“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.

New 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.

While 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.

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 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.”

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.

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

by 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. Read More

Supposedly Fewer Jobs Require Degrees. Now Employers Can’t Agree on Entry-Level Skills They Need. What’s Their Plan to Make Up Difference?

by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

In an article in HR Dive by Carolyn Crist entitled, “Fewer Job Posts Require Degrees, Though Hiring Hasn’t Caught Up,” the author explained what appears to be a growing shift in hiring practices by employers. Or maybe not.

She explains, “While the intention to hire people without degrees is seemingly growing, hiring practices remain influenced by traditional requirements… Talent acquisition pros appear to be changing their habits, but hiring has not yet caught up to the push to end degree requirements, LinkedIn data says.” Furthermore, few companies feel effective at skill validation. Unfortunately, educational institutions aren’t all that helpful, with their single-minded approach to skill validation that seems more about validating the products they have and want to market – even though often out-of-date and too general to assess job-specific skill needs.

Starting a Business Now Is Difficult at Best. Navigating the Business Through Factors Inflicted By Others Is Terrifying!

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

Entrepreneurism still holds a dream-like status for nearly everyone at one time or another. When we are young with fewer commitments and responsibilities, we are tempted to take the leap. A few do and land at the right moment with the right venture, resources, strategy and financial system balance. Many do and find they were ill-prepared for the wicked ride it can become. Some excellent ideas brought forward by brilliant people time the economic booms and crashes wrong, encounter hidden but insurmountable barriers and the inconvenient discovery that what college textbooks preached about business financing and investors just waiting for their business plan were never there to begin with. Their desperate moves to navigate this “quicksand” leave many swallowed up and never heard from again.

The barriers to a small business’ operation and growth are increasing proportionally to deregulation and misguided economic policy, and outlined pretty well in another Proactive Technologies Report article “If They Haven’t Already, Local and State Econ Development Should Diversify Focus to Emphasize SMBs and Entrepreneurs.” Take, for example, the simple notion of an established small business financing itself to weather economic turmoil created by others. Legislation that started the movement of bigger and bigger banks to buy up local banks and move money from community banks to coasts(Silicon Valley and Wall Street) began in the early 1990’s. It has continued to the point of worsened prospects and dampened spirits for entrepreneurs and small businesses who always start local.

What Makes Proactive Technologies’ Accelerated Transfer of Expertise System™ So Effective

by Proactive Technologies, Inc.^® Staff

There are a lot of buzzwords thrown around these days. “Skills Gap,” Education-Based Apprenticeships, Industry-Recognized Certifications, “STEM and STEAM” – many confusing to those in management whose primary function is to ensure products and services are delivered in the most cost-effective and profitable way. It can be especially confusing to those who are specialists in business operations but unfamiliar with effective worker development strategies.

For anyone unfamiliar with Proactive Technologies’ PROTECH^©® system of managed human resource development™ and the accelerated transfer of expertise system™, it might help to clarify what makes this approach to worker development and continuous worker improvement so effective. This unique approach, in practice since 1986 and always improving, was designed by someone who endured the pressures of maintaining the highest quality staff in a world of constant change and pressures to do more with less.

We start by collecting client data about each of their targeted job classifications; data that is all around anyway (e.g. people’s heads, operator’s notes, engineering processes, quality standards, EHS specifications). Usually we find that this information isn’t readily available or discoverable by new hires and incumbents. This makes learning and mastering the tasks — unpredictable, ineffective, open to interpretation and conflicts (including legal), costly and not conducive of standardization of high performance. And the continual revision of all of these bits of information adds to the challenge and makes process improvement and implementation efforts difficult, at best. Read More

Read the full August, 2026 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Training Workers for a Moving Target

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

In an article in HR Dive entitled “How employers could improve job outcomes for young adults: Certain degree programs and on-the-job training could open access to high-demand jobs,” Anthony Carnevale, the lead author of a recent report and director of Center on Education and the Workforce, said in a statement, “Pathways to good jobs are especially strengthened through comprehensive policy efforts that layer effective interventions on top of one another.”

“Some of these pathway changes involve increasing educational attainment, especially progressing toward attainment of a bachelor’s degree. Others replace or combine classroom learning with on-the-job learning, capitalizing on the growth that occurs when workers gain access to jobs in high-demand fields that equip them with both general and sector-specific skills, competencies, and domain knowledge”

It must be understood that the recent report, and other reports over the last decades attempting to provide guidance for better labor force development, explores solutions from the educator and policymaker’s perspective; using the traditional tools and approaches to education to prepare workers who can enter the labor pool with more to offer employers.

When education talks about “on-the-job training,” they are more likely referring to “on-the-job learning,” which is just a change of venue for traditional class or online learning. While important and necessary for preparing future and returning workers for the labor pool, too little time and discovery is spent on the employer’s role in developing the workers they themselves need to perform unique tasks, on their unique equipment for their unique processes. When a trainee’s core and industry-sector skills (industry-specific) are enhanced with task-based structured on-the-job training – by an employer’s subject matter expert delivered one-on-one in a deliberate transfer of expertise – the workers learning efforts prior to employment or concurrent with employment are preserved through direct application, before they erode from non-use.

Realistic Job Previews Can Be a Useful Tool for Measuring a Prospective Employee’s Transferable, Task-based Skills

by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

Artificial Intelligence is changing the way candidates are evaluated for hiring. More and more candidates are using AI to generate a polished resume – often inflated and/or not truthful – and employers are using AI to evaluate those resumes – with “canned or developing” knowledge and evolving biases. According to an article by Jill Barth of HR Executive, “Organizations that rely on resumes as their primary hiring decision driver are 35% more likely to report a bad hire, according to the report. Meanwhile, around 64% of employers say they have already hired someone whose performance did not match what was on their resume, with 39% saying it has happened more than once.” Concerns have emerged over the damage of ‘slopification’ in AI hiring and whether AI hiring  efficiency is worth the legal risk?

