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.

Estimating the Costs Associated With Skipping Processed-Based Structured On-The-Job Training

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

It should go without saying that if the employer has no deliberate strategy to train workers for the tasks they were hired to perform, the employer will probably never realize the maximum output possible from a worker. Multiple workers operating under-capacity can create exorbitant, and unnecessary, costs to the employer – bleeding from profits and often leading to sweeping and irreparable reactions from management as they try to “fix” all but the obvious.

The effect of worker capacity on any business strategy is the least understood of factors, but one as important as innovation, process improvement and zero defect strategies. After all, fundamental to each of these strategies is the worker’s ability to competently carry the intended actions to maximize those efforts efficiently.

Employers need to seriously consider the human factors, not ignore them and focus on everything but this. After decades of neglect, supported by workforce development institutions that have no tools to address this stage of worker development and often unknowingly promulgate distractions in their efforts to claim they do, management has come to simplify the human factor into a cost that can be easily eliminated or replaced by a lower cost alternative in another location. Lacking in this reaction is the underlying fact that moving operations to lower-wage labor markets with even more need for training (e.g. new challenges such as language, culture) only appears to be adding to profits short-term; the same problems exist, but the lower cost of labor makes it more tolerable even if greater challenges to worker performance now exist. As wages rise, these challenges become more pronounced and management becomes more critical.

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How Start-Ups and Joint Ventures Can Benefit From Structured On-The-Job Training

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

A article in a previous issue of the Proactive Technologies Report™ entitled “Enterprise Expansion/Contraction and Worker Development Standardization” explained the process of standardizing training for expanding, contracting, merging and acquiring enterprises. It discussed how to take inventory of incumbents and new-hires in training, and how to standardize multiple worker development strategies. But what about standardizing tasks that are in design, have just been designed or are evolving in their design? Or the importance of this component in creating an enterprise to perform the tasks meant to lead to profit from an innovation? If the goal is the repeatable high-quality performance of tasks once they have been formalized, then standardizing and documenting the procedural steps is necessary, though often an afterthought.

Entrepreneurs and engineers that design and fine-tune a production process or service strategy are immersed in it until they feel confident it is ready for scaling. Whether through “expert bias” – the overconfidence that results with satisfaction in discovery leading to the opinion that everyone should understand their innovation – or through mere oversight, a brilliant idea can fail in proliferation during efforts to transfer the processes and techniques without a formal structure.

The solution is simple. It takes an understanding that a structure to transfer the standardized task from the expert to the task performer is vital to ensuring that all aspects of the innovation are maintained and repeatability of the highest quality of performance is certain.

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Classes Alone Will Not Close the “Skills Gap,” But Structured On-the-Job Training Can…Every Time!

by Proactive Technologies, Inc.^® Staff

Proactive Technologies. Inc. works with many employers, a large number of them manufacturers, to set up structured on-the-job training programs designed to their exact job classification(s), built to train incumbent and new-hire workers to “full job mastery” – still the most elusive goal most employers face and the key to” closing the “skills gap.” Under-capacity of workers is an enormous source of untapped value and unrealized return on worker investment. 

The accelerated transfer of expertise system™ approach can help any employer quickly and completely train the skilled workers they need AND realize an increase in worker capacity, work quantity/quality and compliance (ISO/IATF/AS and Nadcap, engineering specifications and safety) while reducing the internal costs of training. New-hires and incumbent workers are driven to full job mastery and higher levels of return on worker investment (ROWI). The task-based, structured on-the-job training infrastructure is perfect for apprenticeships; instead of marking the calendar for “time-in-job,” job-relevant tasks are mastered and documented. AND, unlike classroom or online training, the cost per trainee decreases with each added trainee once set up. 

This approach makes a worker’s mastery of the job the focus, integrating into the company’s existing systems and standards by building structure around the loosely arranged worker development activities already in place. By structuring the unstructured worker training to make it work effectively and efficiently, this approach maximizes the use of resources already in place.

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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.

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Worker Compliance With Quality Initiatives; Avoid Worker Quality Audit Without Worker Training/Certification

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

A.1.1 Has all work performance “knowledge” been captured for use in developing and maintaining a consistently compliant workforce?

