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.

Historically, employers have provided a tepid interest and response to the training process, relying too much on education to do the job only employers can do and relying on internal, informal, unstructured and undocumented one-on-one training to do the rest. This is partly because so much hype circulates around “new and improved” attempts by education to address the urgent need that employers continually voice. This may, also, be due to many employers’ denial about how weak and often ineffective the employer’s internal method of training new-hires, cross-training incumbent workers and upskilling incumbents for changing processes and technology are. Workers have been caught in a “Ground Hog Day” (I am talking about the Bill Murray movie, not disrespecting the little critter) loop for decades. Read More

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 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”).

Wikipedia points out that “Empirical research suggests a fairly small effect size, even for properly designed RJPs (d = .12), with estimates that they can improve job survival rates ranging from 3–10%. For large organizations in retail or transportation that do mass hiring and experience new hire turnover above 200% in a large population, a 3–10% difference can translate to significant monetary savings. Some experts (e.g., Roth; Martin, 1996) estimate that RJPs screen out between 15% and 36% of applicants. Read More

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.

People in the upper-mid west and northeast are familiar with the “job creating” promises made throughout the last few decades, and the aftermath of decaying properties, buildings and workers left behind by a shift in investment interest. First steel, then textiles, then electronics, then automotive industries. Many US projects did not make it to expectations. The mass relocation of manufacturers during the multi-decade off-shoring wave, as the US became an incubator of SMBs headed south, north and overseas, was more “destruction” than “creative.” Overnight communities lost their biggest employer(s) and premier contributor to the local tax base. Cumulatively, communities veered from boom to bust, setting aside their horrifying experience to rely, once again, on the next “promise of opportunity.”

A few years ago, the reshoring of microchip factories with the help of the CHIPs Act of 2022 promised a surge in jobs and prosperity for communities that fought hard enough to bring the jobs to their area. Just like electric vehicle and solar production, to date most projects have scaled back their efforts, toned down their projections of job creation, or shifted their focus and therefore their timeline to job creation – with some projects stopped altogether. With a new administration came a shift in priorities and players. Global tensions, tariff policies and supply chain disruptions are still changing plans, sometimes overnight. With AI data centers and the ever-more-consuming amount of money poured into projects is unhindered, we can expect a short-term rise in construction jobs and supplier jobs. But AI’s widely advertised purpose is not the creation of jobs, instead the actual elimination of jobs, so we might see a “wash.” It seems counterintuitive to use taxpayers’ money to enable an industry, with access to its own capital, that promotes the destruction of taxpayer’s livelihood, lifestyle and community. As we witness daily, trading long-term stability and steady growth for the short-term booms has never worked out well for the current and next generations.

Local SMBs and entrepreneurs have been waiting their turn to be showered with support and affection like those that capture and hold the media’s and capital market’s attention. In many cases they are “boot-strapping” their business longer than ever expected. Instead of being sincerely celebrated, nurtured and supported they are often viewed with indifference, skepticism or as “riddled with risk.” Never mind that many of the large, established and enduring corporations were started on a kitchen table or in a garage, or that some mega giants that simply emerged are notoriously risky. No matter what the latest economic shift or upheaval is created by others, experienced SMBs and entrepreneurs who have been around these blocks a few times have been able to survive while other more well-financed and visible companies surge then evaporate. Read More

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.

Sometimes more diligent workers make up for document inadequacy or lack of process documents by keeping notes in their lunchbox or, more precariously yet, in their head. Heaven forbid this is discovered during an audit. These notes not only are uncontrolled and unofficial, but they represent a wealth of “tribal knowledge” that is not routinely shared with new-hires. Mistakes that are known to have happened, and can be avoided if shared, are repeated with each trainee to everyone’s detriment. The fact that each employee feels the need to keep their own notes is a sign of some problem with process documentation and should investigated.

Stepping back to get a better view of learning patterns of a typical worker may be helpful. It varies from organization to organization, job classification to job classification. If an organization has been trying to hire based predominantly on wage level, they often find the lower the wage level the lower the inventory of prerequisite skills for not only the tasks to be learned, but also the ability to learn. And most organizations that focus on lower wage levels do not have a budget for remediation of deficient core skills to improve the process of learning.