The hiring process can be difficult for both the employer and the prospective employee. A wrong decision can cost each party a lot of time, money and opportunity. It seems reasonable to believe that some of the “hasty turnover” experienced by employers – new-hires quitting in the first few days of employment – may be due to the shock of discovering the real nature, culture, requirements and environment of the job. An unwanted outcome based on the employer not providing an accurate picture of the job, work environment and work expected to be performed can be avoided with a “Realistic Job Preview.” (“RJP”).

If They Haven’t Already, Local and State Econ Development Should Diversify Focus to Emphasize SMBs and Entrepreneurs

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

Everyone seems to be scrambling to be part of the Artificial Intelligence marketing pandemonium. Trillions of dollars are being invested worldwide to solidify AI’s place in the center of all activity. Whether it will succeed in securing that place, or significantly near that level, is heavily debated. Nevertheless, the continuing concentration of bank and investment capital away from community banking not only places all eggs in fewer baskets, it makes it harder for Small and Medium-Sized Business (SMBs) and entrepreneurs to get a chance to reach their full potential and to provide local jobs that will sustain the local economy should the AI bubble burst.

Cities and states are beginning to experience revolts to AI data centers popping up in backyards with very little notice to residents affected, regulation or buy-in – underestimating or ignoring concerns for their enormous thirst for water and energy, their potential for air, water and noise pollution, or what that means for the community if the AI bubble pops and the building and property are abandoned.

When is Illustrating Technical Materials Useful to the Trainee?

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

Technical process documents standardize work processes in an attempt to maintain task performance at a consistent level of output. From organization to organization, process documents may vary in usefulness though required by ISO/AS/IATF and Nadcap certification. Some may be too vague, too specific or too cluttered into lengthy paragraphs designed for human error. Nevertheless, the intended purpose is to offer guidance as to the “best practice” way of performing work. Whether illustrating technical documents is useful in achieving that goal is dependent on a few factors.

Technical processes, illustrated or not, are most useful to a worker when learning a task for the first time. Unless in a checklist format where step-by-step initials are required to document that no steps are missed, most process documents are reduced to a “reference status” Even though management and auditors want to believe process documents are followed intently each time, that is usually a “staged” behavior. In reality, once committed to a worker’s memory many documents are not seen by the user until the audit is scheduled. Unfortunate but true.

Read the full July, 2026 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Economic Development Opportunities – An Important Incentive in Attracting Companies to Your Region

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

When organizations try to create new jobs in their area – working with companies that are considering moving to, expanding to or expanding within their areas – skilled labor availability for many regional economic development strategies may include an offering that consists of one part skills assessment, one part general skill classes and a sprinkling of worker tax credits or grants. That seems to be what most incentive packages include, but is that because: A) that is what the other offers look like; b) it has been like that for decades; C) it is assumed that is all that is available; or D) all of the above?

For over forty years headlines sounded the alarm that those institutions that were training the “workforce of tomorrow” were not succeeding in their effort as discussed in, “An Anniversary That You Won’t Want to Celebrate: Years Later and The Skill Gap Grows – Is it Finally Time to Rethink The Nation’s Approach?“). Many skilled workers that are available to work do not have the skills that employers need today. Not completely satisfied with their answers to the inevitable labor force availability and suitability questions and how workers with specific skill requirements will be found or developed, some economic development organizations are exploring other options and opportunities.

“Whether attracting new companies and helping them thrive and expand, or helping existing business to do the same, this approach is an important component of any economic development strategy.”

Many AI and Automation HR “Solutions” Face Growing Legal Challenges

by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

If a worker, who has proven themselves competent for a job, is fired and replaced by another employee without just cause and due process, that most likely can be challenged by regulatory agencies and end up in the U.S. courts. But what happens if that same person is fired and replaced by automation or even a robot? Do the same principles apply?

In China, a tech worker was laid-off and replaced by AI. The case landed in court and the lower court ruled in favor of the worker. The case was taken to the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court, which “upheld an earlier decision by a lower-level court that the tech worker’s dismissal was unlawful.”

Explained the article. “The decision is being hailed by legal scholars as a reassuring signal for labor rights protection at a time when the central Chinese leadership is pushing for industries to widely adopt AI technology.” “At the heart of the case is whether a company can use AI replacement as a pretext for laying off human workers.”

Challenge Employees with Self-Improvement Opportunities to Head-off Burnout

by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations, Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

Let’s face it. Routine work can be boring. Doing the same work for extended periods can affect an employee’s attitude toward their job, employer and life. There are things employers can do to alleviate the tedium of work they need performed, keeping the incumbent employee interested and engaged and the new-hire curious and open-minded.

Workers of all ages are showing frightening levels of decline in engagement with their work. According to a recent Gallup survey, “The New Challenge of Engaging Younger Workers:”

Maximizing Worker Capacity Maximizes Shareholder Value…If Done Right

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

To many, “maximizing shareholder value” has become synonymous with layoffs and short-term cuts that will typically have harmful effects on long-term operational capacity. An often overlooked, but more productive, goal is “maximizing worker capacity” and should be a priority for every organization – publicly traded or not. Leaders of an organization are quick to say, “our workers are our greatest asset.” Yet, efforts to maximize returns on this asset are often hard to recognize or understand.

Maximizing a worker’s capacity maximizes worker value. Collectively, maximizing each worker’s capacity maximizes an organization’s value, and that of the shareholders. It is as simple as that.

