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Proactive Technologies Report – March, 2023

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Lack of Immediate “Big Win” Puts Improvements in Worker Development on Chopping Block…For Short-Term Focused Management Cultures

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Let’s face it, discussing the desperate need for worker training to build consistent performance, increased worker output and compliance, is a hard sell in any boardroom. The first question is usually, “how much is this going to cost us?” Not “what is the investment and how will we realize the return?” Since accountants, who are not trained in any aspect of worker development, have more weight in this type of showdown, guess who wins.

Shareholder gains are measured in terms of quarterly profit margins; try explaining the merits of building a stronger, more resilient and retained workforce and the value of increasing worker capacity, increasing work quantity, quality and compliance over yawns and disinterest. It usually takes decades of unintentional or intentional neglect to weaken a firm’s workforce; it stands to reason the solution won’t bring exciting monetary returns in a quarter.

There is plenty of shared blame for this state of disconnect. Human resource professionals, training and development experts, and education in general have focused their workforce development solutions promotion on products they have – the quick and simple classroom and online products. It makes sense. That is the domain they are strongest. These products are great for pre-employment core skill development and post-hire core and general technical skill (if properly aligned), but these represent transfer of knowledge, not transfer of task-based expertise.

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It is hard to draw a line from completion of a knowledge transfer course to improvements in a worker’s performance. Sometimes it is due to the lack of fit with the actual need, sometimes to relevancy of the content. And courses just happened to be priced in “seat time” units, which fits an accountant’s“cost” definition well. As easy as it is to list cost in a budget, it is just as easy to delete it from the budget.

In an interesting article in IndustryWeek Magazine entitled, ‘Where Are the Big Wins?’ How I Got Fired as a Lean Consultant,” authors Rick Bohan, Ron Jacques described their experience with this dilemma as this: Read More 

“Quiet Quiting” on a Collision Course with “Quiet Hiring;” How to Make Matters Worse.

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

“Quiet Quitting” and “Quiet Hiring” may be new names, but both phenomena have been around as long as there has been work to perform and someone hired to perform it. The media seems to believe they discovered the trends and named them, like explorers “discovered” new lands…that were inhabited. Like every other impending crisis named, there seems to be manufactured pressure to respond to it – spawning a wave of “expert” opinions that often overshoot the intended target and sometimes complicating matters further.

In an article, What to Do About Quiet Quitting: 3 Ways to Reframe the Narrative, the author comments, “You’ve seen the term splashed across headlines and igniting social media. It isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s coming into sharper focus – like a bullseye – as employees return to the office. Quiet quitting, or “quitting in place” or, simply, “disengagement,” is the latest viral catchphrase that reminds us of one single, inexorable truth: That the pandemic has left workplaces reimagined and workers forever changed. And it’s a wakeup call for employers.”

Disengagement is defined as “the action or process of withdrawing from involvement in a particular activity, situation, or group,” which can be hidden or overt. It can be a simple difference between a worker minimally doing their job to take home their pay and no more, to someone doing that and harboring growing resentment towards their manager, the company and/or their coworkers but lacking the skills and confidence to move on. If left unchecked, it can poison the work environment and, worse, may lead to workplace confrontations.

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While many employers lack the strategy, will or awareness to reengage demoralized workers, often employers exacerbate the situation by doubling down on the neglect or provoking an escalation. Years of not balancing the inputs of competitive performance by foregoing the development of tools and expertise to facilitate enhanced, sustained performance – coupled with simmering worker detachment – sometimes leads employers to accept advice that is more momentarily convenient rather than appropriate when results seem less than expected. Pushing unrealistic performance goals on a fragile organization only fans the simmer to a boil. Read More

Training Issue or Attitude Issue? Understanding the Difference

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

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

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

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

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Assuming that the offered wage and benefits are competitive, there are four essential considerations to the hiring and keeping the best workers; Read More

Confusion Over What Constitutes “Training” is Stumbling Block to Effective Worker Development Strategies

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

For the anyone searching for information to help them choose a worker development strategy, a web search of “on-the-job training methods” might produce thirty or forty informative, but confusing, charts. The search result is a mixture of domains, methods, philosophies – one seemingly in conflict with the other. A non-practitioner of workforce development strategies can gather from this search result alone why there is a perpetual state of confusion between even “experts,” marked by decades of employer and trainee disappointment in the lack of recognizable strategies and outcomes, which are often devoid of meaningful results.

Over the years, approaches and methods have evolved out of their ineffectiveness, many diverging from the basic principals of workforce development. Markets for products to address these approaches grew and well-funded marketing began to find unaware customers. The notion of “training” morphed into branded versions of “learning,” selected not so much on their basis in logic, but more on the lack of “smart” choices and how well the marketing effort worked.

“A great first step is to clearly differentiate between “learning” and “training.” The strategies, methods of delivery and outcomes for each are very different. Without such clarity, one might mistakenly invest heavily in a strategy to accomplish worker development objectives that, instead, uses up vital resources and scarce opportunity, and sours the organization’s attitude toward training for years to come.”

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The acceleration started around 40 years ago. Prior to that, job classifications did not change much and were relatively simple in structure. Then panic set in over the approaching “skills gaps,” as computers were introduced into every aspect of our lives. Fear of baby boomers nearing retirement, taking their technical expertise with them, added to the challenge. Solutions started to appear out of academia, based on the world they knew and not as much on the world they were trying to improve, as they would have liked to think.

Did these methods address the workforce development challenges of their time? In 2023, employers are still concerned with the “skills gap” phenomenon. Read More

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

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Proactive Technologies Report – February, 2023

Posted on by DPrigelmeierpti

Contracting? Expanding? Don’t Underestimate the Tremendous Value of Your Worker’s Cumulative Process Expertise

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Paraphrased many times and in many ways, the meaning is the same. “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” W. Edwards Deming put it more succinctly, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t what you are doing.”

How often do you hear an employer critically examining their system of worker selection, development and maximization? Has anyone tried to describe your firm’s strategy for developing new-hires once on board, or developing incumbent workers to something more than a fraction of what everyone expects of them? Does it sometimes seem that all you have to train your workers to be their best once hired is, “Bob, this is Jim. Why don’t you show him around?” Don’t be embarrassed; it is more common than you think.

“Decisions that look good on this quarter’s balance sheet too often are made without realizing that the short-term gain grossly underestimates the long-term losses yet to be realized; reduced capacity, loss of historical expertise that made the business thrive and degradation of work process compliance.”

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Has anyone tried to calculate the enormous hidden, but real, cost of unused worker capacity, manifesting itself as hiring too many people when workers you already have hired never had a formal. structured, deliberate development plan? Or how low worker productivity, lower than expected quantity and quality of work, lack of compliance with work processes, quality plans and safety requirements, eats into profits?

