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Proactive Technologies Report – July, 2020

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Keeping Employers Engaged in Regional Workforce Development Projects

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Billions of dollars have been spent on workforce development projects funded by the state and federal governments in the last 20-30 years. However, from the tone of the discussions surrounding workforce development projects and participants today, it seems that the same things that were troubling employers in 1980 are still troubling them today.

Getting an employer to sign up for a grant-funded workforce development project should not be that difficult, if the brands and reputations of the institutions promoting the project are sound, and the project concept appears logical, achievable and will in all likelihood contribute to the employer’s business model. But once the pitch has been made to the employers and the bold outcomes projected, keeping the employers engaged for the duration of the project and beyond can be difficult.

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One thing that I have found in setting up and maintaining long-term projects is making sure the person, or people, at the initial meeting are the right ones. “Worker development” seems to fall within the domain of the employer’s human resources department. But not all human resources managers are the same. Some are fresh from college and may not yet have experience with concepts such as meaningful on-the-job training, integration of worker training with ISO/TS/AS compliance, etc. Some tend to be generalists and may enthusiastically agree with a project concept but are out-of-sync with their production and quality manager’s view of the world. While you may be able to get the human resources manager on-board, the human resources manager may not reflect the interest or concerns of the more influential production or operations management and staff.

Unfortunately, this may not be discovered until months into a project. If the operation’s management and staff were briefed on the project (sometimes they are not), out of deference to the human resources manager the other key stakeholders may not voice concerns or ask pertinent questions that may influence the nature of the project. This may later start to percolate up and bring the organization’s participation in the project to a halt. 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.

Studies have shown that performance reviewers rarely have a method to gather performance history for each employee throughout a review period, so they rely on their memory. It tends to focus on the last 2-3 weeks before the scheduled review. Read More

Developing the Maintenance and Other Technically Skilled Workers That You Need; To Specification, With Minimal Investment

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 a previous Proactive Technologies Report article, “Grow Your Own Multi-Craft Maintenance Technicians – Using a “Systems Approach” to Training” I described how Proactive Technologies, Inc. has often joined forces with universities, community colleges (many were schools for which I lead the customized training and workforce development departments) and other related technical instruction providers to setup and implement the ” hybrid model” of worker development.  This approach has proven itself highly effective for technical job classifications such as Maintenance, Chemical Operators, Press Operator, Tool & Die, NC Machine Operator, Quality Control, Supervisor and others.

This “systems approach” to worker development is simple in its structure but includes metrics and quality control points to ensure that worker development outcomes are clearly defined, progress measured and reported monthly, and goals reached – no matter if the job changes or people change jobs. Although this approach can be used for any job classification in any setting, together we have applied this approach effectively for Maintenance and many other critical technical positions, as well as often neglected supervisor and first-line management positions, for many clients over the last 2 decades.

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The approach is unique in that it sets-up for its clients the task-based structured on-the-job training programs. There is no “cut and paste;” each job/task analysis is specific to that job classification, for that company, and incorporates already established process documents and specifications to ensure compliance with quality programs such as ISO/TS/AS and safety requirements.  Proactive Technologies provides the technical implementation support and accurately reports progress for each trainee’s individual pursuit of “job mastery” – allowing the business client to focus on its business while we ensure the employer gets the skilled staff they need, when they need them. As a bonus, incumbent workers are base-lined to the structured on-the-job training program requirements and a customized path is established to drive them, along with the new-hires, to full job mastery.

Like most community college or university executives, I felt compelled to promote products and services we already had on the shelf – even if I new from industry experience that the product only resembled the client’s targeted job by name. I began to worry about the cost to my reputation for recommending a solution that wasted everyone’s time and resources, and left the trainee and employer short. Read More

Can’t Find The Right Workers? Why Not Train Workers To Your Own To Specification?

Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

According to a recent report by Career Builder.com, more than half of the employers surveyed could not find qualified candidates: 71% – Information-Technology specialists, 70% – Engineers, 66% – Managers, 56% – Healthcare and other specialists, 52% – Financial Operations personnel. According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, nearly half of small and mid-size employers said they can find few or no “qualified applicants” for recent openings. And anecdotal evidence from manufacturing firms echoes the same challenge with specialty manufacturing jobs such as maintenance, NC machining and technical support positions. This, in large part, can be attributed to the upheaval caused by the Great Crash of 2008 and the following disruption of several million careers. Sidelined workers saw the erosion of their skill bases while waiting years for an economic recovery that, for many, has not reached them yet.

However, many or most of these workers can be “reskilled” or “upskilled” for the current workforce. The solution lies not in waiting for the labor market to magically produce the needed qualified candidates, but rather in each company investing a little to build their own internal system of structured on-the job training. With such an infrastructure, any candidate with strong core skills can be trained quickly and accurately to any employer’s specifications. Furthermore, a strong training infrastructure has factored into it methods of acceptable basic core skill remediation when the benefit outweighs the cost.

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

Read the full July, 2020 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

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Proactive Technologies Report – June, 2020

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Recent Supply Chain Disruptions: Re-shoring Work to a Disrupted Workforce the Next Challenge, but Surmountable

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

No doubt about it, with the Crash of 2008 and the Covid-19 Crisis of 2020 most businesses have been forced into deep introspection about their products and services, their supply chains, maintaining their current and future workforce needs…even their survival and the evolving needs of an impacted consumer base. Any one of these topics would be plenty, but all at once while against the headwinds of an uncertain, but improving and evolving, economy and society is daunting.

Each one of these topics impacts the others. For example, changing a product or service may require adjustments or changes to the mix of suppliers and logistics, and may even influence decisions to perform tasks in-house or outside. Changing products or services, and potentially the tasks requiring workers to perform them, will determine what skills incumbent and new workers will need. It will require a reassessment of current worker selection practices, core skill development and task-related training. Most operations should consider to:

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  • Re-determine products/services;
  • Determine tasks required to deliver products and services;
  • Define task procedures for best practice performance;
  • Develop “job performance aids” (e.g. process documents, quality documents);
    • For non-process document driven tasks, define the best practice to complete the job data set
  • Develop structured on-the-job training materials so they are ready before new processes begin;
  • Define related technical instruction to build worker core skills for mastering task-based training;
  • Determine which tasks to be performed in-house and which off-site;
  • For in-house work, assess current workforce for core skills learned and mastered so the foundation upon which to master tasks is confirmed;
    • Remediate deficient levels of core skills
  • Deliver structured on-the-job training for incumbent workers
    • Apply same worker development process and standards to new-hire workers
    • (For supplier-performed tasks) Supply assessment and structured on-the-job training materials along with engineering and quality documents to dramatically expedite the adjustment to high quality vendor performance
  • Monitor, measure performance, continuously improve and maintain data for new changes.