Publicly traded companies and privately held companies – some getting ready to go public – seem preoccupied with increasing quarterly earnings per share above all else. A consistently high level of earnings per share over the long-run no longer seems adequate for some. If the market is slack, an organization might carve costs out of the company from even a lean operation rather than disappoint investors. When labor is viewed as a “cost” rather than an asset, the temptation might be to cut benefits and wages. This may prop-up numbers for the short-term, but a demoralized workforce might not produce the same levels of output and quality yield as before. Sadly, a decision might be made in following quarters to cut benefits and wages even more, followed by workers if needed to make the magic number. All the while, worker and operational capacity, along with enthusiasm and loyalty, are eroding.

Read the full June, 2026 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Balancing the Need to Raise Wages with the Need to be Competitive

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

Increase Worker Capacity, Value and ROI While Lowering Training Costs

It is said employers are having a hard time finding workers. It may be due to some workers having time to think during the disruptions of the past few years and may be looking for jobs that are better aligned with their career goals. Some may be staying put for now through the current chaotic state of economic and geopolitical affairs, made confusing by the premature, incomplete and contradictory news reports and questionable government statistics. Some may prefer not to leave, navigating the difficulties and costs of child care. Although they are with you now doesn’t mean they won’t leave at the first better opportunity.

After COVID-19 years, it appeared employers accepted that, for the short term at least and quite possibly the long-term, they would need to reconsider their compensation structures if they were to attract the caliber of worker they need. Some felt that discussion was long overdue. Of course, raising wages and benefits adds to the cost of labor associated with production or services. If ever the shortage of local suppliers raises the producer’s costs to accelerate the reshoring of jobs to America, the competition for the best workers could get fierce. If the loss of jobs due to the Artificial Intelligence wave displaces so many workers that the workforce pool is replenished, think again. Many of the separated white-collar workers that may be displacing highly skilled, but specialized, workers will need enormous reskilling, process-based training. They will need a wage that will be obviously far less than they made previously or a seasoned, experienced worker in their new position makes, but one that will make them take your job while not continuing the search to a better paying one.

“There is a way to mitigate the inevitable rising labor costs with higher worker capacity, increasing value, and higher worker ROI.”

Training Issue or Attitude Issue? Understanding the Difference

by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

If you spend some time in the Human Resources Department office, you often witness a supervisor or manager trying to explain why the new-hire isn’t working out. “Why do you believe that?” asks the HR Manager. The supervisor thinks a moment and says, “He just doesn’t act like he wants to learn. He seems to have a bad attitude.” The HR Manager doesn’t bother to ask for any empirical evidence since it usually doesn’t exist, so the decision is made to terminate the new-hire and start all over…again.

Some, more forward thinking, human resources departments concluded that assessing job prospects might reduce the amount of hiring turnover. It certainly does help do that if the job classification was properly analyzed and the assessment instruments were aligned to the data for current “job relevance.” However, even with the best screening potentially good employees might be lost. Knowing how to recognize the difference between attitude and training-related issues may save good employees from being lost due to misdiagnosis and cut the employer’s costs of turnover.

Whether a challenge to learning or performance is attitudinal is not easy to determine. Attitudes fluctuate from day to day, throughout the day. They can be affected by personal issues such as health of the individual, health of a family member, financial issues, relationship difficulties at home and the work culture (e.g. relationship with coworkers, supervisor and company management). Rather than hastily concluding any issue of worker development is attitudinal, I find it easier to eliminate the obvious and more common influence on worker learning and development; whether proper training has been conducted. After all, employee insecurity caused by feeling expendable while a 90-day probationary period clock is ticking can, in itself, affect anyone’s attitude and personality. If proper training is not available or worker development is conducted in an unstructured, haphazard and inconsistent manner, this is a major contributor to worker attitudes toward the company, themselves and others in the workplace.

We Need More Meaningful Youth Internships

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

Internships have been around for quite some time. The number of internships – mostly college-based – has hovered around 4.3–4.5 million per year. An estimated 31% of interns complete multiple internships before entering full-time work. A number of federal programs such as the USDA Internships and Career Opportunities website and state and local initiatives are there to assist employers to get started and potential interns to find internship hosts. A common complaint of college-based internships with an industry partner is that they usually offer an underwhelming mix of mundane, gofer activities and are more prone to logging hours until the internship is completed. We all hear it – critiques in terms of those who have completed a program and from inexperienced and unsupported employers who try to administer one.

High school internships have been slower to start. But in recent days high school graduates having been increasingly opting for more local employer-based training opportunities and 2-year apprenticeship courses with local community and technical colleges, where they can possibly start making money while gaining currently relevant and marketable industry skills, avoiding a large college debt. They recognize from peer-to-peer anecdotal updates, that a high-cost 4-year degree has become more risky, with no way to know if their chosen career path will result in the career, or if the career opportunity will still exist after graduation.

For employers of any size, providing youth internship opportunities are a great way to build a pipeline of potential employees while helping young people to explore careers, learn about the work environment and culture, and make an informed choice about their employment future.

Embracing AI Technology for Technology’s Sake

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

It is hard to be a competitive swimmer if swimming in mud. While economy is in a state of uncertainty, is “competitiveness” the real motive driving AI, with all its unknowns, into everyone’s life for every situation?

This time, the rush is on to be seen using Artificial Intelligence (or even just talking about using it)… even if they don’t know why and for what purpose. Consumers are struggling, so are small, mid and large-size businesses. Private employer workers, federal workers and institutions are toiling in a manmade world of chaos and uncertainty. It hardly seems like a time to aggressively push AI – with its known and unknown risks – onto it.

To many, AI seems to be a solution looking for problems, similar to Microsoft’s push to Windows 11 – enhanced for gamers and video viewers as if everyone is using their PC for that. That might be a reason why Microsoft had to extend its security updates of Windows 10 to those not seeing a good reason for the switch, that and the fact that there is a good chance software applications and peripherals might have to be upgraded to accommodate Windows 11 like with previous upgrades – a costly experience for any size business.