For capital investments, on the other hand, textbooks have been written on how to classify them, and how to predict and measure return-on-investment. It is unthinkable for a firm to invest in a $1,000,000 piece of machinery and be satisfied with it putting out 50% less than advertised. Yet, the same principles should apply to the investment in workers. Why would anyone be satisfied with every worker hired only being trained and capable of performing 30-50% of their job? Still, decisions are made to keep the underperforming equipment and not funding the training of the operators to run it…until backed against the wall and the decision is made to cut the “cost” of the workers themselves. Read More

Thinking Past the Assessment – Unfinished Goals and Unrealized Expectations

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

Literally speaking, an “assessment” is the process of measuring the value, quality and/or quantity of something. There are many types of assessments, and methods for assessing. In theory, it is the process of evaluating one thing against a set of criteria to determine the match/mismatch.

There are assessments for risk, for taxes, vulnerability. There are psychological, health, and political assessments. There is a group of educational assessments that measure a variety of outcomes such as educational attainment – assessments of course content mastery, assessment of grade level attainment, assessments of Scholastic Aptitude Tests (“SAT”) that compare a student to their peers nationally and a variety of college readiness exams.

“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. “

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Educational assessments have been adapted for use in workforce development and employment, used to assess a prospective employee’s suitability for a job opening, with limited success. 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. 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.

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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.

Technology shifts so fast these days, and the focus of workforce training is so volatile, that it makes little sense for educational institutions to purchase equipment for training when only a few employers have similar equipment and the equipment may be obsolete before the school gets through the purchasing, installation and instructor training stages let alone before someone completes a 2-year training program. In addition, the company or companies that were targeted for this training might be acquired, closed or moved – leaving before any return on the investment of time, money and facilities are realized. Read More

Tips for Establishing Your Company’s Training Strategy – Practical, Measurable, Extremely Economical and Scalable

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

For most companies, an in-house training center doesn’t have to be brick and mortar, and doesn’t necessarily require additional equipment and personnel to support it. It is about focusing the resources already available to develop workers faster and to a much higher level of capacity. This does not happen by throwing dollars or classes at the problem; if that were the case many employers who did so would have solved the “skills gap” problem. It takes a more deliberate approach than that to achieve the outcome that has been out of reach, for many, for decades.

In previous articles, such as in the May, 2016 issue of the Proactive Technologies Report, “A Simple Solution to Skill Gaps – New-Hires and Incumbents” I described a simple, easy to implement strategy for developing new-hires and incumbent workers to full capacity. I emphasized that by focusing on the outcome, the proper inputs become clearer. But by focusing on the inputs, the connection to the outcome may not necessarily be clear. Any use of irrelevant, improper or ineffective worker development inputs means unnecessary costs with low or no return, wasted time and additional opportunity costs.

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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.”

“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 they might be wasting company time, money and resources.”

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. Read More

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

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Proactive Technologies Report – January, 2023

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Standardizing “Best Practices”

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

When it comes to the term “best practices” for process-driven tasks, there seems a wide range of understanding of the concept; some better than others. According to Wikipedia, “A best practice is a method or technique that has consistently shown results superior to those achieved with other means, and that is used as a benchmark. In addition, a “best” practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered…Best practices are used to maintain quality as an alternative to mandatory legislated standards and can be based on self-assessment or benchmarking. Best practice is a feature of accredited management standards such as ISO 9000 and ISO 14001 – the framework for industry quality programs such as AS9000 and IATF16949. ISO 30414 broadened its focus on best practices with its “Human Resource Management – Guidelines for Internal and External Human Capital Reporting” in an effort to secure an organization’s sustainability with regard to worker technical expertise through establishing documented best practices.

This credible definition of the concept is representative of a consensus opinion that I have seen in the field at organizations who strive for high quality performance. However, how many individual interests derive their best practices, or what they display as their best practices, seems often to operate at the edge of the definition yet close enough to claim that best practices have been achieved. In truth, proclaiming a process as a best practice may be soothing to the locals, it may not have the same credibility with clients, potential clients or auditing agencies.

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There are few steps that can help any organization achieve a best practice, which is related to the quality assurance notion of “repeatability.” Each systematic step is important to ensure credibility of use of the title. In addition, this approach helps to minimize the tendency to over-analyze a procedure and dwell on the least important aspects for benchmarks and metrics.

  1. Define the Task or Procedure – In order to analyze a task/procedure, it must be targeted at the task level, which means: “A unit of work that has a beginning point, ending point and a series of steps in between, and when the steps are performed correctly and in the right order a desired outcome is achieved.” Without clarity of the target task, the process of defining each step of the task as a best practice component may be difficult and/or the sequence can become convoluted.
  2. Determine Best Practice(s) – If the desired outcome is accurately known, it is easier to define the steps, or “inputs,” that lead to that outcome.  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.

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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. Sometimes these differences can be subtle and of no consequence, sometimes they become a point of contention, lead to confusion and/or unsafe and incorrect task performance.

Every work environment is less than ideal for learning. Production pressures, personality clashes, learning style and teaching style differences, and departmental boundary incursions do not make it easy for a trainer to train or a trainee to learn without structure and guidance. If any of our experts train the next wave of new-hires or cross-trainees without structure, tools and standards – the building blocks of “best practice” performance – some of the expertise might not transfer and the differences between them become more obvious with each wave. This can often lead to frustrating confrontation between shifts, with one shift declaring the other two shifts as incompetent. Read More

Increasing Worker Capacity – An Alternative to Cutting Workers for Short-term Cost Savings

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

In business, if you encounter market “softness” and believe that the business level that you were previously operating at is now unsustainable – even if for a limited period – you might be tempted to first “cut labor costs” to extend short-term cash flow and/or make the balance sheet appear healthier in pressured by investors. It often becomes a slippery slope that can lead some organizations struggling to get off. Sometimes the pundits’ forecasts were inaccurate or the recovery is swifter than anticipated. Regardless, what appear as a benign short-term solution can have long-term repercussions as the market recovers and the employer is now struggling to regain the capacity the workers afforded, while watching opportunity slip by.

Sometimes investments are made in machinery and technology during the lulls to get ready for the economic up-turn, but too rarely is any effort made to determine the level of each worker’s current capacity (i.e. what percent of the tasks they were hired to “expertly” perform) relative to the job they are currently in and what could be done to increase it to handle not only existing technology and processes, but the new technology and processes as well. One might even think about cross-training workers to build “reserve capacity.”

