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“There is no doubt this approach is effective. After all, what is better: unstructured and haphazard worker training that cannot be explained, measured, improved or understood, or structured on-the-job training for all workers that is easily measured, implemented, improved and explained to auditors?”

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1. Determine the Employer’s Need and Agree on Strategy: How has the client been (or not been) training workers until now; what are the current and projected staffing levels for incumbents and new-hires along with attrition rate and reassignments; is the culture supportive of training workers and see it as vital to competitiveness; are any task-based documents available and are they in use (e.g. work processes, quality standards, safety standards); which jobs are targeted and why; is the company following any quality mandates, such as ISO/TS/AS and do they have any quality programs underway such as LEAN, Six Sigma; what is the budget for setting up the structured on-the-job training program and implementation. A strategy encompassing all of these points is prepared for the employer before an agreement and timetable is confirmed.
2. Job/Task Analyze the Target Job Classifications: The analysis is always performed using the employer’s subject matter experts to develop task lists of each targeted job classification, then each task is analyzed further for the best practice; also identified are relevant components that lead a trainee to reach “task mastery;” a review of data by subject matter experts is held to reach a concurrence on data; materials to structure the on-the-job training are created (the PROTECH© software system accelerates the data collection process and automatically generates all of the tools of the human resource development process from the data – materials are ready in minutes not years…at a fraction of the cost of manual development. One revision updates all reports.). Read More

While all this is going on, political tides that brought in the change may begin to turn back. Often one political party or the other overreaches, or misreads their constituents and acts against their voter’s interests. The make-up of Congress and or the presidency in the next election may push the pendulum back.

A good strategy for employers during days like this is to try to learn as much as possible about the proposed changes. No matter if industry groups are behind the successful push for changes in laws and regulations, this does not mean the changes will survive. So, it is a good idea to remain pragmatic and realistic during these times. Try to project how the change will be received by your customers and by employees in your organization. Then weigh the benefits of making policy revisions to incorporate the regulatory changes versus the costs of the policy changes – including financial costs, costs to morale (if any) and the costs if these government changes are later reversed and the company has to reverse its policies to match.

Some other considerations are: Read More

This accelerated transfer of expertise™ approach is a tremendous offer without the discount, but with it 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/TS/AS, 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 the apprenticeships; instead of marking the calendar for “time-in-job,” job-relevant tasks are mastered and documented.

Over the years, I have noticed that many employers’ idea of a worker training strategy is a hodge-podge of classroom and online training. This seems to be based on the assumption that all of the right people have been hired, they all have mastered the tasks of the job and that a few classes will drive each worker’s performance to higher levels.Where does this assumption come from? Why do employers collectively settle for this type of model even though decades of experience and day to day worker performance offer many clues that this model of worker training is not as effective as hoped? Too often the feedback from workers attending classes is, “I don’t know why the company had me attend that class.” “That was a waste of time.” In an informal way, this is a form of “content validation,” or in this case “invalidation.”

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“Conceptually, a better overall approach is simple, accurate, efficient and effective. If an employer isn’t including these simple steps in their worker selection, development and performance evaluation strategy the might be wasting company time, money and resources.”

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This legacy approach is a comfortable model to explain. Everyone has attended school; some higher education as well. It is what we grew up with and the sentiment has become acceptance from familiarity. Some accept this approach because they are unaware of better alternatives. Some find comfort in being among the “herd.” Most of the employers seemed locked into this model, so it must be the right way to train workers. If this were true and reinforced with evidence, why after 30 years of concentrated application (as technology entered nearly every aspect of worker performance) the “skills gap” we all talk about has not only survived, but has actually grown? Read More

Last year, Christina Merhar of ZaneBenefits 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.”

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.The “Maintenance” job classification was a perfect example and could be incredibly different from company to company. In the early days, Maintenance was thought of as multi-craft; a maintenance person was responsible for maintaining all aspects of the operation. Some companies tried to hold onto that concept of Multi-Craft Maintenance but, as Multi-Craft Maintenance Technicians were becoming harder to find and therefore required higher pay, more and more companies began to deviate from multi-craft to specialty and single-craft positions that cover only limited areas such as facilities, electrical or mechanical. Some Maintenance positions did not include HVAC, some were primarily focused on servicing machines but not repair. Some employers subcontracted out facility maintenance and instead had their Maintenance employees perform preventative maintenance tasks on everything from manual machines to PLC driven multi-axis machines, to robots and robotic manufacturing machines – leaving the servicing to the warranty and/or contracted OEM experts. Trying to find the right balance between an effective Maintenance program that gives every employer what they wanted but does not train for skills that one might never have a chance to use and master and most likely would forget, proved increasingly difficult to say the least.