A growing number of business leaders are advocating for a return to a long-term US industrial policy to guide all of these new technologies into a coherent long-term plan for the broadest impact on US economic sanity, stability and sustained vitality, not to mention for a stable and thriving global market to which to sell US products and services. To move away from an economy driven in self-serving directions by one or a few incredibly wealthy individuals.

The well-funded marketing push by Big Tech and investors to force AI into every corner of life, business and society, seems to add fuel on an already growing fire. In 2024, investors put $1.6 trillion dollars into AI. The Manhattan Project during WWII to develop the first nuclear weapon only spent $30 billion in today’s dollars! “The US’s largest companies have spent 2025 locked in a competition to spend more money than one another, lavishing $155bn on the development of artificial intelligence, more than the US government has spent on education, training, employment and social services in the 2025 fiscal year so far [August, 2025].” It is estimated that Big Tech will spend $725 billion in 2026. With that kind of money behind it, the next innovation – self-tying shoe laces – could be the next “trend.” A lot of that money is spent on the construction of data centers around the country, which are being increasingly opposed by residents for fear of draining the community’s scare water sources, generating ambient heat and noise, and raising consumer electric rates even more. Other than construction jobs, data center isn’t project to create many more.

What Makes Proactive Technologies’ Accelerated Transfer of Expertise System™ So Effective

by Proactive Technologies Inc.^® – Staff

There are a lot of buzzwords thrown around these days. “Skills Gap,” Education-Based Apprenticeships, Industry-Recognized Certifications, “STEM and STEAM” – many confusing to those in management whose primary function is to ensure products and services are delivered in the most cost-effective and profitable way. It can be especially confusing to those who are specialists in business operations but unfamiliar with effective worker development strategies.

For anyone unfamiliar with Proactive Technologies’ PROTECH^©® system of managed human resource development™ and the accelerated transfer of expertise system™, it might help to clarify what makes this approach to worker development and continuous worker improvement so effective. This unique approach, in practice since 1986 and always improving, was designed by someone who endured the pressures of maintaining the highest quality staff in a world of constant change and pressures to do more with less.

We start by collecting client data about each of their targeted job classifications; data that is all around anyway (e.g. people’s heads, operator’s notes, engineering processes, quality standards, EHS specifications). Usually we find that this information isn’t readily available or discoverable by new hires and incumbents. This makes learning and mastering the tasks — unpredictable, ineffective, open to interpretation and conflicts (including legal), costly and not conducive of standardization of high performance. And the continual revision of all of these bits of information adds to the challenge and makes process improvement and implementation efforts difficult, at best.

Read the full May, 2026 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Let’s Do the Math. Turning Training “Cost” Back Into Worker “Investment”

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

It’s fairly institutionalized now. A lot of time, effort and resources go into recruiting workers, but very little is done once they’re hired to maximize the return on what should be considered an investment. Although employers forgo tens of thousands of dollars in lower worker capacity and, compliance risks and therefore lower ROI for each employee, each year, the solution has always been simple, economical and available but ignored. Here is formula to estimate what it means to the bottom line to “develop organizational capacity” through worker development and how to turn what has become unnecessarily a “cost” back into a manageable “investment.” 

Background – There was a time when worker training was considered essential, supported by management and accounting. As employers, unwittingly at first, shifted this focus away from nurturing an investment to placing the burden on someone else, it began to look to some like an unreasonable expectation. Pressured by shareholders, employers saw an opportunity to please them and blame others; the false choice to move and keep work offshore in lower wage labor markets (with greater training needs), or spend a lot of time and money developing automated replacements – never mind the risks or feasibility. Simply training the worker for maximum capacity was nudged further and further off the table. The trichotomy – conflict between cheaper labor markets, automated solutions and simply training the worker – continues.

For many employer’s HR professionals, improving onboarding is popular. It is a good start, but it is informational learning, and 70-80 percent is forgotten before the learner gets a chance to apply it. Re-enforcing it with more classroom learning experiences only amplifies the ineffectiveness. Even more detrimental, leaning so heavily on “learning” experiences with uncertain relevance and outcomes has jaded management and accounting to think all worker development options are “costs” to be minimized.

Structured On-The-Job Training Programs for Salaried Personnel

by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

It is not just the hourly workers that, once hired, run into the “Bob, this is Sally. Why don’t you show her around” form of “training.” In environments where no structure exists to deliberately train hourly workers, supervisors and managers are similarly shown their desk and wished “good luck.” Yes, the company may offer a series of management courses that explain contemporary management theories, but often the most overlooked training is for the tasks against which performance is ultimately measured.

We frequently hear anecdotal stories about supervisors who are “thrown into the mix” of not only having to lead their workers to measured levels of performance, but concurrently learn their own job from their surroundings as best they can. Other supervisors and managers may be under the same pressure to focus on output, so they may be rarely available to mentor a new manager. Most likely, nothing was ever written down. Even worse, supervisors or managers who are new to the entire operation may have to learn what it is their employees do by observation before they can attempt to lead them to better performance.

Sounds familiar? It seems to run contrary to all the other business improvement initiatives, such as Six-Sigma, LEAN, Continuous Improvement, Total Quality Management, etc. Do companies have to settle for a “seat-of-the-pants” learning experience for their hourly and salary workers? And could this be a major contributing factor in reduced organizational competitiveness? Read More

Employer’s Missed Opportunity for a Dream Workforce

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

It’s been a growing disconnect, starting several decades ago and continuing to present a major obstacle to an organization’s longevity, stability, adaptability, and competitiveness. Employers seemingly neglecting their irreplaceable role in workforce development. It has always been unrealistic to expect others to be able to train the workers each employer needs when the processes are unique, their equipment is unique or unique in how they use it, their facilities and safety requirements are unique, and their expectations are unique.

