Even the Best Written Work Instruction Is No Replacement for Structured On-the-Job Training

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to assemble a toy or piece of furniture by the included instructions, you’ll appreciate the assessment that many of these instructions seem to be an afterthought, lacking clarity and often causing more confusion than one would think for something considered to be an “assembly instruction.”

You might be aware that many companies create work instructions in a rush attempt to qualify for ISO, IATF or AS certification. Often someone with little or no experience as a technical writer is asked to write a work instruction for others to follow. Sometimes several people, with many backgrounds, are tasked in an effort to quickly prepare the organization for a pre-certification audit. The belief is that the auditor only wants to make sure that the company has work instructions, not critique the quality of the instructions. Often, as well, little thought is given to keeping the documents current and accurate as changes and improvements occur. Soon, any document clarity is reduced to confusion.

Lessen Gen Z Workplace Anxiety – Make Training Deliberate and Engaging

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

In an article in Business Insider entitled, “Gen Z is bringing a whole new vibe to the workplace: anxiety,” author Eve Upton-Clark tried to shed some light on a contemporary topic considered enigmatic by some and over-blown by others; Generation Z and its journey into the workplace. Understanding generational shifts in behaviors and expectations are a never-ending role of employers and their management. Having a better insight can make the experience a little less challenging for everyone.

In her article she writes, “Anxiety is driven by uncertainty,” Ellen Hendriksen, a clinical psychologist and the author of “How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety,” said. Because they grew up in the digital age with nearly unlimited amounts of information at their fingertips, Hendriksen said, Gen Z has the least experience with uncertainty. “When you need to know where to go, you can pull up Google Maps,” she said. “If you are going to a new restaurant, you can look at the menu ahead of time. There’s a lot of certainty in this world now which didn’t exist before.”

She continues, “But at work, there’s often a lack of certainty — which gets exacerbated in a remote workplace where it is easy to avoid confrontation. “Anxiety is maintained by avoidance,” Henriksen said. “Our first reaction when we are anxious is often to avoid the thing that is making us scared, and so if we are anxious about speaking in a meeting, we might remain silent. If we are anxious about taking phone calls, we’ll let those calls go to voicemail.” Further, “Whether sensing when a presentation has gone on too long or understanding the subtext of what someone is saying, managing how you work is a fundamental skill.”

Whether a Gen Z or Baby Boomer, how we are trained once hired is a crap shoot. Read More

Proactive Technologies’ Turnkey Package Offers for Prospective and Returning Clients – Discount Window Now Open

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 for the most unexpected reasons. Proactive Technologies, Inc.^® wants to accommodate and support those workforce development decisions in the best way it knows how. This introduction for new and returning clients of its turnkey worker development package is one example. The current discount window is open from January 1st – March 15, 2024! 

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. Read More

Deming Was Right on Training Workers

By Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Dr. W. Edwards Deming, an American engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and management consultant, remembered for his vital role in rebuilding the Japanese manufacturing sector after being destroyed during WWII, said “You have one chance to train a worker, just one, so don’t muck it up.” At the time, his theories on management and manufacturing, quality and business longevity, were dismissed by U.S. manufacturers. After quickly helping move Japan’s manufacturing and economy towards competitive status in a relatively short time, U.S. manufacturers reevaluated his theories and practices and began implementing the parts of them that did not significantly affect short-term profitability.

It is not clear if, by the statement, he had the U.S. vocational education and classroom-based training system in mind, or the informal, haphazard and undocumented one-on-one training a worker receives once hired. Either way, one thing in common was that the accelerating rate of technological advancement – post-WWII to 1980 and beyond (computers entered the scene) -forced continuous revision of the learning and training requirements for employment. Literally, technology was changing the nature of work before their eyes leaving manufacturers flat-footed on what to do and education, already technically lagging the current nature of work, in a perpetual and losing state of “catch-up.”

To set the record straight, this is not a criticism of education itself. But the way education institutions are structured, they literally cannot keep up with academic-led innovation let alone employer-led technological innovation. For example:

Read the full February, 2024 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

From Innovation to Implementation – Success Depends on Preparedness of Those Executing

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

How often does a product or service go straight from research and development to service implementation or product production? A skilled, experienced worker may be able to overcome the ambiguity of this hand-off, but it seems there is, today, a shortage of skilled, experienced workers; baby boomers finally decided they can, or have to, retire, or some companies experience high turnover rates of replacements, or most employers say they lack of skilled candidates…or even someone skilled enough to train them.

There are many reasons that this loosely organized hand-off still exists:

Retiring Workers and the Tragic Loss of Intellectual Property and Value

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

The warnings went out over three decades ago. Baby Boomers were soon to retire, taking their accumulated expertise – locked in their brains – with them. But very little was done to address this problem. Call it complacency, lack of awareness of the emerging problem, preoccupation with quarterly performance, disinterest or disbelief, very few companies took action and the Crash of 2008 disrupted any meager efforts that were underway.

