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

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

According to a recent report by Career Builder.com, more than half of the employers surveyed could not find qualified candidates. 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.

This, in large part, can be attributed to the upheaval caused by the Great Crash of 2008 and the following disruption of several million careers. 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 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 sidelined workers 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.

However, most of these workers can be “reskilled” or “upskilled” for the current workforce and would be extremely grateful for the clear path to stability and personal growth. 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. 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 this 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 GoToMeeting 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.