Can’t Find The Right Workers? Why Not Train Workers To Your Own To Specification?

Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

A recurring theme in the media is that employers “just can’t find the workers they need.” According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, nearly half of small and mid-size employers said they can find few or no “qualified applicants” for recent openings. And anecdotal evidence from manufacturing firms echoes the same challenge with specialty manufacturing jobs such as maintenance, NC machining and technical support positions.

Manufacturers say $32 billion was spent on “training” in 2025. Yet employees and employers remain unsatisfied with the results. “Employee turnover has cost US industries nearly $1 Trillion…And the most astounding part is that most of this damage is ‘self-inflicted.’ (American Machinist). Employers that average 20-30% turnover rate are unnecessarily running out of skilled candidates.

It’s no secret, many employers complain that they can’t find skilled labor but fail to try to properly train the ones they have or hire. Raced through on-boarding, a new-hire is dropped off at the area supervisor’s door. Introduced to anyone available, the informal OJT begins. No structure, no strategy, no documentation. Panic sets in as the 90-day review approaches with little to validate retention. This seems more like a disconnect between knowing what core-skills and knowledge a successful candidate needs and how to accommodate or remediate core-skill gaps,  and having a strategy to build on that foundation with structured, deliberate, documented on-the-job, task-based training before those core-skills and knowledge are lost to time.

This can be attributed, first, to the upheaval caused by the Great Crash of 2008 and the following disruption of several million careers including seasoned HR managers with the historical memory of how the cycle of worker development worker. Before being convinced to enroll in educational programs to develop new, marketable skills most had to wait 5-6 years for the Crash to bottom out, the remaining companies to dust themselves off a pattern of hiring started to emerge. Nothing is more frustrating to a worker who was previously considered “highly skilled” to follow the “experts” advice and “reinvent themselves” through a 2-4 year program only to find those jobs were moved overseas, too. 

The evidence of a persistent disconnect couldn’t be clearer:

• “Only one in four workers say their employer allowed them to grow. Meanwhile, a whopping 77% of employees say they feel like they are “on their own” in terms of career development in their company.” (Business Insider)

• “42% of employees who are looking to find a new job say they feel their company is not maximizing their skills and abilities.” (Deloitte)

• “94% of workers say they would be more likely to stay at a company if it invested in their career.” (LinkedIn)

The wave of outsourcing jobs, which started in the 1970’s but continued to pick up steam and is just now being recognized as a major economic policy mistake of the “Neoliberals” and “The Third Way” disciples. The NET result has been highly qualified and experienced workers who were sidelined saw the erosion of their skill bases while waiting years for an economic recovery that, for many, has not reached them yet. This turned out not to be the celebrated “creative destruction,” as much as it was plain old disruptive destruction. The Covod-19 pandemic of 2019-23 sent a lot of workers home to ride out the outbreak. Some found their employers couldn’t survive the economic destruction and had to close. 

Employers were finally finding their footing when private equity and hedge funds began aggressively buying up nearly 75% of the manufacturers and other businesses, gutting their assets and cutting costs (i.e. mostly labor, including higher paid management including CEOS, Accounting Managers, Human Resource Managers). Experienced HR Managers who, again, learned the importance of task-based on-the-job training to develop and retain workers was replaced by lower-paid HR Generalists whose expertise was typically limited to recruiting, benefits and firing. Educational institutions, taking their queue from private equity’s direction, cut “on-the-job training” from the curriculum for HR Generalists and HR Manager programs, and slashed Training and Development programs altogether since they seemed now unmarketable skills.

Currently big money has been chasing tech projects such as Artificial Intelligence with Quantum Computing on deck – focusing on the technology for technology’s sake – and pushing tech solutions where they are not needed and sometimes not wanted and then disrupting themselves and expanding the chaos.

So the importance of deliberate, structured on-the-job training to maximizing worker capacity, compliance and safety was lost to the subsequent generations of HR Generalists. Since HR Generalists and fresh executive management were more familiar with the classroom style learning they experienced all their educational path, it became the solution for everything. But “learning” is so different than “training”  that its institutionalized misunderstanding has created a growing gap that employers will never close unless they clarify their goal and expectation in recruiting, hiring, developing and retaining each worker as an asset to be maximized.

• Education can, and should, only ensure graduates have a solid core and Industry-general skill base. Each employer has to train workers on its own machinery, processes, products and polices.

• Even graduates of traditional trade training programs need employer-specific training on job-specific tasks before they forget anything relevant they learned.

• Onboarding and 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%;”

• Informal OJT is better than nothing, but resident experts as trainers “are so automated and unconscious about what they do that they don’t always remember to tell you. even if they want to“- omitting 70% of what’s necessary;

• Workers too often receive informal training on only 30% of the tasks for the today’s complete job!

At best, 30% of the learning, 30% of the training for 30% of the tasks – no worker can be driven to excellence if not deliberately, properly and completely trained first!

To those hoping AI will close the “training gap,” not so fast. If your “standardized processes” are more in the heads of your resident experts or on notes in lockers, how and what will AI learn? Those who rushed to be first have found that not all hype is worth the noise…especially when experiencing the significant costs, illusive ROI and risks – including “dumbing down” the workers cognitive base. Concerns have emerged over the damage of ‘slopification’ in AI hiring and whether AI hiring efficiency is worth the legal risk. Then there are the continuous improvement changes from engineering, quality and EHS. It is difficult and costly for AI to “unlearn” for constantly revised processes and specifications. And don’t forget the expense of running AI and the risk to intellectual and proprietary property, and patents.

But irrefutable proof shows most workers can be “reskilled” or “upskilled” for the current workforce and would be extremely grateful for the clear path to personal stability and personal growth through a traditional relationship with the employer. New-hires would greatly appreciate a deliberate attempt to train them for what the employer wants and expects. The solution lies not in waiting for the labor market to magically produce the needed qualified candidates, because a clear definition of which jobs needing which skills entry-level will be around long enough to commit oneself to. But rather in each company investing a little to build their own internal system of structured on-the job training. With such an infrastructure, any candidate with strong core skills can be trained quickly and accurately to any employer’s specifications. Furthermore, a strong training infrastructure has factored into it methods of acceptable basic core skill remediation when the benefit outweighs the cost.

No matter how you examine it, an employer is responsible for training workers to perform the essential and unique tasks of the job for which they were hired. The employer has the need, the equipment, the processes It is not economically feasible or practical for education systems to focus this sharply. Waiting for them to do so or allowing it to happen by osmosis is risky and costly for the employer, since every hour that passes is one more hour of wage for unproductive output. Add to that the hourly wage rate of the informal on-the-job training mentor/trainer efforts multiplied by the number of trainees and this becomes a substantial cost that should attract any manager’s attention.

An investment in a formal, deliberate structured on-the-job training system will cut internal costs of training substantially, raise each person’s worker capacity to where it is expected to be, improve output quality and quantity, and raise worker compliance – to processes, to quality standards and safety mandates. It simply makes business sense.

If you would like to know how the accelerated transfer of expertise system™ approach might work at your firm, and how a pilot project may be the best way to introduce this approach to your organization, contact a Proactive Technologies representative today to schedule a videoconference briefing to your computer. This can followed up with an onsite presentation for you and your colleagues. More information is available at the Proactive Technologies website and provides an overview to get you started and to help you explain it to your staff.