Thinking of a company as being made up of building blocks helps to visual this relationship. Fundamental to it all is the worker, and worker capacity. Worker capacity fits the definition above, but seldom do companies have a definition and control of a worker’s capacity. More often than not, companies view a workers contribution as placeholder for a position defined in terms of hours worked, dollars spent or an expected output based on the history of predecessors.

But worker capacity is much more than that. It relates to the range of tasks the worker is expected to masterfully perform, on equipment and using tools provided, meeting all standards and specifications, and in a safe and risk-adverse manner. It is affected by internal factors such as the company’s strategy, policies, management technique, working environment, company culture and perception of fair compensation. It can be affected, as well, by the worker’s external influences such as well-being, well-being of family members, health, finances and any number of unexpected disruptors. Read More

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.

Next, this technology had to rely the applicant knowing the right words and phrases to describe their own pre-hire knowledge, experience, skills and abilities of interest to the employer for the algorithm to recognize a closeness or match. In truth, most candidates even knew less about the difference between a skill and ability, knowledge and a trait, having “experience with” versus being “acquainted with,” or being “fluent” in a topic or having a passing knowledge.

Nevertheless, this technology, with all of its short-comings, stormed the market. Many who lost their jobs in 2008 had not written a resume or filled in a job application for 20 or 30 years, let alone were aware of how key-word search worked and the need to be precise in describing a life of work in terms used by employers which were evolving and who probably changed their own management line-up and company strategy. No one really knows how many highly skilled and perfect matches have seen their careers derailed by this technology, robbing the worker of the job they wanted and the employer of the worker they needed. Read More

We tried a lot of innovative programs for employers in the community within the constraints mentioned, but if I was to be honest we rarely kept up. What we thought we knew of the targeted job classifications and their requirements, and upon which our programs were built and measured, seemed to become increasingly misaligned within just a few years. Not only was advancing technology putting pressure on the content of our learning materials and program design – a constant push toward obsolescence – the employers were continually rethinking the design of their job classifications to meet their business goals and budgets. We were finding less and less similarity in job classifications between employers, by job title and job content. 

Inevitably, and not from lack of effort or desire, it was difficult to keep technical curriculum current to within 5-10 years. The “Maintenance” job classification was a perfect example and could be incredibly different from company to company. In the early days, Maintenance was thought of as multi-craft; a maintenance person was responsible for maintaining all aspects of the operation. Some companies tried to hold onto that concept of Multi-Craft Maintenance but, as Multi-Craft Maintenance Technicians were becoming harder to find and therefore required higher pay, more and more companies began to deviate from multi-craft to specialty and single-craft positions that cover only limited areas such as facilities, electrical or mechanical. Some Maintenance positions did not include HVAC, some were primarily focused on servicing machines but not repair. Some employers subcontracted out facility maintenance and instead had their Maintenance employees perform preventative maintenance tasks on everything from manual machines to PLC driven multi-axis machines, to robots and robotic manufacturing machines – leaving the servicing to the warranty and/or contracted OEM experts. Trying to find the right balance between an effective Maintenance program that gives every employer what they wanted but does not train for skills that one might never have a chance to use and master and most likely would forget, proved increasingly difficult to say the least. 

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

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

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

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

1. Inventory of human resources enterprise software (if existent): Decisions usually have to be made as to which system will become the standard, what data has been kept and should be kept, how to convert the data to the standard format, training of each site’s staff on the new system, etc. Read More

As pawns in this transformation, workers – some with extreme experience – are now very vulnerable to being reconsidered out of the equation as with the newly hired. This is primarily because it was not clear prior to the pandemic the range of tasks for which an employee has expertise and what core skills, abilities and competencies those tasks mastered represent and are transferable. Without the base of data to know how existing workers can be retooled for new tasks and new production needs, it is so easy to think that starting over is a better solution. It is not, that is unless an employer post-pandemic has no better worker development “infrastructure” for defining the tasks that currently exist and for the new tasks that will need to be performed as the recollection of supervisors who may be also on their way out.

It does not follow that automating the worker out of the formula is a better, less costly solution when you calculate the cost of designing, building and proofing the automation for this disruption plus an estimate of having to do it again for the next disruption. Each employer has a tremendous amount of value built into their human assets, but most have no way to identify it, replicate it, or transform it. Read More 

My take away from this experience has been that not all online resources have the same quality, of content and delivery, and that not all learners respond well to a two dimensional delivery method. Some need more instructor facilitated engagement in order to make the content stick. Some can watch an online tutorial and immediately pick up the topic. In between these two learning styles parents found themselves with very little experience in human development – other than their parental role in nurturing. We won’t know how much of what was learned is retained until schools reopen and we hand off the children to those better able to assess.

I hope that our leaders and our educational systems look back on this era as a wake up call that we as a country were so grossly ill prepared for disruption. Read More

When Education encounters disruptions such as covid-19, institutions shut down, instructors wait at home, training providers are sidelined, and some of these even move on if the opportunity arises. Yet their employer – many left open as essential industries – are continuing to employ, informally train incumbent, new and transferring workers. Those employers that invested in a structured on-the-job training infrastructure were able to adapt and minimize the impact. Even those without a formal structured on-the-job training system were better positioned to continue to deliver training (albeit informal and ad hoc) compared to educational institutions and providers that were essentially shut down waiting for the green light on when and how to reopen.

There is clear role for related technical instruction in workforce development, which is to build essential core skills and competencies in trainees so they can learn and master the tasks the employer needs done. But if the employer has a structured on-the-job training infrastructure in place, not only can they accept more prepared candidates they can quickly drive them and incumbent workers to sustained maximum capacity. Even better, they can keep the worker development process going while they wait for their related technical instruction partners to redefine themselves and recover. Employers have the facilities, the equipment, the subject matter experts and the need, so to allow them to be reluctant or timid workforce development partners when they would like to be more aggressive is an unfortunate mistake.  Read More

Recently, with the changes brought about by ISO 9001:2015 (promulgated toAS 9000  and TS 16949 quality models) concerning the “capture and management of legacy knowledge,” and Nadcapthe company realized that they have been capturing and managing legacy knowledge for the hourly positions all along. Nadcap (formerly NADCAP, the National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program) is a global cooperative accreditation program for aerospace engineering, defense and related industries.

Complying with the requirements to capture and manage the process knowledge, identify gaps between the job knowledge needed to perform in the job and the employee’s consistent performance of the tasks of the job, and documentation to provide evidence that the gap was found and closed, has been a routine component of the PROTECH© system of managed human resource development. The many tools, reports and benefits ensure the approach to all job classifications, all employees is consistent – even though the jobs and people are not.

The OJT Tasks Mastered Report is proudly posted on the Gemba boards of each department to show ISO/AS auditors, and clients and future clients, not just generalizations of work behavior, but more importantly the level to which each worker is trained to perform, and has mastered, each detailed task of their job classification. Read More

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

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

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

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 

• 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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  

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

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 

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  

“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