Nine Scenarios That Would Make You Wish You Had a Structured OJT System

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

I think one can confidently say that most employer’s focus on training the workers they need – to perform the tasks they were meant to perform – has become detrimentally blurry, counterproductive and often non-existent. There are many reasons for that – some legitimate. But without a deliberate, measurable strategy for quickly driving each worker to mastery of the entire job classification, an employer’s labor costs (not just wages, but opportunity costs and undermined return on worker investment as well) can be substantial and act as a drag on an organization’s performance.

Many employers are still waiting for the educational institutions to solve the problem. After all, look at all of the money spent on education directed at “training the workers of tomorrow.” Yet a lot of the institutional strategies appear to include repackaged tools from the past…and not the ones far enough past that seemed to work. For example, the recent comments made by education insiders saying we should have kept the high school vocational programs that were relatively effective until the late 1970’s in place. These were phased out when the push to prepare students for college took priority. Now, there is a push for community colleges to “pump out” more apprentices which, if done only to meet numbers but not emphasizing quality of the general training, could be another waste of scarce resources of time, money and opportunity for the trainee, the employer and communities. Another decade lost.

Still, no matter how well or how poorly institutions prepare the workforce for employers, the employer cannot deny their responsibility to continue the training process and train the worker for the organization’s specific use. The degree to which they take this responsibility seriously will determine the success of the institution’s efforts to prepare workers, how much value the worker adds to the operation, and how well the operation performs in the market. Any apprenticeship that lacks an aggressive structured on-the-job training program cannot be the robust experience it is meant to be. By definition, an apprenticeship without structured on-the-job training really isn’t an apprenticeship.

But the success/failure doesn’t stop there. A successfully and fully trained (to the tasks required) staff prepares, and keeps, the organization prepared to seize opportunities, adjust to disrupters and weather unforeseen forces. Failure at preparing and maintaining each worker’s job mastery, as part of system, can exacerbate an organization’s challenges and, potentially, lead to failure or irrelevance of the organization.

Having a structured on-the-job training infrastructure in place not only allows the organization to adapt and evolve, if built correctly it can align the training of workers with the other systems of the organization and facilitate a higher level of compliance. Without it, there is nothing to ensure a worker’s mastery performance of a process to engineering, quality and safety specifications.

Increased work quality and quantity, compliance, worker adaptability, worker capacity and return on worker investment…while decreasing the internal costs of training, scrap, rework and operator error. It sounds like a robust solution to me.

Nine, of the many, scenarios should make any employer wish they had structured on-the-job training for each of their critical job classifications. Several are intertwined, which explains why the lack of structured on-the-job training hobbles an organization more than realized if training is viewed as an isolated process:

1. Opportunities to Expand Market – opportunities rarely announce themselves way in advance, and if an organization is incapable of scaling fast enough the opportunity might pass, or pass to a competitor. A staff trained to full capacity usually can quickly adapt, increase capacity and utilize unused capacity by accommodating additional task training for new products and services.

2. Sustained Normal – excessive turnover leads to excessive labor costs, disruption and depleted capacity as the task experts are preoccupied with training yet another replacement. If this training is unstructured, uncontrolled and not measurable, this can be a “turn-off” to a new-hire who chooses to leave for a job elsewhere. At a minimum, it becomes an inefficient use a subject matter expert’s time – adding to the costs. A structured on-the-job training program for the “accelerated transfer of expertise™” significantly addresses both engaging and quickly driving new-hires to full job mastery, and the efficient use of the designated task trainer’s time.

3. Overall Economic Expansion – as the economy expands and the technically skilled workers pool is depleted, the competition for labor drives the cost of labor up. That is how it supposed to work, anyway. If no structured on-the-job training is in place, this adds the other costs mentioned on top of a higher wage rate. Having a structured on-the job training program in place makes it possible to accept those new-hires with less industry experience (assuming the core skills are present) and who may not have normally been selected; a system of training workers to each task of the job makes sure anyone can become an expert.

4. Economic Contraction – typically when the economy contracts, the first reaction of any employer is to scale down an operation and ride out the downturn. Layoffs create a cascade of added challenges. Employees are moved from position to position – many with little or no experience in the new job to draw upon. The technically skilled workers, for which an organization has invested heavily, are let go along with the less experienced ones. Or the technically skilled workers, who saw this coming, lined up another job and left prior to the layoff…because they have skills that make them marketable. Regardless, the work that a worker once performed is divided among the remaining employees – often without the subject matter experts or structure necessary to transfer expertise quickly and fully. The organization’s capacity decreases and problems with work quantity and quality, service and compliance arise. When the economy rebounds, the organization struggles to recover quickly enough to regain their market position.