It is here that organizations sometimes try to make up for the deficit by expending time and money to illustrate the technical materials, thinking “pictures speak a thousand words.” Adding illustrations alone to flawed technical processes will not magically bring the document together to a make a better learning material. Here are a few examples of what I am talking about: Read More

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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.”

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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

Is an Apprenticeship Without Structured On-The-Job Training an Apprenticeship?

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

Career and vocation-focused training is a pivotal point in every current and future worker’s life. This world is overwhelmed by forces that make the effort more difficult for the education and training providers, more urgent and critical for the learner, more scrutinized by the employer and constantly measured against time; how long the training takes (which determines costs) and the relevance of the skills acquired to the targeted job which is always moving to the next level of technology. If the training is not “continuously improved” and maintained to be predominantly current and accurate, the graduate may find that jobs for which the new-found skills were targeted now marginally or, even worse, no longer exist.

The European apprenticeship systems are well-established and are often offered as a comparison to the U.S. menagerie of approaches, standards, acceptance and credibility. Employers in Europe have had the time to reap the benefits and adapt to the established frameworks to determine a pragmatic role they could play that is most advantageous to the enterprise, apprentice and community. For example, the apprenticeships in Germany are revered for their clarity, personal growth options, participation rates and successful outcomes. Some have embraced apprenticeships to the extent to make money while cultivating a workforce with close relevance and proven talent that they have the option to draw on.

In theory, apprenticeships offer a promising approach for traditional trades and crafts. As of 2008, more jobs can be registered as apprenticeships with new models accepted by the U.S. Department of Labor. If the program is based on a sound structure and methodology (one that can work for any type of job classification), an apprenticeship capstone – the job-related, employer-based training – would be maintained current and accurate for at least the employer apprenticeship host. Without this component, an apprenticeship experience may be as hollow as some of the for-profit educational chains which are often criticized for high costs and low placement rates.

“No one would ride in a plane flown by a pilot with only classes and simulator time, have surgery by a surgeon that hasn’t yet operated on a live human, or receive a root canal from a dentist with no “live-patient” time. Certified mastery of the tasks that define each of these jobs is what makes the ‘license to practice’ credible. And there is a difference between ‘a pilot” and ‘the pilot.’ Having a pilot license certifies you to fly planes, not a specific plane; you still have to have training and be certified to apply your craft to flying that particular plane. With other technical jobs,  the hybrid approach to apprenticeships, both are accomplished at the same time.”

The term “apprenticeship” has taken on many new meanings in the rush to increase the number of apprentices in the United States. Some 2-year community college programs that have been around a while have been re-branded in an effort to give new life to the same programs of worker development. Some have been thrown together to position an organization for the anticipated flood of grant dollars to find apprentices. Many of these are less “employer-centric” and more “industry-friendly” in spirit only. Yet, it is important to remember that the ultimate beneficiaries of an apprenticeship should be the apprentice, the employer, the community, the industry and then the workforce development community, in that order. This should always be the focus and priority. Read More

Has Your Organization Captured The Expertise of Your Critical Hourly and Salary Positions?

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

Starting in the late 1980’s, employers became increasingly concerned with succession planning; ensuring salary workers were being groomed to replace critical senior employees in the event of retirement or voluntary/involuntary separation. It was realized that the potential disruption – direct and the ripple effects – caused by an unplanned void in the leadership chain might be perceived as a threat to shareholder value. Shareholders, too, wanted assurances that maximizing a firm’s performance was not tied to one or two invaluable people.

Compounding the concern was the realization that the workforce was aging at all levels, and that retirements were a certainty. Prior to the Crash of 2008, employer’s concern over this was amplified by anecdotal reports from other employers already experiencing the impact. A movement toward a remedy began to take shape, and not just for high-ranking salary positions, but technically critical salary positions and even hourly positions that with a loss of one or a few technical experts might disrupt operations and impair a firm’s viability.

For decades prior to the Crash of 2008, Proactive Technologies, Inc. worked with a lot of employers by job/task analyzing their critical job classifications – initially hourly positions but a growing salary class of positions as well. This approach “captured the expertise” of the aging workers to use it to develop the tools which would allow the company to train nearly anyone with a sufficient core skill base, replicating experts as needed.

