaknesses in their worker development process. If pressed, I believe most employers are aware of it, but have become comfortable with the mistaken notion that “it is what it is.,” Some are unaware and frustrated at the lack of results when hiring new workers to maintain or build capacity; accountants show signs of concern when hiring adds labor costs and often results in lower production output. Others in management may be concerned with unsustainable poor output quality or an increase in product or service scrap or rework.
Hiring more workers is not always the answer to the apparent lack of capacity to take on new product lines and new projects. Many employers overlook the fact that there is a tremendous amount of untapped capacity among the existing workers who have never had a chance to be fully trained for the jobs for which they were hired. The reason: most companies have remained in the unstructured, informal, undocumented one-on-one task-based training mode – even though the tasks are often transforming and the skills required for jobs have continued to increase in complexity.
Understanding the “chemistry“ of worker development is key to maximizing the return on worker skills and efficiencies. If an enterprise is struggling to increase output given the current staffing levels, adding new workers to compensate may often yield even less output. The simple reason being that a new person with no demonstrated skills or relevant capabilities is paired with a higher paid subject matter expert who is to transfer their expertise in an unstructured, ad hoc and undocumented manner. For however long this unstructured experience takes, one person who used to be very productive is now training a worker who has little or no productivity, doubling the loss of capacity rather than increasing capacity to increase productive output. As production output falls, the subject matter expert trainer may feel compelled to take up the production slack – putting more distance between them and the trainee. During the probationary period, the new-hire doesn’t know what they don’t know and what is not being trained, so they may feel the only solution is to lay low.
This experience can take 2 to 3 times longer than necessary and the new worker may be trained to only 20% of the required tasks that management and expects. For however long this takes to transfer a full job set of expertise, two people (not one) are drawing pay and underproducing.
The only way to get the subject matter expert back to work so they can continue to produce at the high level previously witnessed and add a fully functional and capable new employee to the aggregate capacity, is to structure the on-the-job training process. Structured on-the-job training (“SOJT”) is task-based, including all of the critical tasks that make up the job classification. If an operation has standard work instructions, these can be incorporated into the SOJT infrastructure, which helps with ISO/IATF/AS and NADCAP compliance. Read More
Lessen Gen Z Workplace Anxiety – Make Training Deliberate and Engaging
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
In an article in Business Insider entitled, “Gen Z is bringing a whole new vibe to the workplace: anxiety,” author Eve Upton-Clark tried to shed some light on a contemporary topic considered enigmatic by some and over-blown by others; Generation Z and its journey into the workplace.
Understanding generational shifts in behaviors and expectations are a never-ending role of employers and their management. Having a better insight can make the experience a little less challenging for everyone.
In her article she writes, “Anxiety is driven by uncertainty,” Ellen Hendriksen, a clinical psychologist and the author of “How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety,” said. Because they grew up in the digital age with nearly unlimited amounts of information at their fingertips, Hendriksen said, Gen Z has the least experience with uncertainty. “When you need to know where to go, you can pull up Google Maps,” she said. “If you are going to a new restaurant, you can look at the menu ahead of time. There’s a lot of certainty in this world now which didn’t exist before.”
She continues, “But at work, there’s often a lack of certainty — which gets exacerbated in a remote workplace where it is easy to avoid confrontation. “Anxiety is maintained by avoidance,” Henriksen said. “Our first reaction when we are anxious is often to avoid the thing that is making us scared, and so if we are anxious about speaking in a meeting, we might remain silent. If we are anxious about taking phone calls, we’ll let those calls go to voicemail.” Further, “Whether sensing when a presentation has gone on too long or understanding the subtext of what someone is saying, managing how you work is a fundamental skill.”
Whether a Gen Z or Baby Boomer, how we are trained once hired is a crap shoot. The ubiquitous “Bob, this is Julie. Why don’t you show her around” is institutionalized as what most employers call “on-the-job training.” 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. Currently an Independent Business Consultant
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.
These 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
Keeping Employers Engaged in Regional Workforce Development Projects
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Billions of dollars have been spent on workforce development projects funded by the state and federal governments in the last 20-30 years. However, from the tone of the discussions surrounding workforce development projects and participants today, it seems that the same things that were troubling employers in 1980 are still troubling them today.
Getting an employer to sign up for a grant-funded workforce development project should not be that difficult, if the brands and reputations of the institutions promoting the project are sound, and the project concept appears logical, achievable and will in all likelihood contribute to the employer’s business model. But once the pitch has been made to the employers and the bold outcomes projected, keeping the employers engaged for the duration of the project and beyond can be difficult.
One thing that I have found in setting up and maintaining long-term projects is making sure the person, or people, at the initial meeting are the right ones. “Worker development” seems to fall within the domain of the employer’s human resources department. But not all human resources managers are the same. Some are fresh from college and may not yet have experience with concepts such as meaningful on-the-job training, integration of worker training with ISO/IATF/AS and NADCAP compliance, etc. Some tend to be generalists and may enthusiastically agree with a project concept but are out-of-sync with their production and quality manager’s view of the world. While you may be able to get the human resources manager on-board, the human resources manager may not reflect the interest or concerns of the more influential production or operations management and staff.
Unfortunately, this may not be discovered until months into a project. If the operation’s management and staff were briefed on the project (sometimes they are not), out of deference to the human resources manager the other key stakeholders may not voice concerns or ask pertinent questions that may influence the nature of the project. This may later start to percolate up and bring the organization’s participation in the project to a halt. Read More
Read the full September, 2024 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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