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Too often, in this age where every quarterly report has to be as good or better than the one before – actually earnings per share – even if the economy currently doesn’t allow it, well-run businesses are pressured to cut into the bone; driving down wages, cutting benefits and ultimately eliminating workers. Investment in worker training isn’t permitted. It doesn’t take an accounting genius to make sweeping, ill-informed cuts, but it does take a pretty savvy leader to recognize and avoid this perilous track or, worse yet, pick up the pieces after these mistakes have been made. Read More

Enterprise Expansion/Contraction and Worker Development Standardization

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

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

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

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

For companies contracting, one would think this would just be scaling but in a negative direction. It usually ends up more complicated than that when work for three different areas are consolidated on top of the work performed by the workers in the fourth area. If left alone this will produce an obvious bottleneck to say the least. With consolidation of the jobs, and therefore the consolidation of the tasks required of workers in each, intuitively it would stand that recipients of these tasks should be trained on the best practice of these new processes and necessary compliance. Otherwise, contraction of an enterprise will continue as overall capacity dwindles and decreasing output results.

In a third scenario, when a company acquires another site or other sites, the acquiring enterprise usually brings in an expert who can unify HR and HRD strategies and already knows how to analyze what is needed. An effective expert will make sure inventories are taken at each site to formulate a strategy on how to consolidate differing systems and policies into one unified system – hopefully flexible enough to accommodate the uniqueness of each site. The process flow follows a logical track: Read More

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

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Proactive Technologies Report – December, 2022

Posted on by DPrigelmeierpti

Is it Possible to Close the “Skills Gap” if Focused on the Symptom, Not the Cause?

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

There is nothing like the futility of trying to solve a specific problem with a general solution…or treating the symptoms with methods that do not address the underlying problem. No one would use a screwdriver to tighten a nut or bolt. However, in an environment surrounded by a loud, unrelenting and self-interested screwdriver industry “expert” voices there may well be many who try – even those who should know better. Especially if given a “free” screwdriver.

According to the Center for Economic Research, “US Businesses lose approximately $160 billion total every year as the result of the skills gap.” According to a 2017 Training Magazine report, the “Total 2017 U.S. training expenditures [employer] rose significantly, increasing 32.5 percent to $90.6 billion. This dropped slightly to an estimated at 87.6 billion in 2018.” On top of this, in 2018 the US spent $50 million on STEM education (simply putting back what was taken out of education after reforms started in the 1980’s) to “address the skill gap of future employees.” While education and training throughout 2020 -2022 was upended by the Covid-19 pandemic, employers seem to be slowly returning to the informal forms of training. Predominant prior to the crisis, informal on-the-job training is a familiarly better alternative (to the online tools and programs they tried during the Covid slowdowns and shutdowns) for their practicality in developing the employer’s unique task-based skills.

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Considering the U.S. has been warning about the “skills gap” for over 40 years, the amount of money lost – spent on accommodating, or wrongly addressing, the symptom – the total cumulative loss could be in the significant trillions of dollars…not to mention the resources misapplied. And millions of workers who want, and wanted, to work in a career and employers that could/could have employed them were, both, left empty.

This history has led some to suggest the skills gap is a farce. Even if your concerns aren’t that extreme, one has to wonder why with all of the money spent, the resources applied and the employers and trainees impacted, we seem to still be struggling with a skills gap that started to reveal itself in the 1980’s.

The fact of the matter is that employers have been just as unfocused and ambivalent about defining the problem as government has been zealous about having the only “solution.” While employers say they need and expect workers that can “hit the ground running,” “think outside the box,” “have skills for the jobs of tomorrow” and all of the other buzzwords and phrases circulating, what they really need is workers that can perform their unique tasks and processes, on their unique equipment, in their unique environment within their unique pay structure in a world of change. Not only do employers lack a clear definition of the job as it exists today, internal and external forces never allow a job to fully materialize before it is significantly changed by design or by changes in technology, or relocated out of the education system’s service area. Read More

Task-Specific Performance Reviews – An Accurate Metric for a Structured On-Job-Training Outcome

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

We have all been through it. For decades this has been the topic of comedy shows and movies…the dreaded annual performance review. And when it is over, we might tell our confidants how non-reflective of reality and unfair it was. We calm down over the next few months and grow more anxious each month as we get closer to the next one thinking we are at its whim.

Why are they used? Are they supposed to be a good measure or performance or just a way to meet a human resources department obligation. More times than not they seem like a justification for not giving a wage increase than guidance on how an employee can continually improve and contribute to the organization.

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It is bewildering why management would spend the time and money, and risk employee morale time and again, on a employee measurement that isn’t.

Conceptually, the performance review has a purpose. It is to measure employee performance during a review period, identify areas of weakness and strength, and offer guidance on how an employee can improve on shortcomings and expand potential. But that is only possible if it is accurate to the job classification against which an individual is measured.

Several decades ago, performance review criteria became a template – one form fits all. In order for that to be possible, the metrics had to become more general, such as whether the individual “works well with others,” “completes projects on time,” “shows initiative.” At best, these types of measures leave the reviewed wondering whose job performance is being discussed. At worst, these subjective measures leave a lot of latitude for the reviewer who sometimes deliberately or inadvertently punishes an otherwise good performing employee. Read More

Is the “Gainful Employment” Requirement for Education Realistic?

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

In May of 2019, the U.S. Education Department sent out reminders to universities of the July 1, 2019 deadline to update their websites to include specific information to comply with U.S. Obama-era “gainful employment” regulations. On July 1, 2019 it was revealed that the U.S. Department of Education published its final regulation to eliminate the so-called gainful employment rule. However, it may not go away entirely. Proponents of the rule say Congress might later choose to alter the regulation in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA), which would require the department to again address the issue.nly focuses on the “supply-side” of the equation. No matter how much tinkering goes on with the rule, if employers and government policy fail to provide the quality jobs with quality compensation levels for which the focused college learning is directed, gainful employment may remain an unachievable goal.

In the 1990’s, computers and microprocessors began to appear in more and more aspects of a broader range of occupations. The alarms went off that this was going to dramatically and significantly alter the nature of work and the skills required in the future. Education at all levels began to reexamine its learning models and content in an, often, futile attempt to “keep up with change,” never mind get ahead of it.

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“Futile” since, concurrent with this transformation, government was compounding this disruption with trade agreements and incentives to a smaller and smaller concentration of corporations that encouraged the exportation of the jobs that education programs were targeting. Additionally, employers imported workers to fill these positions (through visa programs) who would perform the same work at a fraction of the established compensation levels – many of whom attended the same U.S. education institutions.