This dilemma for program and instructional design, I believe, is worse today. Read More

It is important to understand that the types of skills that employers are most concerned with – especially employer-specific task-based skills – most likely have not been in the local workforce, nor have any programs been available in local institutions to develop them, simply because these new jobs, with new skill requirements, have never been in the area. The types of skills needed for most modern manufacturing and advanced manufacturing have never been developed because the need was not present nor the data on these jobs available. Even if the need was present, by the time the skill is recognized, a program developed and a worker completed the learning manufacturers either moved on or moved out.

“Determining that you, indeed, hired the right person for the job will not automatically ensure the person is successful in learning and mastering the job. The most important step in the employment process is seeing to it that the individual’s core knowledge, skills and abilities are applied in learning and mastering the tasks which they were hired to perform. That is where the money is made.” 

Leading up to this, while working in certification program development, training program development and quality engineering for manufacturers, I found that the traditional, academic approaches to job training were beginning to lose their effectiveness in the workplace. Even the techniques for developing training materials was no longer suited for a job classification that may have significant changes to it weekly. Rapid job changes affected job descriptions, hiring assessments, performance appraisals – impairing an employer’s efforts to remain compliant with Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulation. Establishing certifications for workers was impossible since the training that led into it, and even the materials used for hiring a candidate, grew quickly obsolete. Evaluating worker performance was being reduced to subjective generalities, often generating resentment from workers and those that evaluated them.

The new standard includes a couple of changes that make the new standard easier to implement with other management systems, and focuses more on management commitment and performance and less on prescriptive measures. The standard has a new structure called a “High Level Structure” and introduces the concept of “risk-based thinking.” The emphasis is on organizations identifying risks to standardize quality performance and taking measures to “ensure their management system can achieve its intended outcomes, prevent or reduce undesired effects and achieve continual improvement.” The revised standard also puts increased emphasis on achieving value for the organization and its customers; in other words “output matters.”

No matter how you examine it, an employer is responsible for training workers to perform the essential and unique tasks of the job for which they were hired. It is not economically feasible or practical for education systems to focus this sharply. Waiting for them to do so or allowing it to happen by osmosis is risky and costly for the employer, since every hour that passes is one more hour of wage for unproductive output. Add to that the hourly wage rate of the informal on-the-job training mentor/trainer efforts multiplied by the number of trainees and this becomes a substantial cost that should attract any manager’s attention.

Investment in a formal, deliberate structured on-the-job training system will cut internal costs of training substantially, raise each person’s worker capacity to where it is expected to be, improve output quality and quantity, and raise worker compliance – to processes, to quality standards and safety mandates. It simply makes business sense.

For new clients, this turnkey package offer includes:

• Performing detailed job/task analysis (incorporating employers’ process documents, qualilty and safety requirements) on targeted job classification(s);
• Development of task-specific On-the-Job Training Plans and Checklists, Technical Procedures (Job-Performance Aids), and much more;
• Training of employer’s current trainers to implement structured on-the-job training using the developed materials;
• Technical support and record keeping/monthly reporting – 12 months;
• Certificate of Job Mastery™ Portfolio preparation and delivery;
• All production costs and expenses.

For former client-employers – those for whom their PROTECH© training infrastructure was built and investment made, but implementation was interrupted during the years following the crash of 2008 – this turnkey package includes:

• Updating the previous job/task analysis (incorporating changes to employers’ process documents, quality and safety requirements) on targeted job classification(s);
• Development of updated task-specific On-the-Job Training Plans and Checklists, Technical Procedures (Job-Performance Aids), and much more;
• Training of employer’s current trainers to implement structured on-the-job training using the developed materials;
• Technical support and record keeping/monthly reporting – 12 months;
• Certificate of Job Mastery™ Portfolio preparation and delivery;
• All production costs and expenses.

Why not find out more about this approach while the discount offer program is underway? What do you have to lose? Contact us to hear more how this discount offer can help your organization build a structured on-the-job training infrastructure with nearly half the normal investment. A live online presentation list is available in this newsletter. Click on the title you are interested in and best for a schedule, or click on Contact Us to schedule your own.

Watch your email inbox for a resend of the flyer in a few days with dates we will be in your area.