You may be thinking this approach is too daunting to attempt. That is why many businesses get caught flat-footed when disruptions occur. If you might have convinced yourself, or have been convinced by others, that this approach is too time and labor intensive to warrant its consideration, that would be a shame. Ad hoc, disjointed, unfocused and unnecessarily too costly strategies are the only alternative. Anything between is half as effective.

Many employers underestimate the direct and opportunity costs that are not only eating away at profits but stifling innovation and making market shifts and market disruptions a continual threat to their existence.

Those who are unfamiliar with Proactive Technologies, Inc. and the service it provides to employers to set-up their worker development infrastructure, manage and provide technical implementation support and provide record keeping and monthly reporting to track each worker’s progress to full job mastery and full worker capacity, might fall back on outdated stereotypes to talk themselves out of even learning more about this approach. They are probably unaware that Proactive Technologies has been helping employers build and maintain robust workforce development systems since 1986, more often than not defraying the employer’s investment further by helping them find and acquire state worker training funds. Read More

Returning to Work – Overcoming Short-term Risks to Worker Health and Safety, AND Operations

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

In my article in the Proactive Technologies Report entitled, “Online Resources for the New, Reluctant “Home Schoolers” and “Home Learners”, I identified online resources for parents finding themselves in the position of becoming ad hoc home teachers of their own children as they rode out the Covid-19 crisis. The emphasis was to try to curb the natural erosion of a learner’s skill base from non-use and continue building on those skills to prevent, or at least minimize, the known “summer slide” effects so when schools reopened and students returned to their regular schedules they could hit the ground running.

Employers might not be thinking about it yet – they have plenty on their mind during the shutdown – but the same “summer slide” effect may become apparent in workers currently sidelined as they return to their work. Employers must consider the “start-up” lag that may occur from both memory and muscle atrophy.

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First, muscle atrophy may be occurring during this disruption. Exercise facilities were closed, employees had to remain inside for the most part, diets changed and many will experience the “covid-15” weight gain. For the most part, employees were rendered immobile for several months and the muscles developed for the work previously performed – no matter if standing or sitting for extended periods, lifting with the full body or with arms extended, twisting and turning the body, walking or running for extended distances and even which shift is being worked – may not be functioning as well as when they were maintained by a daily regimen. Even balance can be affected by muscle atrophy or spinal realignment during the days away from work.

Anyone who said yes to a friend who needed help moving remembers the weeks of associated back and muscle pain from using muscles not normally accessed. It is easy to relate to a worker returning to their old jobs, old job with new tasks or, in some cases, new jobs with the same employer. Anyone who has not taken a walk in several weeks realizes how laborious it now is and how stamina has been impacted. It is not that these attributes are gone for good, but they may need to be built up to previous levels that were sufficient to perform the tasks once performed. For older workers, balance and stamina are two important factors in mobility and performance.

Competitive sports enthusiasts are quick to say, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.” Read More

What Makes Proactive Technologies’ Accelerated Transfer of Expertise™ So Effective

by Proactive Technologies, Inc. Staff

There are a lot of buzzwards thrown around these days. “Skills Gap,” Education-Based Apprenticeships, Industry-Recognized Certifications, “STEM” – many confusing to those in management whose primary function is to ensure products and services are delivered in the most cost-effective and profitable way. It can be especially confusing to those who are specialists in business operations but unfamiliar with effective worker development strategies.

For anyone unfamiliar with Proactive Technologies’s PROTECH™ system of managed human resource development for the accelerated transfer of expertise™, it might help to clarify what makes this approach to worker development and continuous improvement so effective.  This unique approach, in practice since 1986 and always improving, was designed by someone who endured the pressures of maintaining the highest quality staff in a world of constant change and pressures to do more with less.

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We start by collecting a lot of data for the client about each of their job classifications that is all around anyway (e.g. people’s heads, operator’s notes, engineering processes, quality standards, EHS specifications). Usually we find that when this information isn’t readily available of discoverable, it makes learning and mastering the tasks – for new hires and incumbents – unpredictable, ineffective, open to interpretation and conflicts (including legal), costly and not conducive of standardization of high performance. And the continual revision of all of these bits of information adds to the challenge and makes process improvement and implementation efforts difficult, at best.

Many times we find that tasks are not proceduralized for best practice performance; either not defined at all or defined vaguely as “Perform _____,” leaving it up to each new trainee to guess what was intended. We job/task analyze the missing bits and work with engineering, quality and management to make sure we have the best, best practice before we develop any training or certification tool from it.

Our proprietary software allows us to quickly gather and consolidate the many sources of data for use only when and where needed. Read More

Some Thoughts on a Struggling Workforce

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 has revealed the frailty, inefficiency and ineffectiveness of many U.S. institutions. Firstly, the U.S. healthcare system, made up of a patchwork of non-profit and faux non-profit hospital systems operating under a mix of local, state and federal regulations. As we found out, procuring the necessities such as personal protective equipment (for hospital staff) and ventilators for extremely critical patients was a nightmare, seeing states competing among themselves with a broken supply chain for scarce supplies and paying 5 – 10 times the previously established prices. What should have been aggressively coordinated at a national level – like the other developed economies who saw lower numbers of deaths and a quicker path toward “normal” – was preempted by the same disjointed lack of leadership, confusing guidelines and conflicting mandates that left the citizenry trying to do what was right for themselves and their community while unraveling in their personal lives.

The healthcare insurance system revealed itself to be more on paper than in practice. The federal government had to intervene with taxpayer dollars to guarantee citizens would be cared for while they were losing their jobs and employer-backed health insurance (or an employee’s ability to continue to pay for insurance). Make-shift hospitals, such as those found in lesser developed countries, discovered new found importance even while testing supplies for Covid-19 still remained in dangerously short supply.

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The state-run unemployment insurance programs proved inadequate and underfunded to handle a mass event of over 40 million new unemployment claims in the first 5 months of 2020 – not to mention “gig” workers who found themselves exceptions to nearly every program – until federal government provided short-term intervention to shore up funds.
Federal food assistance programs were unable to keep up with the sudden surge of newly, and unexpectedly, unemployed overwhelmed the system. Community food banks tried to close the gap but quickly ran short themselves.