Then the Crash of 2008 happened and employers found themselves unexpectedly and unwillingly accelerating the loss of technical experts at all levels. For employers late to the game, there was no longer time to capture expertise; it had already left the building. We saw this phenomenon repeating itself with the Covid-19 pandemic. Read More

Knowledge Gap v. Skills Gap, Core Skill Gap v. Task Skill Gap – Important to Know Which You Are Trying To Close

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

One common, ongoing theme that all of us in workforce development and related disciplines are familiar with is that our educational and workforce development institutions are not, despite the tremendous resources at their disposal. adequately addressing the issue of the “Skill Gap.” A lot has been written about the concern over the billions of dollars spent by employers and education to address the skill gap each year, but after 30 years we still are consumed with concern. Many employers have either learned to discount education as a viable partner in workforce development or have lost their confidence in these institutions all together and moved on. How hard would it to bring them back?

Some have suggested that educational institutions seem preoccupied with controlling the definition of the challenge so the solutions they prescribe can be pulled from their shelf. They have a powerful lobbying presence in Washington D.C. and state capitals to guide their proposals to steer grant money targeted for workforce development to their institutions. In some cases it is what sustains the schools…but for how long without significant outcomes?

As early as the 1980’s, surveys of employers showed a growing “schism of trust” in existing institutions helping meet the skills gap challenge. Today, educational institutions and workforce development groups seem more inclined to defend the institution and its programs. They are less interested in understanding the clear dichotomy between the core skills needed to master an employer’s tasks, and the employer’s de facto role in providing task-based training to ensure core skills are not lost, but are put to a good use that reinforces their utility.

Most “customized training coordinators” at community colleges and career centers would tell you their understanding of customized training can range anywhere from providing classes onsite or offsite to recommending a credit or non-credit course. Their educational training did not prepare them to seek out such an invasive role in an employer’s internal training. As they try to justify their engagement to that degree, they often provide evidence that they have little to offer that is specific to an employer’s needs. Read More

Enterprise Expansion/Contraction and Worker Development Standardization

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

One challenge faced when expanding, contracting or acquiring an enterprise is adjusting the scale of the workforce development strategy(ies) that already exist(s) to the increase/decrease in the number of workers while maintaining a consistent ratio of output, quality yield, safe performance and process compliance. Contrary to an accountant’s perspective on staffing level adjustment, there should be serious consideration given to the range and depth of each worker’s acquired skills; an “inventory” of each employee prior to the official act of expanding or contracting. We take a physical inventory of product, equipment, parts, etc. to assess value, so why would we treat a human asset any different?

Obviously, an expansion strategy is different than a contraction strategy, but when it comes to determining the value of a worker it is similar for both strategies. How an organization addresses the development, measurement and maintenance of that value may differ widely. Let’s look at both scenarios.

For companies expanding, if a sound structured on-the-job training infrastructure is in place it is simply a matter of scaling. More work means more employees that have to be trained before adding value to the operation. Sometimes expansion includes a segue from straight-line scaling, such as new products and services requiring new equipment, which in turns requires new/improved core skills before structured, task-based on-the-job training can be implemented to build upon incumbent worker skill sets. A solid structured on-the-job training infrastructure can easily adapt to new work, new tasks, new technologies and new trainees.

For companies contracting, one would think this would just be scaling but in a negative direction. It usually ends up more complicated than that when work for three different areas are consolidated on top of the work performed by the workers in the fourth area. Read More

Proactive Technologies’ Turnkey Package Offers for Returning Clients

by Proactive Technologies, Inc.^® – Staff

The world has been through a lot in the last few decades. Employers finding themselves making decisions and changing their mind – willingly or unwillingly – for the most unexpected reasons. Economic downturns, pandemics, mergers and acquisitions often lead to short-term decision making. Since classifying a “worker” and “worker training” as a “variable cost” rather than an investment is still the norm, unconsciously shooting oneself in the foot with regard to maintaining a qualified and optimized workforce is the norm, too.

Proactive Technologies, Inc.^® wants to accommodate and support those workforce development decisions in the best way it knows how. This introduction for returning clients of its turnkey worker development package is one example. 