Over a decade ago, Steve Minter in an IndustryWeek Magazine article on April 10, 2012 stated, “Only 17% of organizations said they had developed processes to capture institutional memory/organizational knowledge from employees close to retirement.” Who is going to train their replacements once they are gone? Would the learning curve of replacement workers be as long and costly, repeating the same learning mistakes, as the retiree’s learning curve? Would operations be disrupted and, if so, to what level?

“In our new “outsourcing nation,” a widely held belief is that employees are simply costs to be cut and not assets to be valued.” …. “Manufacturing faces a two-sided problem: it not only has thousands of people retiring, but it does not have the training programs to train skilled workers to replace them.”

A Strategy to Capture Tribal Knowledge, IndustryWeek- Michael Collins 5-23-16

Proactive Technologies’ Turnkey Package Offers for Prospective and Returning Clients – Discount Window Now Open!

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 for the most unexpected reasons. Proactive Technologies, Inc.^® wants to accommodate and support those workforce development decisions in the best way it knows how. This introduction for new and 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.

Quality Policies and Process Sheets Do Not Replace Training

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

A very common fallacy in business operations is that a description of what should be done listed in a quality policy, such as a quality control policy or a quality assurance plan, that seems to be sufficient for the training component of ISO/IATF/AS certification meets, therefore, the company’s training requirement in general. Perhaps this false equivalency is wrongly supported by the additional fallacy that the existence of standard work instructions is the equivalent of on-the-job training plans. Too often this is used to defend the belief that this replaces formal task-based training.

Sometimes this leads to the rationalization that if the company keeps it simple and barely meets what an ISO/IATF/AS 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.

Read the full January, 2024 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Tracking Documented Worker Capacity and Value Growth

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

It is difficult for any operations manager to justify investments in worker training to the accounting manager. Without empirical evidence, the institutionalized belief by accountants that training is a “cost“ often prevails over common sense improvements in a company‘s workforce. While only familiar with traditional “classroom learning“ with repetitive seat time costs, accounting departments are swift to challenge any attempt to spend money on classes alone, where no tangible correlation between time spent and improvement in performance is credible.

Structured on-the-job training is different. Employers invest in informal, unstructured, and undocumented one-on-one worker training all of the time; all day, every day for every employee. Once an employee is hired, including the brief training for individuals who do not end up staying past probationary period and periods of cross-training, “Bob” is paired up with “Jim” and a mysterious process begins. No training plan, no documentation, very little accounting for real hours of training or outcomes. If there were, accountants would be strong advocates for long overdue changes in worker development strategies.

Nevertheless, informal on-the-job training produces some positive results for some people or products wouldn’t get shipped nor services delivered. But it doesn’t work well, especially for many who could have been great, loyal workers. The process cannot be explained, measured, improved or accounted for – most likely the reason it is accepted as fact but avoided in process improvement discussions. Yet it is the only thing holding most operations together.

Structured on-the-job training works much better. It provides the infrastructure, the accountability, the documentability, and empirical evidence to justify increases an investment for tangible increases in worker performance. It is not difficult to set-up a structured on-the-job training system if you have the methodology; you just build an infrastructure around the informal on-the-job training that already exists, incorporate all available process, safety and quality documentation available to make training an accurate, deliberate and complete experience. Read More

Put Yourself in a Trainee’s Shoes

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

It is fun to watch a popular TV show on CBS, now in syndication, called “Undercover Boss – reruns and all.” Watching a CEO or executive of a major corporation slip into disguise and enter the world of their workers is interesting and entertaining. Sometimes they find the organization needs a little “tweaking,” and sometimes it needs major rethinking.

The entertainment value, I suppose, comes from watching these individuals being tossed into a job classification – alien to most of them – and, while cameras are rolling, receiving a crash coarse in performing various job tasks. Some tasks are performed close to the customer. Not only do leaders get a rare look at what it is like at the lower rungs of the organization, in some cases they get a look at the sub-par performance most of their customers experience and how tenuous the corporation’s existence is – sustained only by the initiative a few loyal, but mostly self-interested, employees. These employees try to make up for the corporation’s short-comings as if their job and future depend on it…which they do. If the company fails, they lose their job, plain and simple. Some put up with the company’s shortcomings in pursuit of the next opportunity.

It is interesting to see CEO’s marvel at how difficult it is to learn the job tasks they previously thought were inconsequential and not worthy of attention. Previously known only as a word on a report, the fact that how the tasks are performed by these neglected employees are the reason the corporation exists goes unnoticed and unappreciated. Some episodes look like popular television shows of the 50’s and 60’s, “I Love Lucy.”