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

Quality Policies and Process Sheets Are No Replacement for Worker Training

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

A very common fallacy in business operations is that a rough description of a task that should be performed listed in a quality policy or a quality assurance plan is effective. It may seem to be loosely sufficient to create an illusion that the training requirement of ISO/AS/IATF and Nadcap certification is met for now as is the company’s training requirement in general. Perhaps this false equivalency is reinforced by the additional fallacy that standard work instructions are the equivalent of on-the-job training plans. Too often this is used to defend the belief that standard work instructions or process sheets, perhaps with illustration, replace formal task-based training – especially when so much work went into creating them (but maybe not maintaining them).

Sometimes this leads to the rationalization that if the company keeps it simple and barely meets what an ISO/AS/IATF or Nadcap auditor might accept for their certification purposes, the training requirement is covered. But an auditor at that stage is just looking at what the company is intending to do, not how they carry it out. That is discovered later.

This false assumption is challenged when product or services turn up defective, and customers expect an explanation and a corrective action. This is when a weak, or no, connection can be drawn between the policy that guides quality standards, work processes and who trained and certified the employee to perform the task independently is discovered. This is when the records that exist, if any, do not support the assumption that mastery of the task ever occurred. This is when the customer loses faith in the producer or supplier – not just in the task(s) isolated in the one incident, but possibly performance of all tasks on which they depend.

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Your “Resident Expert” May Not Be an Expert Trainer, But Easily Could Be

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

Just because a worker is informally recognized as a “star performer,” it doesn’t necessarily follow that they can be an effective trainer. Employers like to think it is as easy as that, but seldom does it turn out to be the case. However, with a little structure, some tools and a little guidance these resident experts can, and often do, become expert trainers.

If one thinks about how an expert is measured and recognized, it is usually by subjective, mostly anecdotal measures. The worker performs job-related tasks quickly, consistently and completely. This implies few mistakes, performance that is mostly within specifications and standards of performance, and no one can remember anything rejected or returned as scrap or rework.

Thinking it through a little further, one might struggle to explain how the expert performer developed these traits. Someone showed them how to perform a task, and repetitive performance developed new, retained skills. They are now operating as a “robot” while performing a task, seldom thinking about the subtleties and nuances of each task (filed in memory long ago), which makes them fast, consistent workers – something the employer can notice an appreciate.

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Two Common, Unfortunate Mistakes: The Importance of Setting Up Separate Accounts When Receiving Training Grant Funds

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

Two common, unfortunate mistakes that can derail a company’s sincere effort to address the training gap at their firm are easily overcome, but toxic if unaddressed. Getting upper-management on-board with trying to build a deliberate training infrastructure is not easy, as most who have tried have found out. Taking preemptive measures to avoid these land mines seems worth the while.

The first, the champion who took the initiative to create a training strategy, lobby for it and attempted to implement it at their operation fails to establish proper leadership of that effort. W. Edwards Deming often said, “divide responsibility and no one is responsible.” And something as important as establishing a new, deliberate training program to address the neglect of the past has to be led by someone who recognizes that fact, understands the implications and knows how to lead the effort to successfully reach its goal.

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Is Entrepreneurism in America Still a Revered Thing?

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

Just as the economy has bifurcated into two economies, as confirmed by the “income inequality gap,” so has the reverence and appreciation for local, small to mid-size businesses as compared to concentrated, behemoth multinational companies and Private Equity or Hedge Fund portfolios. It seems support to small businesses has become more of platitudes than substance and support for independent mid-size businesses is very selective. The large publicly traded and private equity funded corporations have access to exponentially growing capital sources. Mid-size companies rely on regional banks, which are few and far between. Small firms have access to, well, hardly anything unless acquired by a bigger firm.

The focus of most economic development organizations has been on attracting the largest of companies and employers to the region. Each locale competes to reel in the “whales,” offering tax breaks, expensive infrastructure improvements and monetary incentives to companies that can access many sources of private and public capital as well as bank financing on their own – socializing the risk and privatizing the profit in the hope that the benefits of doing so will outweigh the costs. Each locale wants to be able to announce the most optimistic of predictions for the region to much fanfare and publicity. Politically, this is appealing, but most citizens have come to understand the fragility of the arrangement and how fleeting the proposed benefits to the community and region in return have become.

Some companies have learned how to play this game well, moving operations around from state to state, country to country to take advantage of the public’s generosity. And whenever economic adversity arrives or balance sheets are weak and need perking up to maintain share price and attractiveness, they pick up and move operations and jobs and leave a community rattled in the wake.