According to a Training Magazine article entitled, “Bridging the Skills Gap” by Lorri Freifeld, these revealing points were extracted:

• 49 percent of U.S. employers are experiencing difficulty filling mission-critical positions within their organizations. (ManpowerGroup’s seventh annual Talent Shortage Survey; 1,300 U.S. employers surveyed; positions most difficult to fill: skilled trades, engineers, and IT staff).
• Only 1 in 10 organizations has the skills needed to utilize advanced technologies such as cloud and mobile computing, social business, and business analytics. (2012 IBM Tech Trends Report; 1,200 professionals who make technology decisions for their organizations, 250 academics, and 450 students.)
  • Alarming number of professionals (more than 60 percent), and students and professors (73 percent) feel there is a moderate to major skill gap in these four technology areas.
  • Nearly half of the educators and students surveyed for the report indicated major gaps in their institution’s ability to meet IT skill needs.”
• Even with preventative measures, there could be 20 to 23 million workers in advanced economies without the skills employers will need in 2020 (McKinsey’s The World at Work report). Read More

If an employer purchases a new, technologically advanced, piece of machinery that is advertised to increase the output of a process from 100 units per hour to 300 units per hour, the employer would be disappointed if it only received 150 units per hour. That employer would, most likely, challenge the manufacturer and perhaps request a refund if not satisfied.

Proactive Technologies, Inc. specializes in setting up, managing and supporting structured on-the-job training for the accelerated transfer of expertise™, and has worked extensively with all types ISO/AS/TS compliant manufacturers and manufacturing positions such as Maintenance (all crafts), CNC machining, Tool & Die, Tool & Gage, Mold and Die Repair, Assembly (all levels) and more. Many were registered as apprenticeships. Proactive Technologies has assisted client-companies to successfully apply for, manage, document and receive reimbursement for almost $2,000,000 in projects in just the last 3 years alone! A substantial amount of that amount was reimbursed to the clients by the state of Ohio to lessen their initial out-of-pocket investment on a project that leads to capacity building, quality improvement for maximized results and return on worker investment! Click here for more information. 

This is a reimbursement program. Once the employer applies and is accepted, the employer completes the approved training and submits the receipts and rosters to the OH IWT, the employer will be reimbursed for 50% of the cost. If the proposed training isn’t held and no training cost is incurred, the employer simply has nothing to submit for reimbursement. No risk, no penalties.

If you would like to discuss a project for your organization, contact us immediately and we will help you create a sensible project containing structured on-the-job training (for transferring task-based expertise) and related technical instruction (building core skills needed to learn the tasks), and we will put together a proposal that meets your needs. If the proposal is to your satisfaction, we will put together a proposed application (that meets the state’s requirements and your specifications). If that is to your satisfaction, we will input the application into the State of Ohio’s website so you can review and be ready to submit it by the deadline.

Proactive Technologies has made several trips to the area for onsite presentations in the last three months, and there will not be time for more onsite presentations before the deadline. However, several live online presentations are scheduled for October 6 – 10th and you are invited to attend one. Select the one – from the schedule in this newsletter or from our website that fits your schedule from the website page and we will send you a teleconference invitation for your viewing at your computer. If you would like to schedule one for an alternative date and time, contact us with your request.

We recommend that you do not delay. If you miss the deadline for this round, you will have to wait until 2018 (if an OH Incumbent Worker Grant round 6 is offered).

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 – 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.

The “Maintenance” job classification was a perfect example and could be incredibly different from company to company. Read More

“Employers do not need to keep themselves locked in the antiquated model of worker development. They can break free and make the worker development system operate like all of the other manageable and measurable subsystems in the organization.”

Comparing this approach to all of the other, more systematic, approaches one sees in manufacturing it seems underwhelming, uninspiring and many ways inexplicable. What is the point of LEAN manufacturing efforts to streamline processes for efficiency if the participating employees are not properly trained to absorb the improvements? What is the point of analyzing processes for best practices if the employees are not properly trained for them now or when they are further improved later? Training in a manufacturing setting must be interactive and evolving, not stagnant and irrelevant, if it is to be viewed as anything more than a cost the accounting department would like to minimize.

Many past Proactive Technologies Report articles have addressed the need for highly job-relevant task-based training that can only come about from a comprehensive job/task analysis. If the reason an employer hires workers is to perform specific tasks that the business model requires to be profitable, then the proper attention and effort must be given to ensure each worker performs their tasks in the most efficient and effective manner. This moves the expenses associated with labor from the “cost” column to the “investment” column. Each employee’s task performance could be, and should be, managed just like all of the technology investments in the plant for maximum return. Read More 

“Employers also benefit through savings in insurance premiums based on participants’ combined results.”

But with all the perceived benefits wearable devices offer, the author cautioned employers, “Companies that want to incorporate wearable fitness trackers into their wellness programs should make certain the health plan will keep private data secure.” Read More

Determining that you, indeed, hired the right person for the job will not automatically ensure the person is successful in learning and mastering the job. The most important step in the employment process is seeing to it that the individual’s core knowledge, skills and abilities are applied in learning and mastering the tasks which they were hired to perform. That is where the money is made. 