A typical Undercover Boss episode might reveal:

• Unstructured, inconsistent and incomplete training;
• Uneven and uncertain motivation;
• Conflicting operating orders;
• Unexpectedly outdated or inoperable equipment;
• Unclear standard practices;
• Unexpected lack of leadership at the local level spawned by unexpected lack of leadership at the upper levels;
• Unvarnished displays of workers rising above these organizational inadequacies and their own personal challenges to ensure product gets out the door and services are performed with pride

Focusing on one aspect, in each case the resident expert was selected to train the covert executive. These attempts at unstructured, task-based training give a vivid picture of the limitations, risks, and failures of foregoing a deliberate training strategy. Read More

Pairing Structured On-the-Job Training with Related Technical Instruction Just Makes Sense

by Frank Gibson, Workforce Development Advisor, retired from The Ohio State University – Alber Enterprise Center

I have for worked with educational institutions for many years, trying to reach out to employers with the latest and best courses and seminars they had. It is what we did with good intentions, but in many cases this was a difficult sale at best. Their products were often already built…before they precisely knew the needs of the employer. If the employer engaged them for our services, when delivered it was more of an underwhelming experience for the customer than I felt comfortable with. Often it didn’t lead to follow-on work.

An employer’s operation is driven by accounting for the bottom line. Accountants are quick to dismiss core and technical instruction as a cost. That is what they were taught in college, and truthfully there is no evidence that attending a course improves work performance in most cases. Sadly, that level of “job relevance” or content validity was considered less important than the power of the institution’s name that was promoting the products or services.

When I became familiar with Structured On-The-Job Training (SOJT), I appreciated SOJT because SOJT built from the bottom up. The training delivery structure was designed around the actual tasks the employee is expected to master, for which the employer hired the individual in the first place. Structuring the best practices into training delivery so that workers can learn faster how to perform each task and to standardize the delivery between each shift’s trainers and each trainee gets to the company’s bottom line. It is seen as an investment that can be defended to accountants, unlike core and technical instruction. Read More

If Your Organization Classifies Your “Greatest Asset” as an “Expense,” You’ll Continue to Have Workforce Issues

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

How often have we heard by an employer that their “greatest asset is their people” or, “we need to invest in our people to continue to grow?“ These are statements affirming the importance of the worker to the overall success of the enterprise. However, actions taken by employers often hollow out these motivating themes, rendering them as repeating platitudes bordering on the disingenuous.

Actions that cast suspicion on her employers sincerity that their workers are at the greatest assets include:

• Cutting the training budget, if one was in place at all, while bragging about the companies, growth and profitability;
• Laying off workers at the first sign of trouble ahead for quarterly report to shareholders;
• Withholding increases in employee wages, cutting of benefits;
• Hiring workers from the outside, instead of training, grooming, and promoting internally.

It is often a sad mistake for employers to remind workers how important they are, while carrying out any of these types of contradictory and potentially counter-productive actions. Especially when companies have seen a steady increase in profits, these acts are self-defeating. Showing shareholders that even if they have had a slight decline in quarterly profits for investing in worker development, causing the shareholders earnings per share to be only slightly affected, might be acceptable to all if the goal is worthy and communicated effectively. And slight decreases in this year’s returns as a result in small investments in training that will lead to an expected increase in next year’s, and the year after that’s, performance seems reasonable and ripe for the asking.

Employees accepted the platitudes for a number of years because they wanted to believe it, thought accepting it was for the greater good or felt they had no choice. The major fact that company profits and CEO wages have continued to rise over the last 30–40 years while the average workers pay has remained flat is good evidence of that. One would think that after 30 to 40 years of benefiting at the expense of the employee and their family that employers would collectively say that they had a good run, and it’s time to share the wealth with the ones who made it possible.

Developing workers, creating opportunity paths to advancement and increases in individual wealth, are not only a good way for an employer to improve overall capacity, promote sustainability and flexibility, but it provides the employer with an empirically proven increase in return on each worker’s investment, and collectively the organization’s return on investment to the operation. Read More

Read the full December, 2023 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

We Have Enough Evidence: Without Employer-Based Structured OJT, Worker Development Falls Way Short

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

As a nation, we have become accustomed to kicking the can down the road. Maybe not deliberately, we appear to be locked into that mode with regard to worker development. It is not for lack of resources – billions are spent each year by federal programs, state governments and employers. If one backs away and looks at the big picture, the will is there but it seems more that the resources just are not properly aligned and focused.

Employers have been struggling with the “skills gap” since the 1980’s. Every manner of solution has been tried, but the gap seems to linger and grow. This is due, in large part, to disproportionately more emphasis being placed on preparing future workers for work and not enough on the employer’s vital role in providing the task-specific training once hired, and “upskilling” them through change.