Some very visible cases of the risk of “putting so many eggs in one basket” exists. “Michigan Loses 5 Plants And Over 13,000 Jobs in Sudden Blow to US Manufacturing Base. “Intel Announces Mass Job Cuts, Sounds Alarm for Ohio, “CEO Lip-Bu Tan said the company expected “workforce reductions and attrition” to reduce its headcount to 75,000 by the end of 2025. This compares to the 108,900 employees Intel boasted at the end of last year, per an annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). “Intel’s ‘Ohio One’ project in Licking County has already suffered delays. Now the company said it will “further slow the pace of construction in Ohio to ensure spending is aligned with market demand.” An Intel spokesperson clarified that the projected timeline for completion of the first fab is 2030-2031, and that work is still actively happening at the Ohio One site.” “Ohio lured Intel’s chip plant with $2B incentive package.”

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

Eroding Organizational Capacity: The “Unstructured, Haphazard and Ad Hoc Process-based Training Effect”

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

If you work long enough for a variety of employers, there is one theme that seems to run common to all – the lack of structure to the all important job-based, process-based training that one would expect. Often we are shown our workstation, introduced to the area manager and then we wait for some guidance and training for what is expected of us. Sometimes we wait in vain. Sometimes we are subjected to bits and pieces of information and take it upon ourselves to make sense of it rather than wait indefinately.

None of our core skill bases and work-based task mastery history are, alone, sufficient enough to substitute for the need to know the best practices for performing the tasks for which the new employer hired us. If an employer hires a new employee not having a structure to quickly transfer job expertise from the incumbent experts to the new-hire, it is fair to say this runs counter to good business practices and economic principals. Yet unstructured, haphazard and ad hoc task training is the norm.

“Only 17% of organizations said they had developed processes to capture institutional memory/organizational knowledge from employees close to retirement, while just 13% said they were providing training to upgrade the skills of older workers.”

IndustryWeek Magazine – Steve Minter

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Employers Say Fewer Jobs Require Degrees. What is Their Plan to Make Up The 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.

Hiring based on skills is more difficult than hiring by degree, by far. Hiring by skill requires an accurate understanding of the required prerequisite skills for the job and an accurate way to measure a candidate’s skill base relative to that job classification. It requires “content valid” or “job relevant” hiring criteria that represents today’s version of the job classification, not yesterday’s or yesteryear’s job criteria – something most employers lack. Many employer’s job descriptions alone are grossly behind today’s technological state of operation, and what they have is guaranteed to continually degrade with each passing year. For some, it might even be so extreme that it may produce an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission violation waiting to be discovered.

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Large-Scale Worker Training Projects Are Right for Small and Mid-size Employers

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 many years as Director of Corporate and Continuing Education at several community colleges in multiple states. I think back on those years before working with Proactive Technologies when employer engagement was very difficult to achieve, let alone retain. Often it was only possible to get the employer to agree to send a few people to classes, either on site or offsite, if grant money covered the cost. But the scope was limited and the results were often inconclusive.

In the mid-90s, I began to partner with Proactive Technologies on what they called “structured on-the-job training programs” meant to increase each worker’s capacity through accelerating the transfer of expertise from the existing experts to new and cross-training workers. It seemed simple and intuitively I felt something the employer could relate to. Building a training program, and an infrastructure where there was none, that the employer could recognize and has the potential to yield results they can immediately realize seemed like a new concept, but one employers told me they wished for in nearly every meeting.

When we began talking with employers and were able to get them to commit to setting up structured on-the-job training programs for one job, maybe two, as a pilot. Inevitably, employers saw the value and expanded the programs to include other jobs critical to their operation and opened the programs up to more employees for training and cross-training.

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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 job are going to be insourced or near-sourced to a neighboring country, but told if you hurry and change career paths again you might be OK.

Currently, the media binge-feeds on the conflicting messages with every press release on AI development that is lopped onto the market to stoke investor fires. Nothing needs to be fully tested and secure, just rush it to the market before investors lose interest. So many big tech companies have staked their futures and reputation on AI. Daily assessments of jobs that will be lost to AI, of intellectual property that will be illegally misappropriated for someone else’s use and enrichment, project a hallucination that we will all somehow be better off when it is just the narrow few. This movement represents an attempt at a monumental “repurposing” of the worker in a capitalist democracy…without defining or ensuring that purpose.

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