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 the first part of a two-part article entitled “Apprenticeships That Make Money? Not as Impossible as it Seems (part 1 of 2)” 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.
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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?
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: Read More
Are Advances in Technology Distracting Keeping 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.
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, as with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, 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.
Today, while the matching technology is still in use, more and more employers recognize its shortcomings and have developed “work-arounds” to try to ensure more qualified candidates are fairly and more objectively measured. Some have thrown out the idea of key-word candidate screening but not before the years of damage was done. Read More
Proactive Technologies Announces Summer “Turnkey Project” Discount Offer is Back – Expires September 30th, 2021
by Proactive Technologies, Inc. Staff
After a year-and-a-half long Covid-19 break, Proactive Technologies Inc. is once again extending to employers a generous discount offer of up to 30% from June 15 to September 30th, 2021 – extended as requested by employers!
This accelerated transfer of expertise™ approach is a tremendous offer without the discount, but with it can help any employer quickly and completely train the skilled workers they need AND realize an increase in worker capacity, work quantity/quality and compliance (ISO/TS/AS, engineering specifications and safety) while reducing the internal costs of training! New-hires and incumbent workers are driven to full job mastery and higher levels of return on worker investment (ROWI). The task-based, structured on-the-job training infrastructure is perfect for the apprenticeships; instead of marking the calendar for “time-in-job,” job-relevant tasks are mastered and documented.
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Waiting on general classes or unstructured, ad hoc one-on-one training to improve performance and maximize the investment in each worker usually proves to be futile and disappointing. When a worker masters the work they were hired for, it can now be possible to explain, document, repeat and/or improve performance. When turnover occurs and puts you back to square one – wiping out any gains and wasting your investment – labor costs rise, quality and work consistency decreases and the “gap” skill remains. So why not treat workers as the investment it is and manage it for the outcome you need and expect?
n the event that anyone needs one more way (i.e. in addition to live online presentations, onsite presentations) to gather enough information to decide whether to move forward with structured on-the-job training to boost their training strategy, PTI is resuming onsite presentations. Contact Proactive Technologies to schedule an appointment. Read More
Environmental and Cultural Factors That Undermine a Successful Structured On-the-Job Training Program
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
I’ll start by saying that every worker is a capital investment. It seems to be conceptually obvious, but sometimes overlooked in practice. Just as with all of the collective expertise is intellectual capital, it should be deliberately developed, protected, its use maximized. ISO9001:2015, TS 16949, AS 9100 and NADCAP emphasize this fact and have sections in their guidelines that pertain to, and require compliance with, this concept.
The saying “can’t see the forest for the trees,“ implies that one is too close to the subject to see it accurately. In the case of worker development, employers have often been marginally successful with the informal, ad hoc, unstructured one-on-one training that seems to gets them what they need, but not as effectively and efficiently as they think or would like.
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Even when an effort is made to structure the unstructured, there are those that resist the effort for a number of reasons. Some have a vested interest in defending the program that they have struggled with through many years of legitimate effort. Some do not like change. Some fear change will interfere with other important goals, such as production quotas – even though the effort to structure what is loosely already there (which takes much longer with lesser results) should only be seen as a positive development. Some may think they know what they are doing or talking about, but are confused about the major differences between classroom lectures, unstructured one-on-one training and structured on-the-job training.
There are only a few true practitioners(with varying approaches) of structured on-the-job training in the world, but the approach is gaining ground with the reintroduction of conceptually similar approaches such as “Training Within Industry”, an approach developed during WWII to help build a strong manufacturing supply chain,. And with the task-based knowledge capture and task-based training requirements of ISO/AS/TS that employers should literally comply with. It would be wise to follow the direction of whichever expert you bring in to help your firm build and implement your structured on-the-job training program until they are ready to hand it off to your trained staff. A professional firm would try hard to learn your culture and constraints before proceeding with a strategy right for your firm. Read More
Read the full August, 2021 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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