We unfortunately know now that what followed was a rapid churning of jobs that used to provide income security and fulfilling careers to all levels of the workforce and made it nearly impossible for anyone to enroll in a 2 or 4-year education program confident there will be jobs waiting for them upon graduation. Read More

Learning, Unfortunately, The Hard Way

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Employers are being tested these days on their ability to respond to a rapidly changing world and maintain operational continuity. Who could have imagined that a pandemic would so disrupt the world’s supply chain, and realign consumer needs and preferences so fast and furiously, that even previously successful business operations would be pushed toward shuttering?

I am sure we all thought that after the Economic Crash of 2008 and its horrible aftermath that we had left those days of extreme reaction behind us. But here we are with another test to see who was paying attention.

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For some firms, just-in-time manufacturing and extreme lean engineering has made it difficult to ride out the economic effects of the pandemic. Without having warehouses of inventory to call up while the supply chains straighten themselves out, the effects are immediate and debilitating. Many firms frantically attempted to reinvent themselves, in some cases in the most extreme way, without a clearly defined market or consumer, while other firms found themselves “checkmated” nearly overnight.

Those that survived had to scramble to stock their shelves, staff and restaff their organizations while reconsidering every aspect of their operation. The economy and its current inflationary effects are straining workers – who might have just been given a raise – once again, who find it increasingly difficult to support themselves. Companies supported by private equity or who are publicly traded find themselves forced to quarterly cut costs – no matter how practical or short-term – to appease their boards of directors. Continuing a decade’s-old practice of denial, of employees being considered a “cost” no matter the employer’s years of investment in developing them nor the wealth of knowledge and skills expertise each represents, are first in line to be discarded.

As pawns in this transformation, workers – some with extreme experience – are vulnerable to being reconsidered out of the equation along with the newly hired. Read More

Read the full December, 2022 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

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Proactive Technologies Report – November, 2022

Posted on by DPrigelmeierpti

Replicating Your Best Performers

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

One project I was involved with sought to establish a structured on-the-job training program for a “CNC Operator” position and establish an apprenticeship. It consisted of around 40 different machines; manual and NC-operated of several brands, controller types and purposes. When I analyze a job – task by task – I first contact the resident “subject matter expert.” It is my experience that in lieu of accurate standard process documents that everyone can use when assigned a machine, each operator keeps their own setup and operation notes. They might be reluctant to share them.

As analysts, we assume that if the subject matter expert is assigned to us, it is a reflection of management’s confidence in the operator’s consistently high level of performance. We also learn a lot about the sub-culture that has arisen at the organization, bordering on “work performance anarchy.” Despite the connotations, this is a useful revelation. This lack of vital information sharing that has been going on can be eliminated. The collective wealth of task-specific information can be screened, validated, standardized and revision-controlled to be shared with all who are asked to perform the tasks.

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This highlights several other preexisting issues in addition to the obvious. First, if the company is ISO/AS/IATF 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. Read Article

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

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

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

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

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

The second type of turnover concerns the individuals that have gone through the interview process, showed-up for work, stayed for a few weeks and then decided the job wasn’t for them for whatever reason. In this case, the company has more of an investment in developing the employee, but it is still rather insignificant.

The third type of turnover concerns employees that have been hired, who received a significant amount of training and pay while in training and have stayed for several months – almost reaching a recognizable level of productivity and return on the employer’s worker investment. Understandably, the employer has more of an investment in this type of employee and their loss is felt more if they leave.

The fourth type of turnover is more critical. The loss of employees that have been trained, have been with the company for the long-term, in whom the company has made a significant investment and their contribution to the operation is felt more deeply.

When employers are literally trying to find anyone with a heartbeat to interview and hire, and some even skip the interview process, it shouldn’t be any wonder that a large portion of those individuals may not show up the first day of work or stay around very long. 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.

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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.

There’s always direct evidence that mastering one more task means an incremental increase in worker capacity. Read More

Regional Workforce Development Partnerships That Enhance Economic Development Efforts

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Most area economic development goals are simple; expand the tax base so revenue is available to maintain and sustain the local socio-economic system. Strategies to accomplish this may differ but often include adding to the employment base of the community and/or region, since an effort to expand consumption – mandatory and discretionary – produces a “multiplier effect” as money circulates through the community. This goal can be reached by local and state governments offering tax abatement, cash and/or infrastructure improvements to companies seeking to relocate, or which are in an expansion mode. At lease, that was the simple vision of economists past.

It is fairly a proven fact, however, that in the past three decades the results of these tactics have become mixed as large corporations became larger and used their clout to seek incentives and cheap labor throughout the world. Commitments to local communities providing the incentives often evaporated faster than the ink on the documents dried, and corporations hopped from state to state, country to country, upsetting the stability of local tax bases, economies, communities and regions.

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Economic development agencies and government leaders have always talked about helping locally grown enterprises which create an estimated 70-80% of the new jobs in the country. As they start, grow and expand they would hire more, provide more in taxes and be more likely to stay put. As large corporations gained more control of the policies and policy makers of the states and the federal government, the focus drifted away from local small and mid-size businesses and toward policies and strategies that helped large corporations at great expense.

It may be time for an economic development strategy that, out of necessity, focuses on smaller enterprises with solid ties to the communities as more and more large corporations with multi-national ties contribute less and less to local and regional economies and tax bases. It may be time to focus on local start-ups, small and medium size enterprises, and on companies that are bucking the “offshoring of jobs” trend and on to companies that are reshoring, relocating or expanding here from other countries. The cost of investing in economic development may shrink, economies may stabilize and grow, and communities and societies may be driven from despair toward hope and vitality with each new opportunity. Read More

Read the full November, 2022 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

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Proactive Technologies Report – October, 2022

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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.

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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

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.

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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. CEOs, who previously were told that the corporate training programs proliferated to each facility were “state of the art” and “working quite well” are now exposed from the end-users perspective. In a typical episode, if you look past the entertainment factor, one can easily detect: Read More

Grow Your Own Multi-Craft Maintenance Technicians – Using a “Systems Approach” to Training

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

Since partnering with Proactive Technologies, Inc. in 1994, together we have advocated the use of a “systems approach” to training that includes a combination of related technical instruction and structured on-the-job training to develop multi-craft maintenance technicians. This approach works equally as well with other job classifications within a organization. This is a viable option to paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to employment recruiters to locate these technicians on a nationwide basis…who still need to be trained once hired. Plus, once the investment is made to setup the infrastructure, you can train as many workers as you need – with a declining cost per trainee.

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The systems approach to training, if built correctly for your company, forms the infrastructure of a highly effective, low cost apprenticeship (registered or not) model. This model can quickly and cost-effectively produce the multi-craft maintenance technicians you need, who will be qualified to perform the tasks required at your facility. Based on detailed job/task analysis data – collected by Proactive Technologies’ experts using your internal subject matter experts who have the final review – worker development materials are generated by Proactive Technologies’ PROTECH© software system for immediate use. Most importantly, technical support to the project includes project implementation management, so you can focus on running your business.