Value comes in many forms. Sometimes value stares us in the face but we may not realize it…or fully realize it. Like a software we purchase but only use 10% of its functions, a car that we seldom drive, or the treadmill that sits in its original packaging. Underutilized value not only represents a minimal return on an investment, it is a lost opportunity to maximize its potential and an inefficient use of capital.

Undeveloped or under-developed worker capacity is a lost opportunity to increase return on worker investment and reduce labor costs. Multiply this experience by the number of employees you have and the loss can be substantial! This is a fact that should be obvious and continually frustrates many a CEO or Operations Manager. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Every employer conducts a massive amount of informal, unstructured and undocumented on-the-job, task-based training every year. The significant cost (especially if you have a lot of retiring experts, revolving new-hires and marginally trained residents), as well as the effectiveness, usually goes unmeasured. If you doubt this point, ask yourself one question; Do I know which tasks each of my employees have mastered, and which they have not? If you draw a blank, you are not alone.

PTI’s approach to worker development has, for many years, been a solution that can provide a great impact on a company beyond quickly developing workers to full capacity with such a simple, sensible and economical approach designed specifically for your jobs, your specifications, your company and culture.

Whether you had to cut your training budget, or never had one in the first place, this structured on-the-job training system makes it possible for you to train every worker to “full job mastery, full capacity” quickly, efficiently, effectively and credibly. So much so that all projects have been eligible for training grant funds that offset – in large part or in whole – the employer’s investment to set-up the SOJT infrastructure and implement training!

Returning Clients: 

The Crash of 2008, the Covid-19 Pandemic, mergers/ acquisitions caused a lot of disruption for manufacturing and lead to following years of disarray. Several of Proactive Technologies client’s structured on-the-job training programs, most funded by state training grants, were set-up, incumbent workers assessed for the training gap and the training materials for new-hires and incumbents produced. Read More

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

It Seems Fear of New Private Equity Owners Cause Local Leadership to Forego Deliberate Worker Training

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

Most employers I talk to say they know their informal on-the-job training programs cannot keep up in an ever-changing world and feel strongly it is affecting their ability to build and retain a qualified workforce. The evidence is in work quality, quantity and issues of compliance with work process and mandated safety. Lets not forget worker satisfaction, focus, loyalty, morale and retention. Yet, even when state training grants are available to reimburse employers up to 100% for upgrading and deliberately training workers for focused and improved outcomes, employers seem more and more reluctant to make the pitch to their corporate management.

While their own performance is measured on overall company performance metrics, it doesn’t seem natural that managers would be afraid to offer a solution which impacts departments and internal systems across the operation and could produce significant improvements, cut costs, boost revenue. Perhaps it is an unawareness that today’s grant programs, in most states, are more efficient, faster, less administrative and generous.

Many employers know that only they can train the workers they need – on their equipment, in their facility on processes unique to their operation by resident experts only available to them. Historically, though, training has been at the bottom of any organization’s list of “things to do.” As the need for deliberate, documented on-the-job training grew more urgent decade after decade, worker development moved farther and farther down the list. Employer’s resigned themselves to decreasing worker performance and marginal worker capacity. After all, product was being shipped and services were being delivered – often by adding more and more workers with the solution staring them in the face; to train each worker for all of what their job requires, not just on tasks that someone remembered to provide.

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Endlessly Scrambling to Find New-Hires Who Could, and Should, Stay but Don’t. There Is a Better Way.

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

An article in HR Dive by Carolyn Crist highlights a common complaint among HR Professionals entitled, “Hiring pros say they face pressure to hire quickly, leading to bad hires: A longer and more expensive hiring process is also contributing to poor decisions, studies said.” She reports on a study that explains a familiar conundrum of Human Resources departments across the board, tasked with finding workers to compensate for the steady churn of workers leaving.

Crist says in her findings, “Amid a skills shortage, 73% of hiring professionals in certain industries — such as manufacturing, logistics and engineering — feel pressure to hire quickly, but they also feel the consequences of making rushed recruitment decisions…” “This rushed hiring can lead to bad hiring decisions, with half saying they experienced increased costs from rehiring or training. In particular, respondents said they had increased costs where transferable skills were lacking, with 63% saying they observed decreased productivity and 56% saying they saw poor work quality.