5. Market Shift – as in number 1, in today’s world not much notice is given when market changes occur. And if the organization is introducing a new product or service, designs or processes, having a structured on-the-job training program available will make the roll-out smoother and more effective. As is often the case, starting to address the training issue a year into the product or service is most likely too late to be effective – and new products and services have already moved in. Having training ready during a product or service test run ensures the best scenario roll-out and chance for maximum success.

6. Unplanned loss of knowledge and expertise and lack of succession planning – the decisions made during scenarios such as described in number 4 may haunt the organization for years. But there are other disruptions to a skilled staff, such as retirements, skilled employees leaving for better opportunities, wages, benefits, and skilled workers being rightfully promoted. If the technical expertise has not been captured and developed into tools used to transfer it effectively to replacements, the organization’s capacity and performance will be negatively affected. When the organization discovers there are more moderately skilled and non-developed workers on their payroll than technical experts, symptoms begin to manifest and the organization may find itself spending more time playing “wack-a-mole” than providing products or services. The sad thing is if a structured on-the-job training system isn’t in place to deliberately train workers, then there probably isn’t any metrics available to troubleshoot the organization. Consequently, proposed solutions may be more trial and error and less of getting to the bottom of the problem. Developing the workers for all critical jobs – hourly and salary – should be a priority of any organization’s succession plan.

7. Tight labor market – a tight labor market means high competition for a dwindling supply of technically skilled workers. But employers have got to stop relying on educational institutions to do all the training necessary to supply workers who can “hit the ground running.” One reason is that the job in question is probably a moving target; changing with every technological advancement, process redesign, product changeover, corporate makeover and LEAN redesign. The best an educational system can do – and all they should be expected to do – is develop a candidate with a strong foundation upon which the employer can continue to build with task-based training and full job mastery. Without a structured on-the job training system in place to ensure this, it is like buying an expensive piece of equipment that is supposed to increase output but not setting it up to run your parts. With a system in place, an employer can confidently choose less qualified applicants knowing they have the system in place to drive each worker to full job mastery and success.

8. A Supply Chain Disruption – the U.S. manufacturing supply chain has become incredibly decentralized since the change in trade negotiation strategies ushered in with the North American Free Trade Agreement (“NAFTA”),  implemented starting in 1994. The trade off of lower wage produced supplies and manageable shipping costs sustained this tenuous relationship between manufacturers and their suppliers for over 2 decades. Although manufacturers and their investors had to know that the odds of a significant disruptive event, such as war, famine, disease, economic collapse, and political unrest.  might erase profits and destroy companies if they ever surfaced, some companies saw planning for such disruption as costly and detracting from the current goal of maximized profits. The economic Crash of 2008 and the Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020 erased trillions of U.S. dollars from the world economy as the supply chain unraveled. Employers that had a structured on-the-job training infrastructure in place, weathered the effects better as component production and processes could be brought back “in-house” and workers quickly trained for the new and returning work.

9. A compliance investigation or audit – during any audit or incident investigation, such as an investigation into an OSHA incident, quality scrap, rework or rejection, or a routine internal audit or periodic audit for ISO/IATF/AS or similar quality model, focus on the worker(s) involved revolve around a few things: 1) are there clear processes in place; 2) was the worker trained to perform the process as designed; 3) is there a record that shows this; 4) if trained, was there an effort to update the worker if the process changed. A structured on-the-job training system such as the PROTECH© system of managed human resource development by Proactive Technologies, Inc. provides the tools to develop the worker, record mastery of the tasks, provide change and document control, and many other critical tools of an overall system of worker development and performance management. It makes the auditor’s job easy and lets the employer breath easier, as well.

There is no longer a credible reason for waiting or avoiding the subject. The tool is here, has been around since 1986, and has been proven over and over. Why not take a few minutes to review this approach to see if your organization is ready for it. You will know within the first 15 minutes of a presentation that this is the tool that you have been missing and wish you had. Visit the Proactive Technologies website, view a 13-minute preview and schedule a live online presentation – followed up with an onsite meeting and discussion. Contact a Proactive Technologies representative for more information.