The “Systems Approach to Worker Development” is effective. To establish the foundation: Read More

Do Contemporary Economic Theories Apply to This Version of Capitalism?

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Lately, Americans have been in heightened state of anxiety and distress over confusing messaging. After all of the uproar by employers that they just can’t find skilled workers, now business talk shows are saying that employers are looking at layoffs because the economy is “too hot,” as if shedding the workers they struggled to find is a good thing for profits. Maybe reducing payroll from the balance sheet looks good for this quarter or next, but destroying long-term capacity for a brief illusion seems counter-intuitive.

Rising prices of just about everything are eating away at the meager and long-overdue wage increases employers used to entice candidates to apply and hired workers to stay. It seems like a collision of America’s two economies, which has been on this course for 30 years.

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We are bombarded by the current “reason” for this uncertainty that will always lead to a disproportionate impact on workers, and it is “inflation.“ What is it? Inflation is generally defined as “too many dollars chasing too few goods.“ It’s the old “supply and demand“ scenario and we have been taught when demand exceeds supply, prices rise.

The Federal Reserve defines inflation as “the increase in the prices of goods and services over time. Inflation cannot be measured by an increase in the cost of one product or service, or even several products or services. Rather, inflation is a general increase in the overall price level of the goods and services in the economy.”

There are different causes of inflation which determine the rate of inflation. Capital.com says “a sudden increase in the price of goods and services has a domino effect on the economy. The depreciation of money comes with a decrease in demand for products and services. Unemployment rates rise, as manufacturing firms are forced to lay off workers. The fear of inflation can also result in hoarding, when retailers and consumers buy excessive amounts of certain goods to not pay higher prices once inflation occurs.” They go on to say the main causes of inflation are “demand-pull inflation” and “supply-push inflation,” which determine the rate of inflation increase: moderate inflation, galloping inflation or hyper-inflation.

Most economists believe that inflation is usually a monetary phenomenon, meaning the appearance and rate of inflation are determined by the Federal Reserve Central Bank. Congress established three key objectives for monetary policy in the Federal Reserve Act: maximizing employment, stabilizing prices, and moderating long-term interest rates. But many feel so much money has been created over the last three decades by the Federal Reserve, providing easy, low (almost zero) interest borrowing to banks and, therefore, large institutional borrowers such as banks that speculate, private equity investment groups and wealthy individuals that there is a lot more to the story than traditional inflation. Read More

Read the full October, 2022 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

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Proactive Technologies Report – September, 2022

Posted on by DPrigelmeierpti

Who is Responsible for Decisions Regarding Training?

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

We sometimes run into a conundrum when promoting the concept of structured on-the-job training: finding who is responsible and accountable for the decision to provide training within an organization. It doesn’t seem like negligence, but it often feels like every decision-maker is saying it is someone else’s responsibility, sincerely believing the other has this important area covered. But it is also surprising when no one inside the organization asks who is responsible when any of the many symptoms of lack of training shows up.

In this environment that seems like “training anarchy,” it is easy for loud voices and strong personalities to step outside their zone of expertise to tackle, what may appear to be, a simple challenge – only to come up short. Sadly, although the proposed solution wouldn’t rise to that provided by an experienced professional or recognized as “training,” others may not know this. They might vent their disappointment by denigrating the notion of training or seek blame of the trainee saying things like “these workers just don’t want to be trained.” The legitimate role and purpose of training is tarnished, but never the solution’s architect.

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Enormous amounts of money in direct expenditures, workers and management time, opportunity costs, etc. could be expended, only to wind up at a under-whelming end. At the same time a seasoned expert in worker development would have predicted the failure if someone could coherently explain to them what the plan was. Far too often the training strategy boils down to putting two people together and hoping for the best, with a class here and a class there, a job/safety analysis that is never used, illustrated work processes that quickly grow obsolete and unusable, color-coded pie charts that really don’t say much and/or a policy saying workers will be trained that is ignored. Granted, a few of these strategies combined might provide recognizable progress if aligned and implemented correctly. But often each of these has a different brain behind them, residing in a different department with a different directive and budget – each unaware of the other’s activities. Read More

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.

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

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

In a Plant Services 2019 Workforce Survey report, almost 50% of employers surveyed answered that knowledge capture/transfer was one of their “organization’s biggest workforce challenges” – a number rapidly growing. Today, employers have been urgently revisiting the expertise capture idea, and not for just hourly positions such as tool and die, production worker, machine operator, maintenance and quality control, but for critical support positions such as material buyer, office manager, administrative assistant, and metallurgical lab technician – typically in that “gray area” of jobs considered as indispensable… until the resident expert is gone. Read More

Workforce Development Partnerships with Substance: My Experience

By Randy Toscano, Jr., MSHRM, Executive Director of Human Resources, Paris Regional Medical Center

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.”

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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.

There are at least two critically important reasons why current and accurate job data makes or breaks a worker development partnership. First, the education and training provider’s role with related technical instruction is to build each candidate’s core and industry-general skills foundation upon which the employer can train them further for their employer-specific work tasks. If the employer cannot accurately define and express their specific needs for each job area they need workers to the training provider, everyone’s time and money is wasted. When that employer–specific data is unavailable, educational institutions turn to “industry-general” standards, developed by a panel of retired CEO’s and educators over coffee and donuts. It is better than nothing, but not even close to finishing the job of worker development. Read More

How Much Would “Full Worker Capacity” Through Full Job Mastery Be Worth to Your Firm?

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

According to Ed Timmons, CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, “our labor costs in the U.S. are still 20% too high.” If he means that employers may be paying too much for unused or unusable worker capacity, and they should seek methods to develop it, I can agree with that. If he means employers should focus on spending enormous amounts on finding alternatives to labor, or randomly cutting workers, or asking workers to work for less wages and less benefits, I would say “hold on a minute.”

Given the growing fear and discontent by workers who still haven’t recovered from the Crash of 2008 and now knocked down with the Covid-19 pandemic, they may want a seat at the discussion. These workers will be trying for some time to, once again, regain value in their 401K and other impacted assets and to rise to the wage level they once had for the talents they possess. Many have the perception, wrongly or rightly, that their employer and their shareholders built great profits while workers slid backward. Many families, today, are challenged by rising prices of nearly everything…against eroding wages. This preoccupation with driving down labor costs, while reporting to Wall Street record quarterly profits, may benefit shareholders in the short-run, but it is surely illusionary and self-destructive in the long-run as the Crash of 2008 should have demonstrated, but the Covid-19 pandemic might remind.