In an article entitled, “Robots Without Mechanics: Why Our Education Pipeline Is Failing the Automation Economy,” by Aaron Prather, the author critiques employers making the capital investment in expensive robots without making the investment to train the technicians to maintain them. “The engineer who originally integrated the system left six months ago. Two experienced technicians retired. The remaining team is juggling alarms while supervisors debate whether to reroute orders to another facility.”

It’s Past Time to Be Honest with Students and Workers About the Future of Work in America and America’s Future

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

So much is going into the marketing of “the promise artificial intelligence (AI).” Without the necessary security, protections and guardrails in place, the message can be confusing and overwhelming to say the least. So far, AI seems to be a boom mainly for those who would use it to harm others rather than to help humanity. And those who are financing and benefiting from the imposition of AI on all aspects of life are betting the farm on AI thriving long enough to pull their profits out before it is realized for what it was only meant to be.

Let me be clear up-front, I am not against AI when it is used as defined and confined to the things it is proven to be good at and still in the controlled testing stage. But in this day and age, and with the wealthy and opportunistic investors seeing this as “the next big thing” to increase their wealth, so much in the way of safety, security, practicality, and efficacy is tossed out the window. In fact, changes by this administration have removed even more regulations and oversight, and we the people who are most vulnerable are, as we have been for some time, the guinea pigs.

For decades, the narrative students and workers were hearing was that manufacturing jobs were leaving America and are never coming back. At the same time, we saw that German, Austrian, Swiss, Korean, Japanese, Swedish and many other countries were building manufacturing plants in the US. The predominant pretext for leaving we heard from US employers and politicians was that they “just couldn’t find skilled workers” while manufacturing jobs established here were shipped overseas where there were literally no skilled workers but magically a way was found to make product. Now students and workers are kept guessing over whether jobs they are studying for are going to be insourced or near-sourced to a neighboring country, or replaced by AI, but told “if you hurry and change career paths again you might be OK.”

Proactive Technologies, Inc.^® Offers Pilot Project Structured On-The-Job Training Opportunity

by Proactive Technologies Inc.^® – Staff

If your organization sees worker training as a cost, not as an investment, maybe you should reconsider your approach! For each worker trained to only 30-40% of the tasks required of the job, employers lose tens of thousands of dollars to undeveloped and underutilized capacity and compliance risks, as well as opportunity costs. Unless you have documented your process best practices completely for training, what is there for AI to learn? Even if it could, are you ready for the many risks, hallucinations and ineffectiveness? This is no way to treat an investment;

If you are interested in learning how a structured on-the-job training project could work for your firm, but want to consider a “pilot project” to work out the kinks before scaling it, Proactive Technologies is ready to help.

The PROTECH©® system of managed human resource development:

Read the full April, 2026 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Appreciating the Value of Labor – Often Overlooked Source of Wealth

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

Businesses invest capital in new equipment or processes to expand and improve operations to become or remain competitive. The level of investment is not as important as the return on that investment. This consistent practice of determining where to best place capital for the highest return should apply to labor, as well. What is “paid” for labor is not as relevant as the value it adds to the operation and, ultimately, profit; the return on worker investment.

The lack of appreciation for the difference between a “training cost” and a “training investment”  is understandable because it is rarely contrasted. The college textbook entitled Financial Accounting: An Introduction to Concepts, Methods and Uses, defines “direct labor cost” as the “Cost of labor (material) applied and assigned directly to a product; contrast this with indirect labor cost.” Indirect labor cost” is defined as, “An indirect cost of labor (material) such as supervisors (supplies).” There is no mention of an expected return on investment. Generations of cost accountants have been taught that there is no good that comes for higher labor costs, which to them is determined by the level of staffing and wage levels. There is no differentiation between strategic labor costs and uncontrolled labor costs.

The profit from, and value of, most worker’s labor comes from task-based work, so all inputs that drive workers to high-performance, high-capacity output are investments.

click here to expand

Have Advances in Technology Distracted HR From the Fundamentals of Worker Selection and Development?

by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

Hundreds of billions of investment dollars are driving the advancements in technology into every corner of our lives, including the selection and development of workers. Predictably, the emphasis often seems more on the technology and the money it can make for investors than the practicality for the end-user or those it effects.

It is not just the refrigerators that talk to your grocery store, or watches that talk to the phone in your pocket. Wall Street, with an accumulating mountain of cash, can drive any idea to fabricate a “trend” that often dissipates as quickly as it emerges, sometimes leaving disruption in the wake but yields a return for investors. For investors it is the means to an end. To many, it may negatively affect their life and their future.

In the 1990’s, investors started to look at the National Security Agency’s and Central Intelligence Agency’s “key-word search” capabilities used to scan millions of documents from around the world for specific words and phrases to expand their intelligence gathering reach. They saw applications of this technology in the civilian world, including scanning the mounds of resumes and employment applications employers had to filter in order to find a few new-hires. On the surface, this seemed to be a godsend.

click here to expand

The Key To Effective Maintenance Training…Any Training: The Right Blend of Structured On-The-Job        Training and Related Technical Instruction

by Dr. Dave Just, formally Dean of Corporate and Continuing Education at Community Colleges in MA, OH, PA, SC. Currently President of K&D Consulting 

I spent a lot of my career as Dean of Corporate and Continuing Education at community and technical colleges, in several states. Where we could, we tried hard to provide the best core skills development delivery for technical job classifications the employers in our community requested. We often did this working off the limited, and often suspect, job information the employer could provide to us.