Employers have been led to believe that the solution lies solely with education. While laying the strong foundation upon which to build strong workers is an important part of the solution, if the employer does not immediately begin building on the foundation, the foundation degrades relative to the continually evolving job requirements, and the opportunity is lost.

For nearly all firms, training a worker for the tasks they were hired to perform, once hired, is a mixture of uncoordinated efforts. Sometimes an expert worker emerges, but it is hard to explain how it happened let alone repeat the process. In reality, worker development and worker performance are inextricably linked. In practice, they seldom are. Most employers have no way of measuring how much under-developed capacity is on their payrolls or they would act immediately.

“Transfer of knowledge” is often confused with “transfer of expertise,” Read More

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.

But if we ask “who trained this expert,” “how was he or she trained,” or “what specifications and standards were emphasized,” we come up empty. By just playing the role of a trainee, and allowing one of these experts to train you on a task, will reveal a lot as to what the new-hire or cross-trainee can expect. If we compare this expert’s task performance to other peer experts, we probably will notice slight differences in performance between them, which means workers that each trained may be trained differently on the same task. Read More

The Employers Have the Most Advanced Equipment Available for Training

by Frank Gibson, Workforce Development Advisor, retired from The Ohio State University – Alber Enterprise Center

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.

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™ 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, 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. Read More

Read the full November, 2023 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

The Good News, Enormous Employer Wealth is Waiting to be Harvested

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

The good news for employers is that there is a tremendous amount of wealth yet to be harvested under the very noses. For most companies, it is one of the most overlooked assets and last to be maximized as with any other assets of the organization. Strangely, it is the asset that employers usually recognize as the organization’s greatest.

Sadly, accounting practices still classify labor, as an “expense” while classifying the purchase of equipment the “expense” is expected to operate as in “asset” or “investment,” which is commonly defined as the “commitment of resources to achieve later benefits.” Little is known about the value of the so-called expense nor the return on worker investment, accumulating value throughout the lifespan of the worker. Historically there have been few ways to account for it. Consequently, a general manager has very little data to present to the board when told to cut expenses – the easiest being headcount.

Every employee who is hired encounters the same scenario. Once hired and through whatever screening available to make sure that the known pre-hire skills are sufficient to learn the unique tasks that make up the job, the blank-slate employee is most likely matched-up with somebody who has already demonstrated they can perform the tasks to the employer’s satisfaction. No structure, no training tools, no documentation, just an informal experience that differs from informal trainer to informal trainer, shift to shift, for every employee that goes through the ritual. Read More

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 a recent 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.”

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.

Proactive Technologies’ Turnkey Package Offers for Prospective and Returning Clients – Discount Expiring Soon

Estimating the Costs Associated With Skipping Employer-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.

Total Cost of Ownership formulas, such as the one used by the Reshoring Iniative, try to capture the hidden and overlooked costs of off-shoring operations, with labor challenges being one factor considered. But even so, the factor’s significance is understated. Read More

Read the full October, 2023 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

A Training Approach That Should Make the Bean Counters Happy

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Whether out of indifference or lack of awareness, it is an unspoken truth that more and more employers have been neglecting their role in worker development lately. Investments in related technical instruction are being pushed to the back burner by ever growing emphasis on meeting quarterly numbers; the push for greater output and profits to meet shareholder expectations which seems to perpetually increase. Classes and online content have always been seen by accounting as costs that can be put-off for a later date that, now, never seems to come.

The more important on-the-job training (the informal transfer of task best practice and expertise) is squeezed in if and when time allows (which is in short supply) by whoever is available – this in an age of Lean and continuous improvement. If employers are waiting for someone else to train their workers to 100% mastery of their unique tasks, on their unique equipment for their unique processes, well that is just wishful thinking.

The contradictions are alarming, and many times middle managers and upper management of corporate-run or private equity managed enterprises are caught in the middle. They know the risks of neglecting training and they see the results first-hand, but have little say in the matter or are afraid of getting caught up in a “cost v. benefit” discussion with people that seem to live in a different world and have made up their mind before the discussion begins. When capacity deteriorates or the siren’s call of cheaper labor markets prevails, someone makes the decision to move the entire operation to a location where training is even more difficult but can be absorbed due to offsetting wage discounts – that is until wages rise and total cost of ownership is understood. Read More

Cross-Training Workers After Lean Efforts Builds Capacity Using Existing Staff

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

Lean activities to redesign processes for better efficiency in a department, or between departments, sometimes result in “surplus” workers – partially or in whole units. It is the subjective priority of Lean practitioners since it is a tangible illustration of a successful Lean improvement. Processes that previously needed 3 people to complete may now only need two, if the efficiency were discovered. So what happens to that one person that has valuable acquired expertise, representing a significant investment by the employer? Would the wise outcome of Lean efforts be to just cut that person from the lineup?