Employers operating within this broken framework were not immune from the impact of the Covid-19. Read More

Read the full June, 2020 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

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Proactive Technologies Report – May, 2020

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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.

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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 scare opportunity, and sours the organization’s attitude toward training for years to come.”

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 2018, employers are still concerned with the “skills gap” phenomenon. Retirees, many who put off, or came out of, retirement for economic reasons as the cost of living continued to rise and their pensions evaporated, are still in the workforce and their inevitable departure, with all of their technical expertise and job wisdom, still on its way out the door. Read More

Online Resources for the New, Reluctant “Home Schoolers” and “Home Learners”

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

A massive disruption, such as the Covid-19 virus, challenges everyone’s notion of “normal.” It can send us, especially the unprepared, scrambling for short-term solutions when the connections to established institutions and resources are unplugged.

Some workers who had not worked from home try to set-up a space to effectively perform work previously performed onsite if employers support the effort. Some workers either find themselves at home, not necessarily “working” from home, with children who are also restricted to house confinement – children whose education can be at risk if delayed or previous progress is idled for too long. Teachers and parents are painfully aware of the “drop-off” in retention that occurs just over holiday and summer breaks alone. Younger students might see this as an unexpected vacation, older students may see this as a threat to their educational attainment and next phase of their education or employment.

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No matter your assessment of the “stay at home” decrees, this disruption is particularly hard on those without internet access or lacking the hardware to connect from home. Somewhere between 21 – 162 million Americans lack access to broadband, depending on who is estimating it. Many of those that do have access struggle with decreased speeds as large providers such as Sprint and Verizon went to “throttling” of bandwidth when net neutrality rules were suspended in 2018. Then there is the problem with crowded bandwidth use as so many more people are staying at home shopping, streaming videos and music and, yes, trying to work from home.

But for those who are fortunate to have access, some of the wireless providers have made available free and/or expanded access during the Covid-19 response, and schools and philanthropic organizations in some communities have tried to make laptops, tablets and hotspots available to those whose financial resources are focused on financially surviving this period. 

Parents challenged to be a “teacher” or “teacher’s assistant” when those things being taught were forgotten many years prior is still a problem for the newly “appointed.” It can be frightening to find out how much has been forgotten for lack of use and how the nature of learning is so much different today. No one wants to appear ill-prepared or uninformed to a child learning 5th grade math.  Read More and View Links to Resources

Are Advances in Technology Distracting, Rather Than Assisting, 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

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 in place. These were phased out when the push to prepare students for college took priority. 

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Now, there is a push for community colleges to “pump out” more apprentices which, if done only to meet numbers but not emphasizing quality of the general training, could be another waste of scarce resources of time, money and opportunity for the trainee, the employer and communities. Another decade lost.

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

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

Having a structured on-the-job training infrastructure in place not only allows the organization to adapt and evolve, if built correctly it can align the training of workers with the other systems of the organization and facilitate a higher level of compliance. Without it, there is nothing to ensure a worker’s mastery performance of a process to engineering, quality and safety specifications.Increased work quality and quantity, compliance, worker adaptability, worker capacity and return on worker investment…while decreasing the internal costs of training, scrap, rework and operator error. It sounds like a robust solution to me.

Nine, of the many, scenarios should make any employer wish they had structured on-the-job training for each of their critical job classifications. Several are intertwined, which explains why the lack of structured on-the-job training hobbles an organization more than realized if training is viewed as an isolated process:
1. Opportunities to Expand Market:  Read More

Read the full May, 2020 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

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Proactive Technologies Report – April, 2020

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Use Business Disruption Lulls to Develop Unused Worker Capacity: Build Organizational Value and Off-set Unexpected Costs

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

For those of us who remember the shear terror of recent disruptive events, we remember the deep sense of doom they instilled in employers, workers and their families, and government leaders. We knew that these were not the “business cycles” of college textbooks, these were man-made catastrophes that spared no-one in the disruption…though sometimes enriching the architects. Nevertheless, they came and went – varying only in severity and duration.

Recent horrific business disruptions like the Savings & Loan Crash of 1986, the Black Monday Stock Market Crash of 1987, the Dot.com Crash of 2000, the Crash of 2008 (with scandals like the Penny Stock Market, SBA and HUD and recessions woven in between), made lives harder and transformed businesses for better or worse. If seemed that if a business survived these types of  disruptors, it was often because they focused on using the downward part of the cycle to adjust and perfect their operations, build capacity and sharpen focus in preparation of the upward part of the cycle to come. Maintaining as much forward momentum  through adversity as possible is critical in determining the quality of the survival, especially when the time between disruptions continues to grow shorter. Lead times, whether for new product introduction, entering a new market or just resuming normal operations is incredibly important if one considers the next disruption as a “backstop.”

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The current Covid-19 virus pandemic and the economic disruption that it is causing will, once again, test a company’s strategy, planning, focus, infrastructure and sense of clarity. Did the company plan for disruption? Was there a plan in place to constructively make use of this disruption (that spares no company) to emerge, at a minimum, ready to adapt, resume growth and be competitive again? Or did the company succumb to the disruption through erosion or by whittling away at what worked – giving little time or thought to “what is next when this passes” and “how best to prepare for the new normal?”

One important business asset is often overlooked in this adaptation and preparation. 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 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 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 that 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 the popular television shows of the 50’s and 60’s, “I Love Lucy.”

A typical Undercover Boss episode might reveal: 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.

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

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

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

When standardizing best practices, the process Proactive Technologies follows to establish any task-based, structured on-the-job training program is the same for existing, evolving and newly released production or service processes. 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, now knocked down with the Covid-19 pandemic, workers 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 recently 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.” Read More

Read the full April, 2020 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

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Proactive Technologies Report – March, 2020

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Five Most Important Ways Structured On-the-Job Training Can Reclaim Wealth For an Employer

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

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

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

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

So, why do so many employers take their role in developing and maintaining each worker’s capacity so lightly? Why do they often embark on proposed solutions that, at face value, seem a stretch? Are they unaware of all the tools out there, or are they relying on voices that may lack the experience and expertise themselves, or have another motive, to propose a credible solution?

When it comes to training workers, there are a lot of ideas floating around – many recycled for decades and no more relevant today than they were back when. Read More

Internships of Value – For Employer AND Intern

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

In my college years, a number of my classmates participated in internships in an effort to gain real-world work skills and experiences, and to be able to add a line to their resumes. Over the years when we compared notes, it seems the results varied from company and by job area. But the common sentiment was that the experiences were not as helpful to building workplace skills and personally fulfilling as they could have been.