Often we were up against budgetary constraints that limited our efforts to customize programs and keep the programs up to date when the instructor was willing to maintain the relevance of the program. If that wasn’t enough, school leadership often showed ambivalence toward adult and career education due in part to the fact that its demand was driven by gyrations in the economy. Furthermore, the institution was built upon, more familiar with and understood better credit courses for the more stable subjects such as math, science, literature, history and the social sciences.

We tried a lot of innovative programs for employers in the community within the constraints mentioned, but if I was to be honest we rarely kept up. What we thought we knew of the targeted job classifications and their requirements, and upon which our programs were built and measured, seemed to become increasingly misaligned within just a few years. Not only was advancing technology putting pressure on the content of our learning materials and program design – a constant push toward obsolescence – the employers were continually rethinking the design of their job classifications to meet their business goals and budgets. We were finding less and less similarity in job classifications between employers, by job title and job content.

click here to expand

“Learning” v. “Training” Confusion In Workplace – Obstacle to Effective Worker Development Strategies and Apprenticeships

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

In an article appearing in EHS Today entitled, “From Seat Time to Skill: How Leading Safety Teams Are Proving Competence, Not Just Compliance,” an important point was made of the difference between “compliance” – seat-time based – and “competency” – being able to apply what is learned during seat-time to the competent performance of a task. “Learning” has become wrongly synonymous with “training,” when in fact they are two different methods, affecting two different domains, meant for two different outcomes. Classroom information delivery may seem to meet a management objective for the time being, but having a name on an attendance roster does not excuse management of accountability when the attendee mal-performs. to internal and regulatory requirements.

This principle should apply to all tasks required of a worker. What is the point of going through the expensive ritual of recruiting, hiring, onboarding only to stop there and let the employee find their own way to meeting management’s expectations? It is a process that is widely utilized and increasingly risky and wasteful:

• underdeveloped and underutilized human capital investment,
• risk of poor performance and malperformance,
• risk of non-compliance with engineering, quality, EHS and OSHA requirements,
• and risk of litigation due to operator injury or death due to inadequate of non-existent training.

click here to expand

Read the full March, 2026 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

No Wonder: On-the-Job TRAINING Is Rarely Taught in College

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

We have heard for the last 40 years that employers “just can’t find the skilled workers they need.” Why aren’t there more people taking a critical look at this bold declaration? It gets regurgitated at every conference, in many newscasts and business publications as if it is a proven fact or biblical commandment, not the folk lore it really is. It was created in the 1980s as a pretext for employers moving their operations to lower-wage labor markets that have absolutely no local skilled labor and few candidates with a good foundation upon with to train.

As employers continued to lean on the phrase to disingenuously express their dismay with state’s workforce development and educational institutions – whose only legitimate role has been, and should be, in developing graduates with a solid general and regionally technical skill-base upon which employers could build upon through task-based on-the-job training that only they could, and should, deliver – the pressure was so great that institutions transformed themselves many times in sincere efforts to accommodate the fabricated reasoning. Each time it resulted in little to no impact on the supposed problem, given the continued “we just can’t find the skilled workers” shifting of blame.

click here to expand

What Are You “Turning Over” When You Say You Have “High Turnover?

by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.®

It is not hard to overhear human resource managers commiserating over the high rate of “employee turnover“ they are encountering and struggling to remedy. In listening a little more closely, it is not entirely clear as to what that phrase, seemingly ubiquitous, means today. Is this a conversation where both parties seem to believe they know what the other is talking about, but underlying each case are different facts?

Not too long ago, turnover meant the rate of loss of employees to replace those who exited the company. It usually referred to those employees in which the employer had made an investment to develop them into an asset. it appears many still see that as a general description, but the source of their struggles seems to address other structural issues.

It is important to distinguish between four different types of labor turnover to be focused. First, there are the individuals that apply for a job, are hired, but do not appear the first day of work. The only investment the company made is the time it took to interview the individual and log them in as an employee.

click here to expand

New Year’s Resolutions That Can Right This Skills Gap…Thing

by Frank Gibson, Workforce Development Advisor and President of the North-Central Ohio Employer-Based Worker Training Partnership

Jessie Potter, Director of the National Institute for Human Relationships, is said to have originated the quote, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.” For the last 40 years, manufacturing employers have expressed their despair at “not finding the skilled workers they need,” while employees say employers are not doing their share to train workers and educational institutions churn billions of dollars each year doing their best to develop entry-level workers with industry level skills only to find those targeted jobs were sent overseas. With the new year upon us, maybe it is time for all parties to take a step back, face the issue honestly and pragmatically and put an end to the buck passing, the “shell game” and the misplaced expectations to make the American workforce the envy of the world.

There are three important stakeholders in this equation going forward: the employer, the prospective employee and the institutions that make the effort to prepare workers for the employer. Although prospective workers can come from any background, it is a relatively linear path to the employer’s front door. What happens next has seemed to be a bit of a mystery to the employer and stakeholders in the community, and that ambiguity affects the quality of the inputs preparing potential workers.

The Prospective Employer Needs:

click here to expand

Use Business Disruption Lulls to Develop Unused Worker Capacity: Build Organizational Value and Off-set Unexpected Costs

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

For those of us who remember the shear terror of recent disruptive events, we remember the deep sense of doom they instilled in employers, workers and their families, and government leaders. We knew that these were not the “business cycles” of college textbooks, these were man-made catastrophes that spared no-one in the disruption…though sometimes enriching the architects. Nevertheless, they came and went – varying only in severity and duration.

