“Full Job Mastery” Means “Maximum Worker Capacity” – A Verifiable Model for Measuring and Improving Worker
Value While Transferring Valuable Expertise
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.®
It is no secret that with the traditional model of worker development, the burden of the job/task-specific skill development falls on the employer. It is not economically feasible nor practical for educational institutions to focus content on every job area for every employer, purchase the equipment and find currently relevant instructors. So they, instead, focus rightly on core skills and competencies – relying on the employer to deliver the rest. This is where the best efforts of local educational institutions and training providers begin to break down even if highly relevant to the industry sector.
Employers rely heavily on onboarding “learning” in lieu of focused, deliberate “training.” Onboarding and pre/post-hire classes convey knowledge, but employees “forget up to 70% of newly learned information within 24 hours if it is not applied; After one week, retention can drop below 10%;”
Employers rarely have an internal structure for task-based training of their workers. Even the most aggressive related technical instruction efforts erode against technological advances as every month passes. If core skills and competencies mastered prior to work are not transformed quickly into mastered tasks the worker is expected to perform, the foundation for learning task performance may crumble through loss of memory, loss of relevance or loss of opportunity to apply them.
click here to expandNew workers routinely encounter a non-structured, rarely focused, on-the-job training experience. It is better than nothing, but in some cases not by much. Typically, the employer’s subject-matter-expert (SME) is asked to “show the new employee around.” While highly regarded by management, the SME (not trained as a task trainer and having no prepared materials) has difficulty remembering the nuances of the tasks when explaining the process to the new employee by up to 70% by some estimates, since that level of detail was buried in memory long ago. Each SME, on each shift, might have a different version of the “best practice” for processes, confusing the trainee even more – rendering the notion of “standardization” to “buzzword” status.
The more time the SME spends with the new employee in this unstructured, uncontrolled and undocumented experience, which is the prevailing method of on-the-job training, the more the employer is paying two people to be non or minimally-productive – turning an “investment” to maximize into a “cost.” Adding employees given the lack of infrastructure to train can actually lower short-term productivity and add little to long-term productivity for an organization, but the costs will attract notice internally and may lead management to falsely believe the problem is cost related.
Initially, new employees have difficulty assembling, understanding and translating the disjointed bits of recollection into a coherent process to be replicated on their own. But they try, if that is all that is left, because they want the job. Each comes with their own set and levels of core skills and competencies, and learning styles vary from the self-learner/starter to the slow-learner worker who, with structure to make sure they learn the right best practice, may become loyal, high-quality workers. Read More
Reacting to the Proposed Reversal of Regulations Affecting Human Resources and Safety Can Be Tricky
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.®
Political winds frequently change direction, sometimes leading to calls to create or unwind existing labor and safety regulations. Currently, major moves to replace agency leadership and disrupt agency staffing to weaken agency mandates and enforcement capability may be a welcome development to some employers who earlier resisted, or were complacent in, compliance. But as history has shown us, many of the changes might be reversed in the span of an election or two. Enacting and implementing changes to company policies, and disseminating changes to the troops, in response takes more thoughtfulness and planning. Regulations and laws that have evolved over time as the result of events that set them in motion usually have some fundamental rationale that everyone can agree with, or they would have been badly battered during public hearings and public review. The disagreement usually revolves around scope, impact of the law on the non-offenders, and ideological divides.
Congressional changes to labor laws or presidential executive orders usually do not take effect overnight. It may take years for a bill to clear the House and Senate for the president’s signature and/or for the affected agency to make the transition. Changes to laws and enforcement criteria made through Executive Order adds to that process, since the rules, and the authority to make rules, came originally through Congressional action. They have a say in the subsequent rule and guidance’s change or survival. There will be many impacted groups waiting to litigate the change and the court process can take years with appeals to higher courts. If shot down in whole or in part, then it will be remanded to the lower court to find a legal solution, before potentially starting another series of legislative activities. Regardless, there is a lengthy period of steps and reviews that could delay the action for some time with an uncertain outcome.
click here to expandWhile all this is going on, political tides that brought in the change may begin to turn back. Often one political party or the other overreaches, or misreads their constituents and acts against their voter’s interests. The make-up of Congress and or the presidency in the next election may push the pendulum back.