According to a NACE (“National Association of Colleges and Employers”) 2015 survey entitled “Internship & Co-op Survey,” “The primary focus of most employers’ internship and co-op programs is to convert students into full-time, entry-level employees (70.8 percent and 62.6 percent, respectively).”  So, it appears most employers view internships as a potential recruitment tool and a way of evaluating candidates for employment.

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“Shadowing” without being able to touch and interact can be done with a DVD at home. Fetching coffee and making sure the break room is stocked with paper plates and napkins do not test the skills developed after 12 years of educational learning and 2 or 4 years of technical and academic study. Do not get me wrong, those who were paid while interns are appreciative for the opportunity and the resume line. However, they all seemed to wish they could have been able to learn and experience more.

Engineering and accounting areas seem to provide more meaningful task-based internship experiences because both have had a long time to standardize some tasks – even proceduralize them in cases – to make it easy for a new person to follow and observe. Other job areas seem to lack standardization of tasks and, to each observer, seem to be seen and understood very differently.

My experience in helping to build “structured on-the-job training” programs from a detailed job and task analysis caused me to reflect on those internship experiences. The structured On-The-Job Training Plan and On-The-Job Training Checklists binders of a Proactive Technologies program seem to help a new-hire and incumbent worker learn. Therefore it is not a stretch that they would help the intern learn, follow and perform a subset of tasks that can be learned during the internship period. It accelerates the process and provides a more deliberate, documented work experience.Further, once the complete set of tasks are detailed in a structured format, selecting a subset as the “internship training plan” facilitates an internship as if it were an apprenticeship, since the structured on-the-job training for the complete set of critical tasks supports the apprenticeship – registered or not. Building a “career” path not only lets an employer evaluate interns for employment based on a sampling of the employer’s specific tasks, it does not squander that time, experience and investment that can be part of a longer-range career for the individual. 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.

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

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

There are at least two critically important reasons why current and accurate job data makes or breaks a worker development partnership. Read More

Understanding the Important Difference Between Classroom, Online and On-The-Job Training

Knowing the Difference Can Save Your Organization Time, Money and Disappointment

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

In the March, 2017 issue of Proactive Technologies Report article entitled, “Thirteen Good Reasons Why Structured On-The-Job Training Should Be Part of Your Business Strategy” I laid out 13 very important reasons employers should seriously consider adding structured on-the-job training to their business strategy. This is based on the supposition that everyone’s definition of “on-the-job training” is similar if not the same, the difference between “structured” and “unstructured” on-the-job training is clear and recognized, and the vast difference between true structured on-the-job training and “classroom” or “online” learning is unquestioned. It also needs to be understood that structured on-the-job training is not interchangeable with classroom and online learning, but rather the “capstone” of applying core skills developed from the latter into mastering units of work for which an employer is willing to pay wages.

There are not many jobs available for which employers are recruiting people who have taken classes, or a lot of classes, as if that is where value lies. If one finds a job like this it is because the employer believes, legitimately or mistakenly, it has a strategy to cultivate those core skills into the performance of work tasks. A task is recognizable by a beginning point, and ending point and a series of steps that, when performed in the right order to the right specification, result in a recognizable and desired outcome. No employer hires people and pays them wages for “being good at math,” “reading exceptionally well,” being aware of safety rules.” Rather they are hoping those skills are current enough, and apply directly enough, to tasks that need to be mastered and work the needs to be done.

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To understand the importance of structured on-the-job training, it is important to differentiate between the three main types of learning in the workplace: classroom, online and on-the-job training. Classroom and online learning are pretty well understood as useful delivery methods in developing core skills that will be utilized later in mastering tasks they will be taught on-the-job and required to perform as the main reason for employment. However that is in no way a guarantee that either online learning and classroom learning – alone or combined – leads to mastery performance of a task without proper task training on how to apply those core skills in the performance of a unit of work; the task. If fact, if not correctly selected for  job relevance (as opposed to industry acceptance), online and classroom content may have little impact on task performance and these core skills usually dissipate quickly without immediate and repetitive usage. Read More

Read the full March, 2020 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

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Proactive Technologies Report – February, 2020

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Certifying and Auditing Workers, Subcontractors

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

When auditors sample worker performance for compliance with process documents and quality standards, they observe the employee perform the steps of the defined process and watch for accuracy. That is necessary for assuring repeatable quality output.

Yet process documents and references to quality standards do not a training strategy make. Technical documents were never intended to be training materials. Depending on the engineer’s style, they may be too technical or too verbose for the average user. Rarely are technical documents tested for readability (against the reading levels of the intended users) let alone repeatability.

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Proliferating process improvement to the supplier in the form of process documents AND training materials they can use to train their workers to your evolving specifications is vital to maintaining consistent quality.

The experienced worker, who has somehow learned to interpret the process document and fill the gaps of missing information to perform the task as envisioned, has the opportunity to repeat that process in a self-standardized way in lieu of proper training. They retain the best practice through repetition. But new-hires and transfers have different skills and abilities and may not be able to identify and assemble the various bits of information into a coherent, repeatable best practice without guidance and structure. The learning curve may become unnecessarily long and costly.
For this among many reasons, structured on-the-job training is critical to efficient process performance and indicative of higher levels of productivity.

Why would a supplier’s experience be any different? Read More

Assessing Employees with Past Drug Addictions for Work Tricky

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

A prevalent challenge faced by many employers is what to do with job applicants with a record of past drug use. Current drug use detected during screening is more cut and dry, but candidates that are going through, or went through, treatment and have maintained a clean life-style since need more care to avoid running afoul of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

The Americans with Disabilities Act  protects employees and job applicants from discrimination based on past drug addiction in most cases.  In a article for the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) website by Roy Maurer, “The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) protects employees and job applicants from discrimination based on past drug addiction. These individuals qualify as having a disability if they successfully completed a supervised drug rehabilitation program or are currently participating in such a program and are no longer using prohibited drugs.”

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One expert he interviewed, Rayford Irvin, the Houston district director for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), said “Opioid addiction is a disability that is affecting millions across the United States, yet many are regaining control over their lives by participating in supervised rehabilitation programs.” “When a worker has a record of such a disability and is performing his job proficiently, an employer cannot lawfully preclude the worker from employment because he is receiving treatment for his addiction.”