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As reported in Industry Week, a group of CEOs from major U.S. corporations, The Business Roundtable, released a statement saying that shareholder value is no longer its primary focus – shifting their practices to line up with their new definition of the “purpose of a corporation.” The new vision emphasizes investing in employees, supporting communities, dealing ethically with suppliers and providing customers with value. “The group signed the Business Roundtable’s new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation. It’s a sea change that moves companies away from the age-old philosophy that companies’ main goal is to look after shareholders.”

“There is an effective, proven alternative to cutting labor costs through gutting organizational capacity.”

Focusing solely on shareholder profits has stunted the long-term viability of many a thriving organization. Under the cover of “making the firm more efficient,” when more profits could not be derived from expanding the market and market penetration, some investors forced cuts on firms that determined the firm’s long-term capability to compete, take advantage of emerging market opportunities, and adapt to changing markets and turbulent economic forces. Read More

Read the full September, 2022 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

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Proactive Technologies Report – August, 2022

Posted on by DPrigelmeierpti

Piece-Part Incentives Gone Wrong

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Sometimes we are tempted to take the easy route, even though it may cost more in the end, offer much less on the path to the desired outcome or cause us to repeat the effort another way. Shallow analyses and shortcuts often lead to unintended consequences. Changes to weaken metrics to convince us, or others, that progress is better than reality only postpones solutions to the underlying challenge. Too often we are focused on the search for a solution to a symptom and not the problem. The example I am about to share represents all of these tendencies.

As a Quality Control Line Inspector at an aerospace manufacturing facility in my early years, one of my first assignments was to in-process inspect work samples from several rows of NC Lathes, Mills and Grinders. I was assigned there with the implicit instructions to be on the look-out for “problems” identified by management: decreased quality yield, substantially high rates of scrap and rework, which lead to increased worker costs and lower returns. The proposed solution was more rigorous quality inspection of parts in-process before they became a component of an expensive sub-assembly or assembly.

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While making my rounds, meeting the operators and inspecting samples, it seemed I was seeing evidence that management identified the “problem” correctly. I say problem, but my feeling was that I had not gotten to the root cause of what I was observing. I was rejecting parts at nearly every work station, on every pass. I decided to dig a little deeper – get to know the operators a little better to see if I could determine why this was happening.

What I found out was that the operators were, for the most part, experienced and knowledgeable. They knew how to measure their products and should have been able to detect parts drifting out of tolerance. Yet, each station had two barrels – one for scrap and one for rework – as if it were foregone conclusion. And they were working at a very high rate of output with, voluntarily, no breaks or lunch. The effort expended seemed to run counter to the outcome. Read More

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

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

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

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

Reluctant to Reshore Due to Apparent Shortage of Skilled Labor? Don’t Be

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

These are relatively uncertain times for some manufacturers with supply chains that transcend borders to countries subject to punitive tariffs, and/or social, political and economic unrest. Knowing where to invest time and precious resources isn’t as clear as it was a couple of decades ago, yet that is the situation many are in.

We all remember how quickly companies relocated part (in some cases all) of their operations, and/or prodded their suppliers to do the same, to lower wage, lower regulation and lower property cost environments – regardless of the transport costs, and risks of regional instability and supply chain disruption. As those economies developed and the associated operational costs increased, those perceived savings continued to erode. And as regional instability rose, many employers started to plan their next move. Once again, the U.S. looks like a viable site alternative.

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One over-hyped and inaccurate factor in the U.S. is the shortage of skilled labor, which some workers see as a veiled attempt to justify importing labor who will take the job for significantly less. There are plenty of skilled labor available who were displaced during the Crash of 2008, or recently displaced by the trade wars, and who had to change career course to feed their families. Many of these workers are still waiting, and could be quickly and easily “re-tooled” for today’s manufacturing jobs with a focused structured on-the-job training program. Some are kept from seeking out these opportunities by wages and benefits for the job they once had now offered at 50% – hardly enough to attract skilled candidates back – not to mention for retaining a “skilled worker.”

Some see this as a sort of hypocrisy; the publicized, frantic search for “skilled” and “talented” workers, while offering these skilled workers less for the job they once held with that employer or a similar employer in the industry. So, for now, many of those workers that are that skilled and talented abandoned the career of their choice for the career that pays the bills.

Unless employers can convince their shareholders that wages and benefits have to go up to attract the workers they prefer, employers will have to accept the candidates that remain of which there are plenty. These are the ones with the college degrees you see working in service positions, just waiting for an opportunity to apply their skills to a job with more substance. Read More

Quality Policies and Process Sheets Do Not Equal 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.

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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.

From a learning perspective, manufacturing environments present hurdle after hurdle to learning and mastering the work to be performed. Unrelenting production schedules, technology advancements and continuous improvement efforts – all offer little room for deliberate task-based training while changing the task out from under the worker while they are trying to learn and master it. Read More

WELCOME MENNEL MILLING!

by Proactive Technologies, Inc. – Staff

Proactive Technologies, Inc. is happy to welcome Mennel Milling! Mennel has been milling wheat into flour since 1886. Whether for a restaurant chain or a food company of any size, Mennel can be counted on for all custom flour blend and bakery mix needs, perfecting over 300 recipes.

Mennel operates 13 country grain elevators throughout Ohio, Indiana and Virginia. Mennel has 26 industrial sites throughout the U.S.; 19 of them in Ohio. Thanks to their long-standing commitment to research and development, Mennel has a proven reputation for providing outstanding products. Their team of research scientists identify new applications for their flour and co-products, and as a result develop new or specialty post-milling processes and products.

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Proactive Technologies will be working with Mennel Milling to set-up and implement structured on-the-job training programs for new-hires and incumbent workers for positions such as Maintenance Technicians, Operator, Supervisor and Quality Assurance Technician. Read More

Read the full August, 2022 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Posted in News

Proactive Technologies Report – July, 2022

Posted on by DPrigelmeierpti

Is It Possible to Improve Worker Performance Without Documented Task Mastery?

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

W. Edwards Deming said, “We are being ruined by the best efforts of people who are doing the wrong thing.” The inefficiencies, discrepancies, affects on morale and potential for adverse incidents would seem to make preventing this a priority. To make improvements given this condition seems to be, at most times, futile.

Often we are lulled into believing this phenomena doesn’t exist when products get produced and shipped, and services are provided. That is where the metrics are pointed – output. But how much is known about the effort, sometime struggle, to get there? Was the effort efficient, accurate and consistent? If we do not have definitive answers to these questions, how to improve performance will likely be as illusive and resources used in the attempt a waste.

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For many organizations, the only way to know the road was bumpy is through negative events; product scrap or rework, lost customers, operator injury or an outcome requiring legal intervention. Perhaps the oversight has been lacking due to a lean or “green” supervisory staff, or a lack of budget for the extra hours or equipment needed to monitor the process, or processes are unsettled and changing rapidly without those individuals performing them being immediately notified.

