Training The Skilled Labor You Need – An Investment That Keeps on Returning
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
In a 2016 Manufacturing Institute-Deloitte survey, 82% of manufacturers surveyed reported encountering a moderate or serious shortage of skilled workers to fill their positions. Over the next decade it is expected 3 ½ million manufacturing jobs will likely need to be filled. Skill gaps are expected to result in 2 million of these jobs remaining unfilled. More than 75% of manufacturers report that the skills shortage has hampered their ability to expand and 69% of manufacturers expect the shortage in skilled production workers to worsen.
In 2021, an IndustryWeek article entitled “The Skilled Labor Shortage Threatens Manufacturing’s Full Recovery, Says Study” stated “…a mix of U.S.-only manufacturers (65%) and multinational manufacturers with a strong U.S. presence (35%). found that finding talent with the right skills has been more difficult.”
IndustryWeek published an article by Glenn Marshall – formally with Newport News Shipbuilding – entitled “Closing the Nation’s Skills Gap,” Marshall discusses a program used during World War II to rapidly develop the skilled workers needed to quickly ramp up U.S. manufacturing to meet the needs of the war effort. Obviously there was a shortage of skilled workers; U.S. manufacturing had never been required to produce at such levels. In many cases workers were using new technology, so skilled workers could not possibly be available. The need was exacerbated by the fact that the world was in crisis.
The program implemented during WWII to remedy this was called TWI – Training Within Industry. Its basis was simple: workers had to be trained very quickly and the workers had to perform the tasks with consistent quality. The method included skills training, employee relations, continuous improvement as well, but at the center of the program was the expedited one-to-one transfer of knowledge from the trainer to the trainee. History will report that the effort was successful and the war effort received the manufacturing output it needed.
This early, but visionary, approach to training workers could easily be a precursor to Proactive Technologies’ concept of the “accelerated transfer of expertise® system”. For the past 30 years this approach has evolved into a structured on-the-job training approach, taking advantage of the latest technology and adapting to improvements in business modeling and quality control. But the concept still holds to this day. In every job classification, and every corner of a facility, one person is training another person to do something. It may be unstructured, haphazard, ad hoc, inconsistent and undocumented, but somehow it has worked. During competitive times this uncontrolled, but critical, process receives intense scrutiny and criticism as the cost of labor becomes a more important factor.
The most effective, efficient and economical training solution is taking this process that has demonstrated it works and formalize it; structure the unstructured and make it a deliberate process with measurable outcomes. It works, but employers are sometimes afraid to go back to solutions that have been staring them in the face for decades, possibly thinking they may be lacking the tools and expertise to approach it. Read More
Put Yourself in a Trainee’s Shoes
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
It is fun to watch a once popular TV show on CBS, now in syndication, called “Undercover Boss – reruns and all.” Watching a CEO or executive of a major corporation slip into disguise and enter the world of their workers is interesting and entertaining. Sometimes they find the organization needs a little “tweaking,” and sometimes it needs major rethinking.
The entertainment value, I suppose, comes from watching these individuals being tossed into a job classification – alien to most of them – and, while cameras are rolling, receiving a crash course in performing various job tasks. Some tasks are performed close to the customer. Not only do leaders get a rare look at what it is like at the lower rungs of the organization, in some cases they get a look at the sub-par performance most of their customers experience and how tenuous the corporation’s existence is – sustained only by the initiative a few loyal, but mostly self-interested, employees. These employees try to make up for the corporation’s shortcomings as if their job and future depend on it…which they do. If the company fails, they lose their job, plain and simple. Some put up with the company’s shortcomings in pursuit of the next opportunity.
It is interesting to see CEO’s marvel at how difficult it is to learn the job tasks they previously thought were inconsequential and not worthy of attention. Previously known only as a word on a report, the fact that how the tasks are performed by these neglected employees are the reason the corporation exists goes unnoticed and unappreciated. Some episodes look like popular television shows of the 50’s and 60’s, “I Love Lucy.”