Lawyers interviewed for the article suggested that employers amend their policy manuals regarding drugs and specify exclusions in line with the ADA and reasonable accommodation provisions issued by the EEOC. Read More

Apprenticeships: Be Careful Not to Minimize Integrity While Spiking The Numbers

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 a Community College Daily News article, “Drawing Lines on Apprenticeships,” business and industry representatives seemed to have expressed to their congressional leaders the changes they would like to see in apprenticeships before they would consider participating. The opening statements from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chair Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tennessee) and ranking minority member Sen. Patty Murray (Washington) set the debate, with “Alexander arguing that registered apprenticeships limit creativity and flexibility that employers seek because of cumbersome administrative red tape. More companies want less-formal, industry-recognized apprenticeships that allow them to work on specific skill sets, he said, adding they also are more appealing to industries such as health care and information technology that don’t traditionally offer apprenticeships.”

Ranking Member Pat Murray (Washington) rebutted this claim, “…registered apprenticeships ensure rigor and program quality. She said GOP efforts to encourage more nonregistered programs is designed to ‘weaken and water down’ programs and to open the training market to for-profit institutions.” Most people actively involved with apprenticeships know that much can be done to make apprenticeships more attractive, practical, fulfilling and feasible to employers and more attractive, achievable and valuable to apprentices. And that there is a role for for-profit training providers when the non-profit and institutional related technical instruction in the area is weak, has not been kept up-to-date or is non-existent.

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There is no denying that the iconic apprenticeships of old were hard for employers to embrace. An 8-10 year apprenticeship program for, in many cases, 1 apprentice was a non-starter. And with developments in the last 30 years – massive relocation of jobs off-shore, instability of employment even before the Crash of 2008 but more so after (employees not able to continue in a job classification for 3 years let alone 10 year apprenticeship), the stagnation and decline of wages and continual introduction of newer technology that redesigns the nature of jobs – everyone involved including community colleges felt they were playing a seemingly never ending shell game. Add to that a period of uncertainty such as the current trade and tariff action exchanges and the only thing certain is an uncertain workforce development target. Read More

Apprenticeships That Make Money? Not as Impossible as it Seems (part 2 of 2) – Setting Up an Apprenticeship Center

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

In part one of a two-part article entitled “Apprenticeships That Make Money? Not as Impossible as it Seems,” appearing in the Proactive Technologies Report, I discussed what seemed to be the obvious differences in European and U.S. apprenticeship models.  I suggested that visionary U.S. business leaders consider creating a revenue-generating “apprenticeship center” within the organization to cover the costs of the apprenticeship and, in some cases, make money. How could that be accomplished? In continuing the discussion I would like to offer a possible strategy.

American manufacturers turned to lower wage labor sources, such as Mexico, China and India, during the last 30 years to lower their production costs in the hope that they would be more profitable. It is now understood that with lower wage costs comes additional supply chain costs which can, if uncontrollable, erase some or all of the gains a lower wage level might offer.But what if some of the services or operations to manufacture products or sub-assemblies that were, or are to be, off-shored could be done internally – at the labor cost of “training wages” as done in Europe – using equipment that would otherwise have to be idled, sold or shipped? What if those training wages could be furthered reduced by state grants? Could employers find that the source of lower wages is in their own back yard?

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Although the following approach for determining if an apprenticeship center/cost-reduction center is right for your organization is simple, it should be scalable to any organization with slight modifications:

Step 1: Review Product/Service Line and Flow: First, list the products and/or services that the organization offers in order to gain a perspective of the scope of opportunities. Read More

Read the full February, 2020 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

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Proactive Technologies Report – January, 2020

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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 in “training cost” and “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.

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.

As many operation managers have found out, drastic moves like reducing the wage rates by 20%, 30% or more, while expecting to maintain the same output quantity and quality, chases off the workers with the gained technical expertise…because they can leave. The investment is lost and so are any returns. Furthermore, it is difficult to find new candidates who are willing and able to “hit the ground running” for an unreasonably low wage rate. And if a good candidate for employment is found and selected, bringing their productive capacity up may be delayed or hindered by the fact that the remaining “subject matter experts” are not as capable of transferring expertise as the technical experts that were driven away.

Scores of competitively run global corporations in the past few decades have withered away chasing short-term numbers to appease shareholders and activist investors, which in the longer run undermined their capacity, purpose, level of service and brand.

Unlike equipment and processes for which empirical data is routinely available to make smart investment decisions, the concepts of “level of investment in workers” and the corresponding “return on worker investment” remains illusive and foreign to most employers. While data-driven capital investment in facilities or equipment decisions are straight-forward and specific, adjustments to labor are usually general; a layoff or addition of 10%, 20% of staffing. Some significant outcomes from undervaluing or overvaluing labor are: 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 unattainable for a limited period, you might first find cost cuts that do not erode the business capacity once held in case your, or the pundit’s, forecast was wrong or the recovery is swifter than anticipated. 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.”

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 new technology 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 pick up the pieces after this mistakes have been made.

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“That is the one point missed in all of the cuts to wages, benefits and staff; the first wave affects those who have no choice, the second wave affects the company as those with choice exercise it.”

When the economy recovers and the company stumbles in regaining its capacity, heads roll, more cuts are made and finally the investors pull out – leaving the previously well-run company impaired or near collapse. No good has come from this, and why it is allowed to continue makes no sense – except that it takes little thought to order, gives Wall Street the appearance of something good happening and something to report. That is why stocks rise when layoffs are announced – even in the face of predictable long-term effects of what the cost cutting means. That and the media’s cheering section that naively extols a short-term bump that may turn into a long-term fumble.

Worker capacity will be needed once the economy resumes, and the prudent businessman would not want to miss the recovery while spending too much time rebuilding the organizational capacity, part of which is finding “talent” to the replace the ones encouraged to leave and part trying to encourage the ones currently employed to stay. Additionally overlooked, employee and management morale suffers during wholesale cuts and irrational cost-cutting acts. The workers needed to sustain a recovery and regain market share are affected by what they see happening around them, and those most talented keep one eye on the door because they have the skills other employers might appreciate and always have the option to leave. That is the one point missed in all of the cuts to wages, benefits and staff; the first wave affects those who have no choice, the second wave affects the company as those with choice exercise it.