Employers that do very little to retain employees, such as adequate compensation, reasonable benefits, proper task-based training and opportunities for recognition and advancement, are often struggling to maintain staffing levels to keep the operation going. Some reported a turnover of retirees and dissatisfied employees reaching daunting levels of 30, 40 and higher percent.

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Reshoring Manufacturing Would Be Great, But Can We All Agree that “the U.S. Lacks Skilled Workers” Isn’t a Credible Excuse Not To?

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

We continue to hear conflicting reasons why employers are reluctant to reshore manufacturing to the United States. Reshoring represents an opportunity to reset the relationship between manufacturing employers and workers, which has been under escalating disruption the last 3-4 decades.

The belabored reason used why some manufacturers are reluctant to return is the same one used for why they left: “they just couldn’t find the skilled workers they needed here in the United States.” It lacks credibility since from the moment U.S. Firms were offshoring manufacturing, manufacturers from around the world were moving in and didn’t seem to have trouble finding workers.

One credible reason manufacturers moved offshore is that the importing country of their goods required them to build and maintain a local plant – often with technology transfer, local ownership and local labor requirements. The tradeoff to the U.S. manufacturer might be usually lower wage rates and looser regulatory regimes which, for years, let producers produce and export to the U.S. the same product made cheaper, raising profits. U.S. manufacturers were willing to trade off U.S. jobs for broader market opportunities, lower wage costs and increased profit margins.

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Perfect Example of “Penny-Wise but Pound-Foolish” – DOGE Attempts to “Cut Waste, Fraud and Abuse”

by Proactive Technologies, Inc.® – Staff

What have we learned? For one thing, the projected $2 trillion in budget savings touted as the reason for going after “waste, fraud and abuse” ended up being less than $202 billion as reported by them, and some of that doubtful. But was the upheaval inflicted upon what seemed to be working government programs worth the rationale to offset unnecessary tax cuts for the privileged worth it? It seemed to be taking a jackhammer to dig a pin hole – the hole just gets bigger with no improvement and the original purpose lost.

The daily drip of new chaos across the media spectrum of legal challenges is tiring and affects our collective mental health. What is lacking in the rush to report it is enough information to allow us adequately process the events into a logical conclusion as to whether it is a relatively “good” of “bad” thing. It becomes one more bit of uncertainty on the pile of uncertainty we all face – businesses and workers.

Take, for example, Elon Musk’s management tactics, as they apply to his own businesses and then the federal government, which at face value seemed reckless and mindless. The advertised rationale was they were truly meant to save America money, reduce the debt and make government more efficient. Was it that or a classic case of what is wrong with accounting practices grossly neglecting “worker value” and investment from the discussion? Depending on the source of one’s news, it is presented as both.

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Five Most Important Ways Employers Can Reclaim and Retain Worker Value With Structured On-the-Job Training

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

In a Proactive Technologies Report™ article entitled “10 Reasons Structured On-The-Job Training is a Vital and Necessary System for Any Organization,” a few of the many important reasons that structured on-the-job training – at least Proactive Technologies’ version – were explained that should be part of any organization’s operational strategy. Here are 5 ways this approach to worker development that integrates an organization’s existing systems unlocks tremendous wealth and yields substantial returns – just for doing what every employer says they want anyway but most find a reason to avoid it.

Too many employers still, wrongly, believe that they have little in the way of tools and metrics to develop and measure the value of each worker that comes to the organization. No structured training program in place means no one has analyzed the job for the tasks required to be performed, the compliance criteria, the core skills and knowledge necessary to master the tasks, or why a task resides in a job classification. If there is no structure, there is no way to measure what percent of the job a worker has mastered or, if still in development, how well they are progressing to the expected level of job mastery and performance. If no structure or metrics exist, there is nothing to improve or, at least, notice an improvement. And if something goes wrong and worker malperformance is suspected, there is little from which to draw evidence to support a conclusion and proper course of corrective action.

And then there is the endless number of issues related to how well a worker was developed, on what were they developed, and how well that expertise has been maintained through all of the changes faced in competitive world. Any worker that has been deliberately, or coincidentally, developed to a recognizable high level of job mastery is considered being of “high value,” although the value is not quantifiable. Every employer wants to retain that worker, replicate that worker and relies on that worker to informally share expertise with others. If that worker leaves the organization for any reason, disruption, confusion, chaos and costs can occur.

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