The short answer is most likely not. Any efficiency and cost savings brought about by the Lean redesign would be offset by the loss of the expertise for which the investment has already been made. Most likely the reason for the Lean was not in reaction to no return on worker investment, but rather a desire to increase the return on worker investment.

If the worker is reassigned to another department, and no task-based training infrastructure is in place, that reassignment may lower the efficiency there which, again, reduces the gains made by the Lean effort. So part of the Lean effort must be the deliberate cross-training of workers in temporary assignments or longer-term reassignments to other departments that seem to have the need for increased staffing, perhaps as a result of the increased throughput achieved from the Lean effort in the upstream department in the chain.

Explaining Your Process Training to Auditors, Prospects and Clients

by Proactive Technologies, Inc. – Staff

How much time, energy and resources are expended by your firm when someone comes to visit and wants to “kick the company’s tires?” When it comes to training your workers to internal and/or company processes, a structured on-the-job training program that operates smoothly and completely in the background may have the answers your clients are looking for.

For most organizations, the general notion is that training is going on in every corner of the organization, for every worker at any time of the day or night. One person is showing another person how to perform a process, operate a piece of equipment or software, fill out a form or, yes, make a copy using the new copy machine just installed. How effective is that informal form of training? Have you ever walked by a copy machine and seen someone standing in front of it, staring at the control panel…then the sky, as if seeking divine intervention. Now, think of the more complex tasks!

When the resident expert masters a task and it becomes routine, there is a tendency for them to marginalize the task as so easy that the next trainee should learn it by osmosis. If not, maybe the new-hire “just doesn’t seem to want to learn.” Somehow, the organization may get by. In this case, like so many, it may sound like an insignificant example of training, but not to the person who needs the copy and who may be judged if a meeting is waiting for it.

Proactive Technologies’ Turnkey Package Offers for Prospective and Returning Clients – Discount Expiring Soon

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

Now, for a limited time, on top of that opportunity PTI is offering a 10 – 30% discount on projects (depending on number of job classifications targeted and scope) until October 15, 2023! 

In Times of Uncertainty and Change, Realism is Important

In business, the aftermath of any transformational event such as the Dot.com Crash of 2000,  the Crash of 2008,   the Covid-19 Pandemic of 2019 – to name only a few of the recent upheavals – makes it often difficult to get one’s bearings let alone see through the fog clouding the path to the future. It makes one question one’s judgement, sometimes being too afraid to make critical decisions and sometimes too quick to hop on the next bandwagon seeking safety in numbers. How long the fog lasts depends on the depth and scope of trauma incurred. How long it takes to emerge from it is determined by how transparent the fog has become and if any discernable patterns are forming upon which to build a strategy forward.

This applies to all workers, as well. Any disruption to employment is followed by a uncontrollable backward slide erasing any gains made to that point. Then the dreaded wait while the economy finds bottom before any future plans can be contemplated. Will the prior job still be available, what changes were made by the employer that may require additional training or education that has a substantial lead time before employability? And can education and training for these changes be accessed by someone who has depleted their funds trying to survive?

Chris Rock, popular comedian, director, actor and self-made philosopher, said something very appropriate and very applicable to moments such as this, “in America, you can do anything you want…if there is a job opening for it.” Profoundly honest, this statement implies both positivity about the future and realism about what we all know of today’s form of American capitalism.

Read the full September, 2023 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Is “Better Marketing” the Solution to Employer’s Apathy Toward Worker Training?

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Sometimes taking marketing efforts and spending up a notch is the answer to sagging sales. Sometimes it is just more money spent proving the customer doesn’t want what you are selling. This could be a temporary or protracted limbo. Either way, it is a good time to take an introspective look at the products/services being marketed, the message, and the state of the target customer.

In the last few decades, marketing platforms were created with the sole purpose of positioning themselves and their platform’s clients, deeper into the consumer’s psyche and life. It seems, in many cases, marketers bombard consumers with personalized content in the hope that they will be worn down and pushed to a buy decision. It must be successful, since most consumers feel personal privacy is no longer a thing and complaining about isn’t worth the time while consumption continues at a relatively strong pace – even if purchases are on credit.

However, marketing efforts can over-do it and erode a brand’s credibility. How many people have gazed at the “fun size” candy bar that looks smaller than the last one bought? Or the “party size” bag of potato chips – smaller bag and half filled with air? Or felt inundated with reward offers from even the liquor store, or credit card offers of reward points which seem difficult to use and paid for with 28% interest rates on purchases? While still effective as choices seem to be shrinking, this hyper-marketing could be driving a cynical society even more so.