An alternative to knee-jerk cuts to workers is to assess each worker’s capacity (i.e. what percentage of the tasks of the job they have had a chance to learn and master), then use business “lulls” to raise it to full job mastery. 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. Read More

Apprenticeships That Make Money? Not As Impossible as it Seems – Part 1 of 2: The European Difference

Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

A few years ago, I had dinner with a friend of many years, Günther Hauser, in his hometown of Neckarsulm Germany. I met Günther several years ago when Proactive Technologies, Inc. (“PTI”) was working on a project in South Carolina that required PTI staff to travel to the LÄPPLE manufacturing plant in Heilbronn, Germany where Günther was the manager of the apprenticeship program. During that dinner, our conversation naturally drifted to an area of shared interest; worker training and apprenticeships and the differences in the United States and European systems of workforce development.

LÄPPLE is a worldwide supplier of press parts, autobody shell components, standard parts and rotary tables as well as automation solutions. They employ over 2000 people and provide exclusive, sophisticated solutions in forming and car body technology as well as the engineering and design of automation systems, machines and tools. Some of their customers include many of the automobile manufacturing companies such as Audi, BMW and Volkswagen.

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While working on the Heilbronn project, PTI staff performed job/task analysis on several job classifications that were being duplicated at a new joint venture in Union, South Carolina including Press Operator, Press Technician, Maintenance, Quality Control, Assembly Operator and Assembly Technician. Günther was kind enough to take me on a tour of the apprenticeship center at the plant. The center had around 100 apprentices at any one time at various stages of progression. Modeled after the manufacturing plant where it was established, the group of young workers were processing in each of their disciplines of choice; CAD-CAM Engineering, Tool & Die, Quality Control, Machining. It was like a mini-manufacturing facility with the LÄPPLE factory.

Those apprentices in their final 2 years of study, I was told, were treated like a part of a Tool & Die Manufacturing center. When an order came in for a die, either from LÄPPLE or one of its customers or suppliers, the process started with designing the die, machining the die components, assembling the die, inspecting the assembly and shipping the die to the customer. Instead of making “key chains and donkey carts” like apprentices are often asked to make in the US as their “hands on” training, these apprentices were producing an actual product that was sometimes priced as high as USD1 million! 

Of course, these apprentices were paid while in their program. Much of the wage came from the government, while the company paid for the facility, equipment, instructors. But LÄPPLE, like many European apprenticeship hosts, learned how to leverage the work produced by apprentices in honing their skills for paying for the costs to host the program. And when an apprentice completes the program,  LÄPPLE gets first pick of the class. The other apprentices have proved their skills enough to be immediately hired by one of many manufacturing facilities in the area aware of the program and its high standards of apprenticeship. Read More  

Read the full January, 2020 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

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Proactive Technologies Report – December, 2019

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“Full Job Mastery” means “Maximum Worker Capacity” – A Verifiable Model for Measuring and Improving Worker Value While Transferring Valuable Expertise

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

It is no secret that with the traditional model of “vocational” education, the burden of the job/task-specific skill development falls on the employer. It is not economically feasible nor practical for educational institutions to focus content on every job area for every employer. So they, instead, focus rightly on core skills and competencies – relying on the employer to deliver the rest. This is where the best efforts of local educational institutions and training providers begin to break down even if highly relevant to the industry sector.

Employers rarely have an internal structure for task-based training of their workers. Even the most aggressive related technical instruction efforts erode against technological advances as every month passes. If core skills and competencies mastered prior to work are not transformed quickly into tasks the worker is expected to perform, the foundation for learning task performance may crumble through loss of memory, loss of relevance or loss of opportunity to apply them.

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New workers routinely encounter a non-structured, rarely focused, on-the-job training experience. Typically, the employer’s subject-matter-expert (SME) is asked to “show the new employee around.” While highly regarded by management, the SME (not trained as a task trainer and having no prepared materials) has difficulty remembering the nuances of the tasks when explaining the process to the new employee, since that level of detail was buried in memory long ago. Each SME, on each shift, might have a different version of the “best practice” for processes, confusing the trainee even more – rendering the notion of “standardization” to “buzzword” status.

Initially, new employees have difficulty assembling, understanding and translating the disjointed bits of recollection into a coherent process to be replicated. Each comes with their own set and levels of core skills and competencies, and learning styles vary from the self-learner/starter to the slow-learner worker who, with structure to make sure they learn the right best practice, may become loyal, high-quality workers.

The more time the SME spends with the new employee in this unstructured, uncontrolled and undocumented experience, which is the prevailing method of on-the-job training, the more the employer is paying two people to be non or minimally-productive. Adding employees can actually lower short-term productivity and add little to long-term productivity for an organization, but the costs will attract notice internally and may lead management falsely believe the problem is cost related. Read More

Algorithms for Hiring, Credit..What Next? Perhaps Caution Should be Exercised

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

We are pushed from all sides to embrace advancing technology meant to impact every aspect of our lives. Peer pressure – from friends, family, colleagues, industry “experts” drive us to consider embracing “our future” – often explaining away the disruptions it causes to our present. Sometimes naïve, but always enthusiastic, media compete to be the first to break the news, bombard us with everything from subtle shaming to industry-driven pushes to accept and use technology – even if lacking thorough testing or proper consideration of all ramifications from its usage. If the technology causes damage, shoulders are shrugged and the horizon is scanned for the next.

Driven by massive amounts of marketing cash -often to create the illusion of trends when market acceptance is tepid – who is helped and who is hurt by the innovation is a distant afterthought. The damage can be done and those promoting the technology push to broaden its acceptance. If press coverage is too harsh when its promise comes up short and shareholder interest wanes, abandon it and move on to fabricate the next “trend.” 

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Take, for example, the recent examples of Apple and Goldman Sachs credit cards, which it appears  issued lower credit limits to spouses of husbands who shared the same credit score. “A tech entrepreneur, David Heinemeier Hansson, first raised the issue when he tweeted that the Apple Card’s algorithms discriminated against his wife, giving him 20 times the credit limit it had given to her.” His wife’s credit score was much better than his own. This, also, happened to the spouses of Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and other prominent figures.

“…the Goldman credit card story is “not the best example of this huge problem.”
Nick Thompson
Wired Editor-in-Chief

Some banking algorithms utilize around 400 attributes in its determination of creditworthiness. And that might be made up of many we wouldn’t expect, but we will never know since it is considered a “trade secret.” But, as in most cases of machine learning, a lot of trust and faith is afforded the technological advancement which is only rocked when something tragic, abnormal or, in this case anti-social and potentially illegal, is discovered. Read More 

Tips for Workforce Developers – Partnerships That Matter…and Last

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

Having partnered with Proactive Technologies, Inc. on workforce development projects for the past 20 years, it gave me a chance to innovate and learn what works, what efforts are most appreciated by the employer, trainee and employee, and which projects utilized resources most efficiently and effectively. There are numerous resources available from many sources that can impact a trainee with varying effectiveness, but the secret is selecting those that are appropriate for the project outcome the employer expects.