For any reason, relying on a negative event to prompt scrutiny can be very costly – much more than the investment needed to prevent this. Worse yet, an investigation too narrowly focused resulting in remedies that overlook the obvious reasons for the discrepancy may inject new uncontrolled variables. Many remedies become more disciplinary (e.g. reprimanding or firing the person(s) thought responsible, a complete audit involving all departments and staff, reassigning the process to another department, or delegating the process to one person who knows how to get around the systemic errors and barriers to produce the output expected…until that one person moves to another job or company and that “wisdom” is lost).

To determine to what degree this is an issue with your operation, you need only: 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.

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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.

Another outcome of a lean effort may not include moving personnel, but either equipment or processes out of the Leaned department into another department up or downstream, often without structured training to absorb the new activities and maintain efficiency. Here the loss of gains made are similar if no training on how to perform the processes or run the equipment is provided. Read More

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.

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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.

Same, too, are the more critical and complex tasks of the job, requiring compliance with so many factors such as engineering specifications, quality control requirements, safety requirements and company policies. Without a deliberate task-based training infrastructure in place, training might be ad hoc, informal, unstructured and rarely documented. Add to this the periodic worker cross-training that allows workers to train in, and master, tasks in multiple job areas and the amount of critical, but undocumented, training can be tremendous.

In the event of an audit by an internal department, a certifying agency, a client or a prospective client, explaining how a worker is trained to master a task critical to a repeated high level of quality might be difficult to impossible. And answering how a worker, who is thought to have mastered a task, is updated when the process is improved, redesigned, affected by changes in technology, changeover of product line or part of an orchestrated improvement program might be even more difficult. Read More

Maximizing Worker Capacity Maximizes Shareholder Value…If Done Right

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

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

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

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

How does this erosion happen? When workers are cut, the work they used to perform gets transferred to the remaining workers. If there isn’t a mechanism to quickly “transfer expertise” to the worker expected to take on the new responsibilities, capacity drops until the trainee comes up to speed. For as long as the transfer takes, one well-paid subject matter expert trainer is being paid to train the paid trainee, yet productivity improvement may be negligible. And further complicating the process, perhaps no one thought about capturing the exiting workers expertise before they left the building, so some “reinventing the wheel has to occur.” Multiply this across all affected workers and the labor and opportunity costs may wipe out any anticipated gains by cutting worker payroll.

Proactive Technologies Report has presented many articles about the value of workers, how structured on-the-job training increases the worker’s capacity to perform more tasks to a level of mastery, the high cost of worker turnover, and more. It is a concept we feel strongly about. Yet we are continually surprised how this topic is avoided by company’s accounting departments and upper management when they feel inclined to trim costs here and there, avoiding cultivating the enormous wealth before them – waiting to be harvested. What would be the value of just a 10% increase in worker capacity, operational capacity, quality and quantity of work, and worker compliance (safety, ISO/IATF/AS, etc.) to any operation?

Not to diminish the important role of investors, but there has been a lot written about whether maximizing shareholder value is a destructive rule that needs to be changed. Critic Steve Denning wrote in an article in Forbes published in 2011 entitled “The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value,” “Imagine an NFL coach,” writes Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, in his important new book, Fixing the Game-What Capitalism Can Learn from the NFL, “holding a press conference on Wednesday to announce that he predicts a win by 9 points on Sunday, and that bettors should recognize that the current spread of 6 points is too low. Read More

Read the full July, 2022 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Posted in News

Proactive Technologies Report – June, 2022

Posted on by DPrigelmeierpti

Appreciating the Value of Labor

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

For expanding and improving businesses that have the capital for the investment in new equipment or processes, attempting 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. 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.

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

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As discussed in many articles in past issues of the Proactive Technologies Report, although labor costs are considered direct costs from an accounting standpoint, they should be more importantly considered as an investment in the operation’s overall level of competitiveness. Operations may vary as to the level of return on investment from labor, but each worker’s cumulative expertise gained while employed becomes an asset to the operation akin to intellectual property and, therefore, wages and compensation paid to develop a worker are an investment. Read More

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.

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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.

Soon employers and employment candidates saw what the developers of this technology did not. The technology first had to count on employers having accurately designed job descriptions in consistent formats, using standardized terms, words and phrases to describe pre-hire knowledge, experience, skills and abilities of interest. The fact was reality couldn’t have been farther from this, with job descriptions written 50 years prior, written precisely for someone the employer wanted to hire (not so reflective of the actual job requirements), or cut & pasted from a handy library resource. Read More

More Employers Finding Ways To Strategically Ensure Fair Pay

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

In an article appearing in IndustryWeek entitled “Trying to Ensure Fair Pay, Employers Are Changing Policies,” it noted that according to a recent employer survey “2018 Getting Compensation Right,” “60% of U.S. employers are planning to take some action this year to prevent bias in hiring and pay decisions.” Further, 53% “are planning on or considering adding a recognition program.”

The report went on, “37% percent are planning on or considering changing criteria for salary increases. Among employers not redesigning their programs, most are making changes to the importance of factors used to set base pay increases.”

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In short, the report led one to believe that employers overall wanted to make pay fairer, but one got the impression that there was no clear path. It is difficult in this environment to talk about raising workers wages without shareholders mounting a revolt. But with the reported shorted of skilled labor, the difficulty in training workers with a lean staff and no structure, strategy or record keeping, etc. an area of compromise has to be reached. If not, skilled workers will not apply, or stay, and the shareholder profits will definitely be affected. It is the “bullet that needs to be bit” to get the economy working like it did so well post World War II when everyone felt they had a chance at doing well for themselves and their family.

One easy-to-set-up, easy-to-implement, low investment/high return strategy for paying workers for the documented value the employee has accumulated has been discussed in previous Proactive Technologies Report articles, most recently “A Pay-for-Value Worker Development Program – Fair to Management and Workers, and Effective Too!” and previously in “Pay-For-Value Employee Programs.”

Developing each worker should be a linear process in spite of inputs from all direction. A person is selected based on closeness of fit with established criterion. The person is then trained on the units of work for which they will be responsible. Once proficient, the person routinely performs these tasks – evaluated at some point based on set criterion for their level of performance and, in some cases, compensation is assigned accordingly. Feedback on how to improve performance is given and additional incentivized development goals can be assigned to drive work performance even higher. Read More

Balancing the Need to Raise Wages with the Need to be Competitive by Increasing Worker Value

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

It is said employers are having a hard time finding workers. It may be due to some workers having time to think during the disruptions of the past few years and may be looking for jobs that are better aligned with their career goals. Some may still fear the status of the Covid-19 cases, and its variants, made confusing by the premature, incomplete and contradictory news reports. Some may want to return to work but are navigating the difficulties of child care and return to school policies that vary from district to district.