A typical Undercover Boss episode might reveal: Read More
Explaining Your Process Training to Auditors, Prospects and Clients
by Proactive Technologies, Inc. Staff
How much time, energy and resources are expended by your firm when someone comes to visit and wants to “kick the company’s tires?” When it comes to training your workers to internal and/or company processes, a structured on-the-job training program that operates smoothly and completely in the background may have the answers your clients are looking for.
For most organizations, the general notion is that training is going on in every corner of the organization, for every worker at any time of the day or night. One person is showing another person how to perform a process, operate a piece of equipment or software, fill out a form or, yes, make a copy using the new copy machine just installed. How effective is that informal form of training? Have you ever walked by a copy machine and seen someone standing in front of it, staring at the control panel…then the sky, as if seeking divine intervention. Now, think of the more complex tasks!
When the resident expert masters a task and it becomes routine, there is a tendency for them to marginalize the task as so easy that the next trainee should learn it by osmosis. If not, maybe the new-hire “just doesn’t seem to want to learn.” Somehow, the organization may get by. In this case, like so many, it may sound like an insignificant example of training, but not to the person who needs the copy and who may be judged if a meeting is waiting for it.
Same, too, are the more critical and complex tasks of the job, requiring compliance with so many factors such as engineering specifications, quality control requirements, safety requirements and company policies. Without a deliberate task-based training infrastructure in place, training might be ad hoc, informal, unstructured and rarely documented. Add to this the periodic worker cross-training that allows workers to train in, and master, tasks in multiple job areas and the amount of critical, but undocumented, training can be tremendous. Read More
The Unintended Consequences of Cutting Workers as a First Choice
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Layoffs have often been employer’s “go to” solution during market gyrations. So much so that activist shareholders consider it a normal practice and implement it as a first choice, along with forcing out the most seasoned of management since they are usually the highest paid based on tenure.
Especially since the 1980’s, changes in the financial markets purpose – from sources of needed capital to direct micromanagement of portfolio firms – have turned an infrequent and considered benign practice into a common occurrence. Private equity groups and hedge funds, with just minority positions, rally to send in “change artists” that have a single-mindedness towards cost-cutting to show investors immediate results that make a share price grow. After all, the investment firm may only hold on to the acquisition for a short while until they have gotten all they can, so gutting a holding’s long-term capacity to look more efficient and profitable short-term appears to be just a means to an end. It can also be an effective way to get rid of a brand’s competition by buying them up and breaking them apart in the name of “prudent investment management.”
To the company, layoffs have an often underestimated but always predictable negative ripple effect. As with turnover, layoff cost effects permeate the organization on many levels for an indefinite period of time. The investment in recruitment, selection, training and retention of workers is out the window, leaving behind the opportunity costs of lost capacity and institutional memory to kick in. After an investment group moves on doesn’t mean the shell of a previously profitable company can rebuild itself and continue. Pushed back, perhaps decades, in their development and now bled of its operating capital while the market has moved on, the firm’s challenges to regain its footing can be daunting. There are numerous examples of legacy brands struggling to come back – shuttering stores and factories in a desperate act to save themselves after being forced to cut into the bone and losing their compass.
The ripple continues outside the company’s facility. The turmoil caused to the labor market by such practices is palpable. Workers are reluctant to pursue educational programs that take even a few years for fear those jobs being targeted won’t be there when they graduate but the debt will remain. Families are impacted when the breadwinners can’t keep up with living costs and unexpected expenses. Drive through cities and rural communities and see a growing decay as local discretionary income is diverted from local small business products and services to non-discretionary and necessary expenses often paid to multi-national corporations.
In an article entitled Cutting Too Much: When HR Needs to Pump the Brakes on Layoffs published in Human Resource Executive by Peter Cappelli of Wharton, the author challenges employers on the long-standing practices of “laying off first, determine impact later.” Cappelli cites an example “I suspect that few people know of Stellantis, the holding company that now owns brands like Fiat, Peugeot, Chrysler, Maserati and Alfa Romeo. Read More
Read the full February, 2025 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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