Costs Associated With Unstructured, Haphazard Worker Training (Part 1 of 2)

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

I have met with many employers, in most industries, since 1987 when providing technical workforce development services. Often, I am led to draw upon my own experiences when I worked in product configuration management, quality assurance, quality control and human resource development positions before starting my own company. After all, it was my frustration with the state of common practices in improving, measuring and managing performance that led me to start my own business. I hoped to help other employers address the issues that I was not allowed to in the positions I held due to interdepartmental friction or strict organizational boundaries associated with larger corporations.

I have many memories from that period, but there is one that continues to perplex me when I see it manifested at companies I visit. Sometimes I get the shivers and a foreboding sense of déjà vu.

Without exception, management expresses shear excitement when showcasing their latest technology and innovations. Equipment that will do what they previously have been doing but now faster, better and cheaper. New and better “best practices” and processes from continuous improvement efforts. Though impressed, I am reminded of the tradeoffs that must be considered in order to take advantage of the latest technology or process, or risk not realizing the improvement’s full potential.

The question is, “what truly takes less time and keeps costs down; throwing two people together and hoping for the best or a thoughtful, structured and deliberate task-based structured on-the-job training program for the ‘accelerated transfer of expertise^TM?’”

Prior to starting my own company, while working at one major aerospace manufacturer in the quality control department, a department meeting was called to inform us that within the week three $500,000 Zeiss coordinate measurement machines were going to be installed. Of course we were excited – this was truly state of the art at that time. The equipment was delivered, carefully installed and calibrated as advertised and each quality inspector couldn’t wait for their turn to learn how to use it.

The first bizarre occurrence came about two weeks in. It seems no one thought it important to train the janitorial staff on the proper cleaning of the areas around the machine. For instance, how each Zeiss table floated on a precisely controlled layer of air that needed to be maintained clear of dust and debris to prevent distortions to calibration. One night, the janitor’s vacuum cleaner bag came open, spraying the entire room with the contents and contaminating the environment we were trying to maintain. It took several weeks – including a disassembly, cleaning, reassembly and recalibration of each Zeiss – to get back to the starting point. Whatever costs were saved by not training the cleaning staff on controlled clean environments were greatly dwarfed by the costs to become merely operational again.

The second surreal experience occurred when the selection of quality inspectors for “training” on the Zeiss was made. I was excited to be one of the first. For me it was as thrilling as getting my first car, but the thrill dissipated quickly when the three of us were led into the room, assigned to our respective machines for training, given a “owner’s manual” roughly translated from German to English (I think) and wished “good luck.” Each of us held a moment of silence to assess what just happened and tried to think of a strategy to teach ourselves how to even turn on a delicate piece of equipment we had only heard of until then. None of us would ask the others for help since we were all new to the equipment and our pride wouldn’t allow it.

I remember my amazement at how each of us came up with a different learning strategy; one more viable than the other. One person used the “I don’t need no stinking manual” method and hit the ground running. I heard frequent machine groans and banging noises as he crashed the Zeiss head into the part over and over. Ruby probe tips broke off and flew across the room. It seemed like a risky approach, but he was the older, and recognized as the more experienced and wiser, one.

The second trainee in the initial group expressed sheer terror of the new Zeiss technology. He spent many days sitting in front of his machine with his manual open, appearing lost in the cryptic text which was not only full of new and strange words created for the new technology but also non or partially translated words for which there were no English equivalent yet. I often found him with comics or Playboys between the manual’s covers, probably much easier to understand and more rewarding at the time.

I, on the other hand, took the time to read the manual as best I could before I turned on the machine – reminding myself repeatedly how much each machine cost. My progress was clearly slower than my ambitious co-worker and my supervisor, who appeared to read my co-worker’s benchmark incorrectly, continued to remind me. Finally, I determined how to setup and operate the Zeiss, and became fairly proficient. Later I was asked to train the others in the department including training of the second trainee of the initial group, for whom stalling paid off.

The costs to the business associated with this one incident, representative of many I witnessed elsewhere, were enormous: the initial cost of the Zeiss equipment and installation (the amount repeated due to a clearly avoidable human error); the costs of three highly paid quality control inspectors teaching themselves how to run the equipment at a collectively slow rate – some damaging the equipment in the process; the inability of these three workers “while in training” to have any meaningful output whatsoever for as long as it took; and the subsequent underutilization of this advanced technology since the owner’s manual only covered the basics.

In this one experience, I witnessed so many unfortunate examples of lapses in sound management and/or lack of understanding of worker training which I draw on it to this day. It seems to be a recurring challenge and I routinely encounter similar experiences when I am asked by an employer to visit their site in the hope that I could provide a solution. To do that, the challenge has to be reduced to its key components in order to build solutions that last and to avoid merely treating symptoms.

Part 2 will appear in the next issue of Proactive Technologies Report and will breakdown the types of training/lack of training costs, how to calculate and minimize costs and how to raise worker capacity and return on worker investment.