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.

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.

Employers: Maximize Worker Development by Better Utilizing Local Resources

by Frank Gibson, Workforce Development Advisor, retired from The Ohio State University – Alber Enterprise Center

Every year millions upon millions of state-provided worker development aid is either not utilized or not utilized efficiently and effectively. It represents a frustrating, protracted stalemate between employers who are not sure what skills they need in employees and what to do to maximize an employee’s core skills once employed, and educational institutions that lack the current, accurate and stable (i.e. targeted skills that won’t be changed in 6-months as the next Wall Street hype emerges) workforce needs data to design better products and services for employers.

The current state of workforce development is frustrating from everyone’s standpoint; employers who seem to go through workers like they are changing clothes, employees and potential employees who have given up turning to education for help in developing skills for a long-term career opportunity that pays for the education and can sustain a family, and who skip from job-to-job to find the best opportunity/compensation mix, and workforce development agencies that have the funding resources to support credible projects but are disappointed when employers bail in the middle of a project that seems to be working.

Short-term thinking has progressively eroded the effectiveness of worker development models around the country. Fundamental to any good worker development project is an accurate target upon which to build an accurate and effective worker development model. Someone has to take the lead to organize the uncertainty into clarity, so whatever is done feeds a purpose in a deliberate strategy. Drifting for decades is as toxic to a trainee’s or worker’s optimism and mental health, as it is an employer’s sustained success. Read More

Appreciating the Value of Labor

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

For businesses that have the capital for the investment in new equipment or processes to expand and improve operations, in an effort 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.

WELCOME CONTITECH!

Proactive Technologies, Inc. and its staff welcomes Contitech – a Continental company named, once again, as one of America’s Best Large Employers for 2023 by Forbes magazine. This is the seventh time Continental has been named to this esteemed list for its efforts in supporting the employee experience.

ContiTech develops, manufactures and markets products, systems and intelligent components made of rubber, plastic, metal and fabric. They are used in machine and plant engineering, mining, agriculture, the automotive industry and other important sectors of the future.

“To be recognized again among America’s best large employers reinforces our dedication to employees through career development opportunities, commitment to inclusion, and a flexible work-life balance,” said Grace Hu, U.S, Head of Human Relations, Continental. “Emphasis on an employee-centric culture has never been more paramount to business success. Continental is proud of the workplace culture they have fostered and the talented teams that have flourished as a result.

Steven Brinkman, Head of Human Resources – Sun Prairie, WI LDPC & Global Compliance Ambassador is bringing… Read More

Read the full August, 2023 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

You’ve Cut the Training Budget, Then Cut Employees…Now What?

By Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Layoffs are a traditional business solution to cutting costs in response to a softening of the market or unexpected erosion of the underlying economy. But anyone who has implemented a layoff or survived in its aftermath can tell you, layoffs often do not really make business sense; they seem like an act of desperation.

According to Elizabeth Flood, Associate Editor of CFO Dive, “Layoffs may cause organizational drag.” “Layoffs can erode shareholder returns, with expected savings from workforce reductions offset within three years by unforeseen consequences such as reduced employee morale, turnover and loss of customers,” according to recent research from Gartner.

“The first thing to recognize is that there is an immediate upfront cost to layoffs as a business will need to reorganize itself around a smaller group of employees and typically incur costly upfront severance payments,” Vaughan Archer, senior director, research and advisory in the Gartner Finance practice, said in a statement. Businesses will likely see an increase in both “costly contractor hiring and demands for increased compensation from remaining employees who are now under a greater burden,” he said.

Even if an organization avoids a “vicious cycle of employee turnover,” eventually, the business cycle will turn, leaving the organization scrambling for staff, the report said.”

Have You 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.

Workforce Development Partnerships with Substance: My Experience

Partnerships between employers and local educational institutions/training providers are a tricky thing. Not every employer knows clearly what they need nor can they articulate the need, and not every educational institution can understand the need, or has products or services available or relevant enough to make a difference. If either of these realities are present, or worse both of them, it can make worker development partnerships difficult to disappointing.

Employers are closest to the work that they need performed by the worker, which is usually very different from the employer down the road. Yet employers rarely bother to document what makes up that work to articulate it in an understandable way to an educational institution or training provider. If you doubt that, take any of your job classifications and try to explain it in enough detail to train from it.

“Our partnership, located in northern Ohio, was the first implementation of the US Metalworking Skill Standards in the country.”