As Dean of Corporate and Continuing Education at community and technical colleges in Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania and South Carolina, at the start of each assignment I had to first learn what resources our school had available for the sectors we were targeting, and how current and relevant the courses, materials and instructors were for the specific skills employers were seeking. To be honest, in some areas our products and services were weaker than expected, so the determination needed to be made whether we had the resources and will to upgrade what we had or develop what we needed. We also had to consider if it would be more economical to strategically partner with outside providers who always had the current technical expertise and already created solutions we could incorporate into our offerings.

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Too often there was internal resistance and a lack of understanding of how important being relevant was to workforce development. Many institutions grew complacent to change or were discouraged by shrinking budgets or misaligned priorities from innovation. Always feeling a sense of urgency to overcome the ubiquitous “skills gap” that cast a shadow on all education and workforce development efforts, there are some important steps that I developed for myself to help me better assess each employer’s need and provide solutions client employers appreciated. This is the reason most employers we worked with kept us engaged year after year. We earned, and maintained, their respect and gave them confidence in our solutions, which ensured our continued role in their business model. This provided a continued revenue stream for the school to continue, improve and expand those efforts.

1) Listen carefully to the employer’s description of the need – not every employer has a clear grasp of their need, but if you listen to their frustration in the context of your experience gained from concerns of other employers facing similar symptoms, you can help the employer discover the root cause. Then a solution that makes sense can be developed; Read More  

Economic Development Opportunities – An Important Incentive in Attracting Companies to Your Region

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

When organizations try to create new jobs in their area – working with companies that are considering moving to, expanding to or expanding within their areas – skilled labor availability for many regional economic development strategies may include an offering that consists of one part skills assessment, one part general skill classes and a sprinkling of worker tax credits or grants. That seems to be what most incentive packages include, but is that because: A) that is what the other offers look like; b) it has been like that for decades; C) it is assumed that is all that is available; or D) all of the above?

For over thirty years headlines sounded the alarm that those institutions that were training the workforce of tomorrow were not succeeding in their effort as discussed in, “An Anniversary That You Won’t Want to Celebrate: 30 Years Later and The Skill Gap Grows – Is it Finally Time to Rethink The Nation’s Approach?“). Many skilled workers that are available to work do not have the skills that employers need today. Not completely satisfied with their answer to the inevitable question regarding the region’s skilled labor availability and how workers with specific skill needs will be found or developed, some economic development organizations are exploring other options and opportunities.

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“Whether attracting new companies and helping them thrive and expand, or helping existing business to do the same, this approach is an important component of any economic development strategy.”

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

Proactive Technologies Announces Significant Turnkey Project Discount Program – October 15th – December 20th, 2019!

“No-Risk” Discount Pilot Program – Witness Approach for One of Your Specific Job Classifications Before You Decide to Expand
by Proactive Technologies, Inc. Staff
Due to the success of our last discount offers, and many requests from companies that could not act before the end of the last discount offer early this year, Proactive Technologies Inc. is once again offering a generous discount offer of up to 40% to employers from October 15th to December 20th, 2019!

This  accelerated transfer of expertise™ approach is a tremendous offer without the discount but with it, it can help any employer to:

1. quickly and completely train the skilled workers they need;
2. realize an increase in worker capacity, work quantity/quality and
compliance with quality programs such as ISO9001:2015, TS16949, AS9100D, NADCAP, etc., as well as engineering specifications and safety;
3. reduce the internal costs of training!

New-hires and incumbent workers are driven to full job mastery and higher levels of return on worker investment (ROWI). The task-based, structured on-the-job training infrastructure is perfect for apprenticeships; instead of marking the calendar for “time-in-job,” job-relevant tasks are mastered and documented.

As if anyone needs one more reason (i.e. in addition to live online presentations, onsite presentations) to decide whether to move forward with structured on-the-job training to boost their training strategy: Read More

Read the full December, 2019 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Posted in News

Proactive Technologies Report – November, 2019

Posted on by DPrigelmeierpti

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

 by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

These are uncertain times for some manufactures 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 strategize their next move.

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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. 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.

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. Read More

The US DOL Wants States To Expand Apprenticeships. Will, and Can, Community Colleges Support Truly Employer-Focused Apprenticeships?

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 an article entitled, “A New Breed of Apprenticeships,” several community colleges were celebrated for their vision in expanding apprenticeship programs to non-traditional areas, in this case healthcare.

In reviewing the article’s “Five Key Elements” of an employer-based apprenticeship, I wonder if the understanding exists of what is most important to the employer. Something that isn’t “front-and-center” as an element is the need to ensure that the apprenticeship program, at a minimum, results in a worker who has mastered all of the tasks for the apprenticeship employer host’s job classification. Without that assurance, the employer will be underwhelmed, if not disappointed, and may disband the program leaving current apprentices without a program to finish and those who targeted the program without the special status they were expecting.

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The article’s author rightly pointed out that apprenticeships have been around for around 4,000 years. They were built around the job classification in the beginning because that is all that there was. There were no community college for core and industry-general skill development; just a subject matter expert transferring expertise to a fresh recruit. It was effective because training was one-on-one in relatively low- traffic work environments. Expertise, tribal knowledge, work wisdom and known safety rules were all transferred while transferring each task’s best practice, so there was no doubt how these components fit together.

This approach became more difficult to manage as enterprises grew in size, scope and complexity. For profit-motivated employers, a 10 or 15 year apprenticeship was unthinkable. Labor unions tried to focus training more into an 8 or 9 year apprenticeship, but it was still hard to administrate and non-union shops showed no interest at all.

In general, employers drifted father and farther from the concept of expert-to-novice expertise transfer, opting instead for the very informal, unstructured and occasional one-on-one prevalent in most firms. Never mind the obvious contradiction with other contemporary management strategies such as LEAN, Total Quality Management and Continuous Improvement applied to capital investments. Most employers seemed to settle on the “hope for the best” strategy when it came to human assets, hoping further that the local educational institutions would come up with a solution while they raced forward to be competitive – dragging this anchor behind them. Read More

Proactive Technologies Announces Significant Turnkey Project Discount Program – October 15th – December 20th, 2019!