Educational assessments have been adapted for use in workforce development and employment, used to assess a prospective employee’s suitability for a job opening. They often measure more of what, if anything, a student learned and retained before graduating than how they match the employer’s actual job opening. Psychological assessments have been adapted to measure a prospective employee’s sociability to the workplace, morphing into a new category called “psychometric assessments.”

We have seen a growth in the employment assessment industry over the past 2 decades – particularly after 9-11. There are assessments for cognitive tests, physical abilities, “trustworthiness,” credit history, personality, criminal background and more. When used improperly, the methods have been challenged in court for their appropriateness and intent.

An assessment is a “test,” and has been held as such by court rulings over the years. The instrument determines a positive or negative outcome for the employee or prospective employee. The court has ruled, in many cases referring to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Uniform Guidelines for Employee Selection Procedures, that anything used to evaluate a prospective employee’s access to employment, or an existing employee’s retention, promotion and movement within a job, must meet certain standards to be legally valid. Read More

“The effects of ineffective training for 1 person can cost your firm more than the training budget for 10 employees for 10 years. Why take the chance with speculative training approaches that may not deliver anything more than cost and disappointment?”

The secret to success is in the “turn-key” approach. We understand that most small and medium-sized manufacturers have a very limited human resources staff, not to mention a non-existing training department. But they do have the subject matter experts who have mastered the training content, just lacking the training technique, materials and support. By applying the Proactive Technologies and Mpact expertise to set-up, implement, support, keep records and report training activity, the time the subject matter expert needs to make available for training new-hires and incumbents is minimized and the effects maximized. The investment needed is low, but the impact and return on worker investment is substantial. Read More

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 ad hoc, haphazard and inconsistent manner, this is a major contributor to worker attitudes toward the company, themselves and others in the workplace.

Assuming that the offered wage and benefits are competitive, there are four essential considerations to the hiring and keeping the best workers; the selection strategy, the learner’s capabilities, the instructor’s capabilities and the training infrastructure. Given the high cost of recruitment, selection, initial training efforts and separation, and heaven forbid a repeat of the process for the same job classification, an internal examination of these 4 components might go a long way toward reducing this cost and making the process cost-effective and efficient. Read More

This highlights several other pre-existing issues in addition to the obvious. First, if the company is ISO/AS/TS certified, an auditor would be appalled and likely “gig” the company for the use of uncontrolled “process documents.” Notes in toolboxes and lunchboxes are not revision controlled. If the company has even questionable process documents that they claim drive their “high level of quality performance” the existence of operator notes are a strong contradiction. A client visiting the site may have serious doubts about the practices, as well.

The next issue is, “what role do these notes play in the training of new-hires and cross-training incumbents?” Does the trainee even know these are available? My experience has been that each trainee is on their own to create their own notes…if they even think it is necessary. So now we have multiple sets of notes for each machine, seldom compared and standardized, AND the company’s process documents if they exist. This is a recipe for incidents of scrap, rework and equipment damage at a minimum.

It also appears that each trainee is on their own to learn the safe performance of each task. It is not enough to provide general safety knowledge learning. When a trainee is taught a task for the first time, it is then when they should be shown how to apply the general safety knowledge to the safe performance of that task. Once a pattern is established, the trainee will be able to better apply the safety knowledge to the safe performance of all tasks. If ways to avoid a safety incident are known, shouldn’t that knowledge be shared with each trainee so that no one has to be hurt when the odds of an incident are known and avoidable? Read More

Training is especially vulnerable because accounting departments see little explainable value and hold the traditional view that these are “costs” that can be put on hold or eliminated – especially if the next quarter might bring a layoff of those scheduled for training.

If the value of worker training cannot be empirically explained during periods of budgetary angst, training, and those associated with training, are the first to be cut despite the obvious questions: “What if the economy comes back? Does the company plan to rebuild its training program and staff when it starts to rehire? Won’t the incumbent workers reassigned to take up the slack by layoffs need training for their new jobs?”

Companies rarely spend much time thinking of the ramifications of eliminating training during slow times. They often do not have a choice. So, training departments need to be relevant if they are to survive. They need to be able to explain their strategy to management, with a strong, empirical investment-return on investment component. If the case cannot be made in those terms, maybe the training department needs to redesign themselves or their cut might be justified. A deliberate structured on-the-job training program that is linked to engineering processes, quality specification and EHS requirements is harder to dismiss than a training strategy that based on an inexplicable selection of classes and seminars.

Another thing a training department can do is to research available worker training grants. Some are designated for new-hires, some for updating the skills of incumbent workers. Read More