When in doubt, some employers pull out a sample written process and a few random specifications for compliance to focus the discussion. Seriously, I have been in meetings when an employer pulled out a 15 year old job description, which was a cut-and-paste of a 20 year old job description, and gave it to the community college and said, “we need workers trained for this.” Not surprisingly, they are disappointed and disillusioned when what the community college came up with seems irrelevant when shown to workers currently in the job classification. Read More

The Worker Development Puzzle… For Many

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

After many years of setting up and providing technical support for employer-based structured on the job training programs, I can say with confidence that most, if not all, employers have significant weaknesses in their worker development process. If pressed, I believe most employers are aware of it, but have become comfortable with the mistaken notion that “it is what it is.,” Some are unaware and frustrated at the lack of results when hiring new workers to maintain or build capacity; accountants show signs of concern when hiring adds labor costs and often results in lower production output. Others in management may be concerned with unsustainable poor output quality or an increase in product or service scrap or rework.

Hiring more workers is not always the answer to the apparent lack of capacity to take on new product lines and new projects. Many employers overlook the fact that there is a tremendous amount of untapped capacity among the existing workers who have never had a chance to be fully trained for the jobs for which they were hired. The reason: most companies have remained in the unstructured, informal, undocumented one-on-one task-based training mode – even though the tasks are often transforming and the skills required for jobs have continued to increase in complexity.

Proactive Technologies Turnkey Package Offers for Prospective and 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 for the most unexpected reasons. Proactive Technologies, Inc.^® wants to accommodate and support those decisions in the best way it knows how. This introduction for new and returning clients of its turnkey worker development package is one example.

New Clients:

If you are interested and would be willing to schedule a brief, 45-minute live online briefing on the PROTECH^® approach to worker development and how PTI would make establishing and implementing a training system easy, efficient and with low-to-no investment for your organization, PTI is willing to schedule a free follow-up session to dig deeper into what it would look like considering a job classification of importance to your firm. Simply put: Read More

Read the full July, 2023 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Training Workers for a Moving Target

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

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

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

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

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

Decision Making While Swimming in Divergent Views

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

It seems like we’re all overwhelmed these days. Bad news, natural, disasters, man-made, disasters, and fears of upcoming meteorites, diseases, hurricanes, and government shenanigans. Even the nightly news has nine stories of current and pending disasters followed by one story of a little boy who found a marble, separated by commercials telling us to “ask our doctor” if this new drug is right for us.

What’s different today is that there is no escape from it. It comes through social media platforms on our phones, our computers, it plays on the radio, network and cable news, it comes from massive industries of political and financial pundits, and paid influencers of many kinds. Second-hand versions of the information come from our coworkers, our neighbors, our friends, and even our clergy.

It is difficult these days to extract the information we need from these sources and make the best, most proper decision in response. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by having to do so, yet that’s what we do both in life and in business; we make decisions based on the information we receive, and hopefully make good ones.

Making it more difficult is the proliferation of paid influencers who have a vested interest in making a believer out of you. These aren’t just the social media types telling you how wonderful their product is, embedded with subliminal messaging to influence your decision to buy based on their representation of their experience. Since the rise of “infotainment,” it has been difficult to separate out fact from fiction, reporting from advocacy and trends from high-pressuring, yet subtle and crafty, marketing. Read More

Worker Development Is an Ongoing Commitment, Not a “One and Done” Event

by Frank Gibson, Workforce Development Advisor, retired from The Ohio State University – Alber Enterprise Center

I have spent many years of my life working in manufacturing and providing consulting services to manufacturers and workforce development groups. While employers like to showcase there ISO, IATF or AS certification symbolizing their commitment to quality, imbedded throughout those certification program requirements are the need to demonstrate a system to develop workers, to maintain records that workers are trained to the company’s processes, show the continuous improvement of the training programs and updating of workers, and the protection of “legacy knowledge” and “tribal wisdom” to ensure sustainability.

Unfortunately, one common thread I find is the employer’s weak focus and commitment to the development of workers. Sure, some employers rise above the rest and there are a lot of core skill and industry-general training programs hosted by community colleges and technical training providers (some seem to make the effort to be relevant with changes in technology and the trajectory of industry). However, too often management rarely stays focused on worker development as they do on other parts of the organization. I don’t often see a “commitment to quality” and “continuous improvement” principles being applied to what the organizations fondly call “training.”

Typically, the conversation changes to classes that are offered before the realization that accounting will see it as a cost and veto the idea before it gets off the ground. Or, the manager hands it off to someone…knowing it will probably see the same fate. Even though most states have grant funds available to help employers pay the cost of classes provided locally and specialty training provided elsewhere, states are willing to provide funding to offset most, if not all, of the employer’s investment to implement a true, documented structured on-the-job training program, as well.