Recent horrific business disruptions like the Savings & Loan Crash of 1986, the Black Monday Stock Market Crash of 1987, the Dot.com Crash of 2000, the Crash of 2008 (with scandals like the Penny Stock Market, SBA and HUD and recessions woven in between), made lives harder and transformed businesses for better or worse. If seemed that if a business survived these types of disruptors, it was often because they focused on using the downward part of the a busy cycle to adjust and perfect their operations, build capacity and sharpen focus in preparation of the upward part of the cycle to come. Maintaining as much forward momentum through adversity as possible is critical in determining the quality of the survival, especially when the time between disruptions continues to grow shorter. Lead times, whether for new product introduction, entering a new market or just resuming normal operations is incredibly important if one considers the next disruption as a “backstop.”

click here to expand

Read the full February, 2026 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Worker Compliance With Engineering, Quality and Safety Specifications; Avoid Audits Without Clear Worker Training/Certification Policy/Program

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

When attempting to comply with the worker training provisions of ISO, AS, IATF, or Nadcap, it is important to keep in mind the intent of the requirement. The goal should include avoiding an “overshoot” with unnecessary additional work and/or creating an infrastructure that is hard to manage and prone to noncompliance. Often interdepartmental rivalries interfere with logical discussions of how to meet the requirement without creating an internal institution to manage it.

Typically, the guidelines for each of the major quality initiatives listed contains a section that provides a fairly open requirement for worker training to make sure the worker component of the “quality system” is sufficient to ensure that process-based tasks can be performed as designed. If they cannot, the effectiveness of the rest of the quality assurance system will be thrown into doubt. The framework below provides guidance but places the responsibility on the registrant to end any past practices that were inconclusive and open to questions:

A. PERSONNEL DEVELOPMENT AND CERTIFICATION

A.1 Training and Certification

click here to expand

A Balanced Approach to Employee Development, Discipline and Recognition

by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

Most of us have experienced an unbalanced approach to employee management. Often supervisors or managers are quick to react to a negative incident, but slow to recognize and respond to a positive one. In parenting, not making sure each child is trained properly to ensure they can perform tasks correctly to meet expectations throws recognizing and disciplining he child into questionable territory. Not certain on which child can/should be able to meet expectations, disciplining teens like you would your youngest can condition them to behave as such. Maybe a stretch for some to see the connection of this with managing adults, most should be able to see where I am going.

Policy manuals are full of examples of behavior not acceptable to the company. Everything from coming to work late to confrontations with fellow employees. Once one of these events is noted and recorded, it hangs over the employee through their career with the company, often given more weight than anything positive even if it was recorded.

Two little attention and recognition is paid to positive events, such as ensuring the work area is always clean at end of shift, a coworker being a very thoughtful and thorough trainer, or a worker that is quick to jump in wherever needed to ensure quotas are met. Rarely are positive issues spelled out in a policy manual to guide supervisors and managers on how to motivate and encourage employees when they exhibit stellar behavior as examples to others.

click here to expand

A Project That Sold Me on Proactive Technologies’ Structured On-The-Job Training System

by Frank Gibson, Workforce Development Advisor and President of the North-Central Ohio Employer-Based Worker Training Partnership

I have been working in the area of workforce and management development for a good part of my life. I have tried to help organizations navigate many of the upheavals in the economy and challenges to specific employer operations. Sometimes an employer senses something is wrong or could be much better, but lack the sources of information they can trust. One project changed my conviction on a better way to help workers and employers many years ago and continued to prove itself ever since. For me, one project in particular stands out.

Proactive Technologies, Inc. started a project in 2000 with an Ohio aerospace manufacturer that was concerned with their legacy workforce reaching retirement age. Several generations of workers continued to work there because, according to them, “it was a good company to work for.” The company estimated 40% were scheduled to retire in the next 2 years; 80% total were eligible to retire in the next 6 years Many of the people were the only people who knew how to run certain equipment, certain machines, perform certain processes and were about to retire and take all that expertise with them. After reviewing many options and products (including an expensive but unproductive Lean project), the company HR director commissioned Proactive Technologies to perform a job task analysis on 5 production job classifications (later expanded to 19 job classifications based on a success of the pilot) to capture the expertise, develop training programs to quickly replicate replacements through the accelerated transfer of expertise system™, and provide the documentation and technical implementation support needed to ensure the project was successful. In many cases, the retiree could use the materials they helped develop to train their replacement before leaving.

click here to expand

Maybe 2026 is the Right Time to Restructure U.S. Economic Reporting to Reflect Our Dual Economy

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

In the past few decades, there has been a building discussion by affected parties – the bottom 90% of the consumers, entrepreneurs, small and mid-size businesses and communities continually devastated by unexpected gyrations created by the 10% – about the “K-shaped economy.” The momentum is steadily building for either a correction to this version of capitalism to make it more fair and growing for a larger part of the economy like during the post-WWII boom, with metrics/statistics,  attention/reporting to track and report that change to citizens who need that information to affect change that positively impacts their future.

Have you ever watched a business show or some network news “economic expert” explain the state of the U.S. economy, scratched your head and asked yourself, “What world are these guys living in?” You hear things like, “good news for XYZ company, 10,000 workers will be laid off.” Or, “the federal reserve interest rate dropped .25%, meaning credit card interest rates, mortgage rates, borrowing rates are headed downward for consumers,” when rarely do those things happen to low and middle class borrowers. Or you might hear, “good news, inflation last month dropped by .5%, signaling consumers could breath a little easier,” when most of us nearly choked when we saw prices at the grocery store, filled our gas tank or opened our monthly telephone our utility bills.

click here to expand

Read the full January, 2026 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

During WWII, US Transformed Manufacturing AND Its Workforce. “We Just Can’t Find the Skilled Workers We Need“ Wasn’t True Then Either and Not an Option.