It appears employers have accepted that, for the short term at least and quite possibly the long-term, that they will need to reconsider their compensation structures if they are to attract the caliber of worker they need. Some feel that discussion is long overdue. Of course, raising wages and benefits is going to add to the cost of labor associated with production or services. If the shortage of supplies raising the costs of goods accelerate the reshoring of jobs to America, the competition for the best workers could get fierce.

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For decades employers have been laxed in their need to develop the most productivity and worker capacity from their workforce. It became more a hunt for “bodies“ than for developing more skilled workers. Most employers like to think that their in-house programs for training workers, once hired, meets their needs, but scratching the surface in most cases proves that there is very little structure, no plan, there is no documentation, and no sense of purpose. For most employers, people are hired, they are paired up with one of the existing workers and, hopefully, the existing subject matter expert will transfer expertise to the new worker to a level that, one day, might be recognizable.

Some companies that are struggling with high turnover, and/or a surge of growth, see many of these workers can get lost in the shuffle. Some continue to hire more “bodies” who then wait for someone to train them to do something. Workers that could have been star performers are let go because there is no structured way to measure the outcome of the training process to anyone’s satisfaction. Then again, many workers leave employers when they discover that there is no way to improve themselves in the job classification. Read More

WELCOME!

Proactive Technologies, Inc. welcomes SK Food Group, one of North America’s leading custom food manufacturing companies. They operate nine state-of-the-art facilities across the US and Canada, and employ more than 2,000 associates. SK Food Group supplies handcrafted sandwiches, wraps, snacks, flatbreads, burgers, protein snacks and more to the most respected foodservice brands, neighborhood cafes and Fortune 500 companies.

In the US, the company has locations in Phoenix, AZ, Columbus, OH, Reno, NV, Minneapolis, MN, Tupelo, MS. As leaders in the industry, they take an active role in ongoing scientific testing and food production safety, with a commitment to product safety and integrity.

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Proactive Technologies will be working with SK Food Group associates to set-up and implement structured on-the-job training programs for new-hires and incumbent workers for positions such as Maintenance Systems Technicians, Packaging Technicians and Quality Control – many of which to be registered as apprenticeships.

We look forward to working with the associates of SK Food Group!

Read the full June, 2022 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Posted in News

Upcoming Live Online Presentations

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  • PTI1002 – Building a Low-Cost, Highly Effective Worker Training System

    7:00 am-7:45 am
    2024-11-12
    Dean Prigelmeier

    Click Here to Schedule

    (Mountain Time) The philosophy behind, and development/implementation of, structured on-the-job training; the many benefits the employer can realize from the PROTECH© system of managed human resource development in more than just the training area; examples of projects across all industries, including manufacturing and manufacturing support companies. Program supports ISO/AS/IATF compliance requirements for “knowledge(expertise)” capture, and process-based training and record keeping. When combined with related technical instruction, this approach has been easily registered as an apprenticeship-focusing the structured on-the-job training on exactly what are the required tasks of the job. Registered or not, this approach is the most effective way to train workers to full capacity in the shortest amount of time –cutting internal costs of training while increasing worker capacity, productivity, work quality and quantity, and compliance.  Approx 45 minutes.


  • PTI1006 – Building a Regional Workforce Development Infrastructure: Employer-Specific for Maximum Effectiveness and Lowest Investment

    1:00 pm-1:45 pm
    2024-11-12
    Dean Prigelmeier

    Click Here to Schedule

    (Mountain Time) The philosophy behind, and development/implementation of, structured on-the-job training; how any employer can benefit from the PROTECH© system of managed human resource development in more that just the training area; building related technical instruction/structured on-the-job training partnerships for employers across all industries one-by-one. How this can become a cost-effective, cost-efficient and highly credible workforce development strategy – easy scale up by just plugging each new employer into the system. When partnering with economic development agencies, and public and private career and technical colleges and universities for the related technical instruction, this provides the most productive use of available grant funds and gives employers-employees/trainees and the project partners the biggest win for all. This model provides the support sorely needed by employers who want to partner in the development of the workforce but too often feel the efforts will not improve the workforce they need. Approx. 45 minutes

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  • PTI1003 – Adding Employer-Specific Structured OJT to Your Training Support Strategy

    7:00 am-7:45 am
    2024-11-14
    Dean Prigelmeier

    Click Here to Schedule

    (Mountain Time) The philosophy behind, and development/implementation of, structured on-the-job training; how any employer can benefit from the PROTECH© system of managed human resource development in more than just the training area; building related technical instruction/structured on-the-job training partnerships for employers in across all industries. When partnering with economic development agencies, public and private career and technical colleges and universities, this provides the most productive use of available grant funds and gives employers-employees/trainees and the project partners the biggest win for all. Program supports ISO/AS/IATF compliance requirements for “knowledge(expertise)” capture, and process-based training and record keeping. This model provides the lacking support needed to employers who want to easily and cost-effectively host an apprenticeship.  Approx 45 minutes.


  • PTI1004 – If You Can’t Find Skilled Workers, Develop Your Own

    9:00 am-9:45 am
    2024-11-14
    Dean Prigelmeier

    Click Here to Schedule

    (Mountain Time) This briefing explains the philosophy behind, and development/implementation of, structured on-the-job training; how any employer can benefit from the PROTECH© system of human resource development in more than just the training area. This model provides the lacking support employers, who want to be able to easily and cost-effectively create the workers they require right now, need. Program supports ISO/AS/IATF compliance requirements for “knowledge(expertise)” capture, and process-based training and record keeping.  Approx 45 minutes.


  • PTI1005 – Adding Employer-Specific Structured On-The-Job Training to Your Apprenticeships

    1:00 pm-1:45 pm
    2024-11-14
    Dean Prigelmeier

    Click Here to Schedule

    (Mountain Time) The philosophy behind, and development/implementation of, structured on-the-job training; how any employer can benefit from the PROTECH© system of managed human resource development in more than just the training area; building related technical instruction/structured on-the-job training partnerships for employers across all industries and how it can become an cost-effective, cost-efficient and highly credible apprenticeship. Program supports ISO/AS/IATF compliance requirements for “knowledge(expertise)” capture, and process-based training and record keeping. When partnering with economic development agencies, public and private career and technical colleges and universities, this provides the most productive use of available grant funds and gives employers-employees/trainees and the project partners the biggest win for all. This model provides the lacking support needed to employers who want to easily and cost-effectively host an apprenticeship.  Approx. 45 minutes

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