Debt Ceiling, Deficit and National Debt; The Difference and Why it Matters

by President of Proactive Technologies, Inc. – Staff

There is a lot of talk and confusion these days about state of the country’s finances. Often one measure is used to conflate and confuse the discussion about how to improve the others. The danger is those most impacted by whatever corrective measure becomes law are usually the same ones who have been sliding backward for the last 4 decades.

It is important to know the difference and add your voice to the discussion.

“The debt ceiling is a limit on the total amount of government borrowing. First put in place by Congress during World War I, it was meant to give blanket authorization for the Treasury Department to borrow money up to a set amount.”

“The U.S. budget deficit is how much more the federal government spends annually than it receives in revenue during that same time period.”

Read the full June, 2023 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

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

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

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

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

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

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

Retiring Workers and the Tragic Loss of Intellectual Property and Value

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

The warnings went out over two decades ago. Baby Boomers were soon to retire, taking their accumulated expertise – locked in their brains – with them. But very little was done to address this problem. Call it complacency, lack of awareness of the emerging problem, preoccupation with quarterly performance, disinterest or disbelief, very few companies took action and the Crash of 2008 disrupted any meager efforts that were underway.

cording to Steve Minter in an IndustryWeek Magazine article on April 10, 2012, “Only 17% of organizations said they had developed processes to capture institutional memory/organizational knowledge from employees close to retirement.” Who is going to train their replacements once they are gone? Would the learning curve of replacement workers be as long and costly, repeating the same learning mistakes, as the retiree’s learning curve? Would operations be disrupted and, if so, to what level?

“In our new “outsourcing nation,” a widely held belief is that employees are simply costs to be cut and not assets to be valued.” …. “Manufacturing faces a two-sided problem: it not only has thousands of people retiring, but it does not have the training programs to train skilled workers to replace them.”

A Strategy to Capture Tribal Knowledge IndustryWeek- Michael Collins 5-23-16

In the last few years, it seems an alternative to the concentration of expertise in a few subject matter experts has become to use lower-wage temporary or contract workers who specialize in smaller quantities of processes, and who can be “traded-out” with a minimum amount of disruption. History will tell us just how costly that approach was and if anything was learned. Read More

The Skills Gap Solution; Employers Are Still Reluctant to Commit to Role Only They Can Fill

by Proactive Technologies, Inc. Staff

Education cannot, and should not be asked to, close the “skills gap” on their own. Employers have been concerned about the “skills gap” since the 1980’s, and the nature and location of the job has continued to change…at an accelerating rate. Employers have convinced themselves to wait for education to close the gap. In the meantime, tremendous resources continue to be expended, but the gap continues to grow.

Educational institutions are not suited, staffed, funded and equipped to train workers for every job, for every employer, nor should they be. Educational institutions do their best work when they build the labor supply with strong, relevant basic and core skills (including STEM), and industry-general skills. Whether those efforts are worthwhile and the resources well-spent depend on two important things: 1) does an employer see value in hiring a graduate, and 2) is there a method in place to ensure those skills are integrated into mastery of the job-tasks the employer needs performed; the value that will influence the employer to retain them.

Only employers can train the worker on tasks they need performed and that affect their bottom line.  They have the need, the facilities, the most current equipment for their operation and the personnel with current expertise. Yet, in reality most employer’s methods amount to hardly more than pairing two people and hoping for the best. This is where the gap is most profound and continues to grow. Read More

Costs Associated With Unstructured, Haphazard Worker Training – Part 2 of 2

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Last month’s issue of Proactive Technologies Report’s Part 1 of “Costs Associated With Unstructured, Haphazard Worker Training,” offered a number of examples of unstructured, haphazard and ineffective worker training that I experienced in my early years in manufacturing. We all have had similar experiences throughout our lives to draw on, I am sure. It is still perplexing that – in view of all of the advanced systems, process controls and metrics that keep an enterprise operating competitively – management would assume that such a “hands-off” approach to developing the critical worker component wouldn’t detract from the other metrics. Why would management expect anything more than skeptical results?

“New equipment that leads to decreased output, more workers added but productivity and capacity falling, or more workers producing product but most of it going into the scrap or rework bin. All of these counter-intuitive outcomes – signs of inadequate or non-existent task-based training – will eventually grab upper management’s attention!”

It is a given that new technology and equipment are dependent on someone learning to either program, service and/or operate them correctly. The incumbent workers, in the job classification before the transition, are the obvious choices for learning. Conceptually, they were doing the work prior to automation with previous version technology and understand the theory and current best practice of the work to be done. These worker’s attained skills will now be tested against the new skill requirements. Unfortunately, training of current workers for even obvious new technology requirements such as setup, operate and changeover of the equipment, is often overlooked or its significance downplayed. Consequently, often the economic benefits that advances in technology are to provide are marginally, or never, realized despite the costly investment.

Read the full May, 2023 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.