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

Suddenly faced with the tremendous challenges of World War II, the US had no choice but to retool the manufacturing sector of the economy to build the needed materials of war. One major obstacle; many of the men working in the factories either enlisted themselves or were drafted into the war. The only solution was to seek out nontraditional workers to fill those roles.

No one ever said “we just can’t find the skilled workers we need.“ They just went to work rounding up anyone who was willing to work in manufacturing including women who, until then, were rarely seen on a factory floor. But how were these completely unskilled workers going to be fit to run the equipment and perform the processes they, and their employers, have never seen before? After all, these were weapons of war. Sloppiness in production and discrepant quality of output was not acceptable.

Workers feed sections of sheet metal through a pneumatic numbering machine at the North American Aviation plant in Inglewood, California. 1942. – Source Rare Historical Photos

Automobile manufacturers retooled to make tanks and airplanes, consumer product manufacturers refocused to make the necessities of war. They were paving new paths and innovation was the norm. Without knowing entirely where that was leading, they were also faced with plugging people into positions needed filling. While defining the work they needed done, they needed to train workers to perform that work – a monumental challenge as any rapidly expanding and innovating employer of today is familiar.

click here to expand

The High Cost of Employee Turnover

by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.®

Most companies are dealing with uncomfortably high levels of turnover. When one separates out those employers that facilitated high turnovers to lower labor costs, there are many reasons for this. However, there is no denying the many costs associated with this that exist and the effects that often compound. These costs are often unknown and unmeasured, but all employers should keep an eye on this challenge and explore its full impact on the organization.

It seems counter-intuitive, but there are some who even recently promoted a business strategy that encouraged employee turnover. In a July 21, 2015 Forbes article entitled “Rethinking Employee Turnover,” author Edward E. Lawler III, “Indeed, the turnover of some employees may end up saving an organization more money than it would cost to replace that employee. The obvious point is that not all turnover should be avoided—some should be sought.” The question is how to determine which ones to keep and which to encourage to leave. Without accurate measures of costs and values of a worker, good employees may be pushed out along with the “bad” and then the true costs of this action realized by the employer after it is too late.

Last year, Holly Bengfort of PeopleKeep wrote in her blog entitled “Employee Retention – The Real Cost of Losing an Employee,” “Happy employees help businesses thrive. Frequent voluntary turnover has a negative impact on employee morale, productivity, and company revenue. Recruiting and training a new employee requires staff time and money. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, turnover is highest in industries such as trade and utilities, construction, retail, customer service, hospitality, and service.”

“For the costs associated with the loss of 1 or 2 employees, the company can establish a holistic approach to worker selection, development and retention that will significantly lower both turnover rates and turnover costs, AND increase the value of all employees in that job classification.”

click here to expand

The Employers Have the Most Advanced Equipment Available for Training

by Frank Gibson, Workforce Development Advisor and President of the North-Central Ohio Employer-Based Worker Training Partnership

Community and technical colleges, career centers and joint vocational schools have always struggled with how to make a positive difference in workforce training. They often bear the brunt of criticism for the “skills gap” employers report when, in reality, employers share equally in the responsibility. Educational institutions have only the resources and capacity to provide core skill training upon which only employers can then provide on-the-job training to drive trainees to the job mastery needed.

Educational institutions are often tempted to assume more of the employer’s role in worker development but run into budget, feasibility and practicality limitations. This distracts them from their very important role of maintaining perpetually relevant core skill and related technical instruction that a high-quality technical education requires. Trying to provide all things to all employers never was the role of educational institutions so they should not take it too personally when good-intentioned efforts do not reach the expectations for them.

These institutions are often encouraged to use their limited resources to buy equipment or build facilities in order to support “customized, hands-on training.” The employer already has the facility and the latest technology in that community. The hard part has been convincing the employer that the school has a viable strategy that makes the employer want to imbed structured on-the-job training into the onsite natural order of learning the job. It would be even harder to convince them a training program, targeting a specific job of theirs, can be more effective offsite at a training facility than onsite.

click here to expand

Do You Have Worker KPI Measures in Place? If So, Are You Measuring Anything Useful?

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

Recently, I met with the management team of a tier 1 and 2 automobile supplier to discuss the merits of structured on-the-job training (“SOJT”) for their firm. After I had toured their operation and was progressing through my presentation slides to the part dealing with the SOJT metrics and reporting that the PROTECH^©® system of managed human resource development™ provides, I was pleasantly surprised by a question I do not often hear in my presentations – especially from anyone in human resources.

This director of human resources asked what may seem like a simple question: “So can this data in these reports be used as KPIs?” After recovering from being startled, I smiled and said, “Yes! Yes, of course. That’s exactly what these reports are for and how they should be used.”

According to Wikipedia, “A performance indicator or key performance indicator (“KPI”) is a type of performance measurement. KPIs evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity (such as projects, programs, products and other initiatives) in which it engages. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.”

The reason for my surprise that I was asked the question is, after perhaps thousands of presentations over some 35 years, I still receive mixed reactions to SOJT. Some react as if I’m showing them the holy grail of worker development as they express wonder at why they had not seen it before. Some seem to be underwhelmed by the broad capabilities of this approach to SOJT, the thorough recordkeeping, reporting, change control and, therefore, support for quality, safety, and engineering specifications compliance. It seems to boil down to the level of realization of the lack of adequate tools to develop and measure worker capacity as well as worker output to expectations that have led many to avoid the topic for fear of the answers; that it might expose limitations in their existing worker development strategy. It is surprising the number of companies I meet with that the only evidence of any kind of worker development performed at their operation is a few hours noted on a time sheet as “training,” when in fact every person in every job is receiving informal, unstructured and undocumented task-based on-the-job training every day. How much time in training is not as illustrative as which tasks have been mastered for the time spent.

click here to expand

Read the full December, 2025 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.