In an article in CFO.com entitled “The Double-edged Sword of Deregulation” author Dan Niepow discusses the risks associated with normally welcomed deregulation regarding financial rules that may create unforeseen or unwanted new challenges, while the change originated from a request from a few organizations. He cites CDF partner’s Tashayla Billington and Mark Spring, “…we expect that the Trump v. Slaughter case is likely to result in continued and even greater ping-pong interpretations on many important issues,”, “Employers have long experienced significant swings in labor policy between administrations. Those swings are now likely to occur faster—and become even more pronounced.” A “swing” connotes a reversal of momentum at some point and return nearer to the previous position. Read More
Employers: Maximize Worker Development by Better Utilizing Local Resources
by Frank Gibson, CEO and Interim Chairman of the Board of the North-Central Ohio Employer-Based Worker Training Partnership, Workforce Development Advisor, retired from The Ohio State University – Alber Enterprise Center
Every year millions upon millions of state-provided worker development aid is either not utilized or not utilized efficiently and effectively. It represents a frustrating, protracted stalemate between employers who are not sure what skills they need in incoming employees and what to do to maximize an employee’s core skills once employed. Then there are the educational institutions that lack the current, accurate and stable workforce data to design better products and services for employers (i.e. which skills to target that won’t be obsolete in 6-months as the next Wall Street hype emerges).
The current state of workforce development is frustrating from everyone’s standpoint; employers who seem to go through workers like they are changing clothes; employees and potential employees who have given up turning to education for help in developing skills for a long-term career opportunity that pays for their education and can sustain a family, and who skip from job-to-job to find the best opportunity/compensation mix; and workforce development agencies that have the funding resources to support credible projects but are disappointed when employers bail in the middle of a project that seems to be working.
click here to expandShort-term thinking has progressively eroded the effectiveness of worker development models around the country. Fundamental to any good worker development project is an accurate target upon which to build an accurate and effective worker development model. Someone has to take the lead to organize the uncertainty into clarity, so whatever is done feeds a purpose in a deliberate strategy. Drifting for decades is as toxic to a trainee’s or worker’s optimism and mental health, as it is an employer’s sustained success.
It all starts with the employer. However, many companies have allowed private equity firms into their lives and are finding that, in many cases, the PE firm’s interests tend to be short-term and focused only to cut costs to improve balance sheets for sale or justify share price increases by manipulating “earnings per share.” Someone in upper management has to advocate to the PE firm for preserving the incredible wealth of intellectual capital (“tribal knowledge and wisdom”) for which the investment has been made and which will be sorely needed after the PE investors have flipped the company and sold off the assets it could. Often during the “turn around” phase the core company forgets their original purpose and previous reason for success.
Short-term thinking has progressively eroded the effectiveness of worker development models around the country. Fundamental to any good worker development project is an accurate target upon which to build an accurate and effective worker development model. Someone has to take the lead to organize the uncertainty into clarity, so whatever is done feeds a purpose in a deliberate strategy. Drifting for decades is as toxic to a trainee’s or worker’s optimism and mental health, as it is an employer’s sustained success.
It all starts with the employer. However, many companies have allowed private equity firms into their lives and are finding that, in many cases, the PE firm’s interests is short-term and focused only to cut costs to improve balance sheets for sale or justify share price increases by manipulating “earnings per share.” Someone in upper management has to advocate to the PE firm for preserving the incredible wealth of intellectual capital (“tribal knowledge and wisdom”) for which the investment has been made and which will be sorely needed after the PE investors have flipped the company and sold off the assets it could. Often during the “turn around” phase the core company forgets their original purpose and previous reason of success.
To get the most out of available worker resources, the employer needs to: Read More
Maintaining Organizational Capacity in a Roller Coaster Economy
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.®
Often an afterthought, the need for structured on-the-job training is just as critical during a time of contraction as during a time of expansion. During cutbacks in staffing, work is redistributed to remaining employees as workers with expertise are inadvertently let go. Sometimes more attention is paid to worker seniority and wage levels than the potential loss of the accumulated investment in worker expertise and related replacement costs as a result of hasty workforce reductions.
Unfortunately, selling the need for an investment in a training infrastructure can be a harder sell to management who might be reluctant to make the case for fear of being perceived as being too “spend-happy” rather than seen as appropriately proactive. However, if no consideration is given to such planning that fact will subsequently reveal itself later in the form of transition costs – lost capacity and decreased operational productivity.
“How an organization prepares for change determines if they will survive it or succumb to it.”
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It can be said that if the organization was running efficiently before a cutback, worker expertise must have helped since the numbers now show that output and yield have been reduced. If the organization was not running efficiently before the cutback, and cutting workers has little effect on output and yield, perhaps the reason was there was a lack of expertise in running operations. Either way, developing expertise and preserving it through adversity should be seen as worthy goals by any organization.
Many years ago, CEOs became concerned with “succession planning,” which was limited to only key managerial positions. As organizations made themselves leaner, the number of positions that should be considered for succession planning multiplied but often went unnoticed until a disruption in operations occurred – quickly exposing vulnerabilities and loss of organizational capacity. Read More
Read the full September, 2026 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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