“No-Risk” Discount Pilot Program – Witness Approach for One of Your Specific Job Classifications Before You Decide to Expand

by Proactive Technologies, Inc. Staff

Due to the success of our last discount offers, and many requests from companies that could not act before the end of the last discount offer early this year, Proactive Technologies Inc. is once again offering a generous discount offer of up to 40% to employers from October 15th to December 20th, 2019! The accelerated transfer of expertise™ approach is a tremendous offer without the discount but with it, it can help any employer to:

click here to expand

• quickly and completely train the skilled workers they need;

• realize an increase in worker capacity, work quantity/quality and compliance with quality programs such as ISO9001:2015, TS16949, AS9100D, NADCAP, etc., as well as engineering specifications and safety;

• reduce the internal costs of training;

New-hires and incumbent workers to full job mastery and higher levels of return on worker investment (ROWI).

The task-based, structured on-the-job training infrastructure is perfect for apprenticeships; instead of marking the calendar for “time-in-job,” job-relevant tasks are mastered and documented. As if anyone needs one more reason (i.e. in addition to live online presentations, onsite presentations) to decide whether to move forward with structured on-the-job training to boost their training strategy: Read More

Read the full November, 2019 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Posted in News

Proactive Technologies Report – October, 2019

Posted on by DPrigelmeierpti

Labor Costs Expected to Increase, So Will Challenges to Worker Development

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

In an article by David McCann of CFO.com entitled, “Labor Costs Will Skyrocket Over the Next Decade”, the author cited new research from consulting firm Korn Ferry  projecting new challenges for employers in the coming years. “Organizations around the world could add more than $2.5 trillion to their annual labor costs within 12 years as a result of the global shortage of highly skilled workers. The report follows up on the recruiting and workforce management firm’s forecast in May that the talent shortage could cost companies $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenue by 2030.

This is a rolling crisis that started several decades ago – the repercussions are just now being articulated in terms employers can relate. Employer’s awareness of the approaching crisis appeared for retiring baby-boomers and the anticipated loss of expertise and critically unique task-based skills mastered over decades of performance. Add to that the rise of millenials, the continual introduction and evolution of technology and the disruptive effects of the Crash of 2008. Now employers are finding themselves rebuilding their workforce, in many cases with tools and techniques that haven’t evolved all that much and still without really understanding the seriousness of the challenge, let alone the labor and opportunity costs to their operation.

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The report continues, “The crisis is not something that’s far off in the future. Even in 2020, the U.S. wage premium is expected to reach $296 billion. By 2025, the gap will total $400 billion, according to the report.” What can companies do to mitigate the trend and minimize the effect? “Employers will need to concentrate on reskilling lower-level workers,” Thompson (author of the report) notes. “That involves identifying those who are adaptable and flexible enough to be successful in the new world of work and putting in place robust training and workforce plans.” 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. Read More

Developing the Maintenance and Other Technically Skilled Workers That You Need; To Specification, With Minimal Investment

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 the March, 2016 Proactive Technologies Report article, “Grow Your Own Multi-Craft Maintenance Technicians – Using a ‘Systems Approach’ to Training” I described how Proactive Technologies, Inc. has often joined forces with universities, community colleges (many were schools for which I lead the customized training and workforce development departments) and other related technical instruction providers to setup and implement the “hybrid model” of worker development.  This approach has proven itself highly effective for technical job classifications such as Maintenance,Chemical Operators, Press Operator, Tool & Die, NC Machine Operator, Quality Control, Supervisor and others.

This “systems approach” to worker development is simple in its structure but includes metrics and quality control points to ensure that worker development outcomes are clearly defined, progress measured and reported monthly, and goals reached – no matter if the job changes or people change jobs. Although this approach can be used for any job classification in any setting, together we have applied this approach effectively for Maintenance and many other critical technical positions, as well as often neglected supervisor and first-line management positions, for many clients over the last 2 decades.

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The approach is unique in that it sets-up for its clients the task-based structured on-the-job training programs. There is no “cut and paste;” each job/task analysis is specific to that job classification, for that company, and incorporates already established process documents and specifications to ensure compliance with quality programs such as ISO/TS/AS and safety requirements.  Proactive Technologies provides the technical implementation support and accurately reports progress for each trainee’s individual pursuit of “Job Mastery” – allowing the business client to focus on its business while we ensure the employer gets the skilled staff they need, when they need them. As a bonus, incumbent workers are base-lined to the structured on-the-job training program requirements and a customized path is established to drive them, along with the new-hires, to full job mastery. Read More

Pre-Employment Physical Ability Tests Can be a Legal Liability If Not Done Right

by Jim Poole, President of Lifetime Learning, LLC

David Sparkman of EHS Today wrote in a July 20, 2018 article entitled “EEOC Cracks Down on Pre-Employment Physical Testing” that “If your company uses pre-employment physical stress tests for job applicants that result in the rejection of female applicants, you could be in a world of hurt if the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) finds out.” He described the story of Hirschbach Motor Lines, “which used a pre-employment back assessment to screen and reject applicants it believed would be unable to work as truck drivers. Applicants were tested for their ability to balance and stand on one leg, touch their toes while standing on one leg, and to crawl… The company eventually agreed to pay $3.2 million to a class of female applicants after the EEOC filed a lawsuit alleging the strength and fitness tests they took impacted women disparately. Earlier this year another case involving physical ability testing required by a police department resulted in a nearly $2.5 million settlement for female applicants.”

EEOC’s aggressive pursuit of cases demonstrates why it is important that employers understand the legal issues surrounding physical ability tests(PATs). Extreme care should be exercised when selecting and validating such tests. Sparkman quotes experienced lawyers representing clients in these types of cases, “’If a PAT has a disparate impact-for example, if women fail the PAT at a statistically significantly higher rate than men-an employer has the burden of demonstrating that use of the PAT is job-related and consistent with business necessity,’ explain attorneys Mallory Stumpf and Sarah Smith Kuehnel of the Ogletree Deakins law firm.”

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The EEOC announced last year in its Strategic Enforcement Plan (SEP) that for the next several years, it will continue to focus on class-based recruitment and hiring practices that discriminate. Read More

Explaining Your Process Training to Auditors, Prospects and Clients

by Proactive Technologies, Inc. Staff

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. 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.

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.

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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 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

Read the full October, 2019 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.

Posted in News

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