Proactive Technologies Report™ – August, 2026

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

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

A recurring theme in the media is that employers “just can’t find the workers they need.” 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.

Manufacturers say $32 billion was spent on “training” in 2025. Yet employees and employers remain unsatisfied with the results. “Employee turnover has cost US industries nearly $1 Trillion…And the most astounding part is that most of this damage is ‘self-inflicted.’ (American Machinist). Employers that average 20-30% turnover rate are unnecessarily running out of skilled candidates.

It’s no secret, many employers complain that they can’t find skilled labor but fail to try to properly train the ones they have or hire. Raced through on-boarding, a new-hire is dropped off at the area supervisor’s door. Introduced to anyone available, the informal OJT begins. No structure, no strategy, no documentation. Panic sets in as the 90-day review approaches with little to validate retention. This seems more like a disconnect between knowing what core-skills and knowledge a successful candidate needs and how to accommodate or remediate core-skill gaps, and having a strategy to build on that foundation with structured, deliberate, documented on-the-job, task-based training before those core-skills and knowledge are lost to time.

This can be attributed, first, to the upheaval caused by the Great Crash of 2008 and the following disruption of several million careers including seasoned HR managers with the historical memory of how the cycle of worker development worker. Before being convinced to enroll in educational programs to develop new, marketable skills most had to wait 5-6 years for the Crash to bottom out, the remaining companies to dust themselves off a pattern of hiring started to emerge. Nothing is more frustrating to a worker who was previously considered “highly skilled” to follow the “experts” advice and “reinvent themselves” through a 2-4 year program only to find those jobs were moved overseas, too.

The evidence of a persistent disconnect couldn’t be clearer: Read More

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Supposedly Fewer Jobs Require Degrees. Now Employers Can’t Agree on Entry-Level Skills They Need. What’s Their Plan to Make Up Difference?

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

In an article in HR Dive by Carolyn Crist entitled, “Fewer Job Posts Require Degrees, Though Hiring Hasn’t Caught Up,” the author explained what appears to be a growing shift in hiring practices by employers. Or maybe not.

She explains, “While the intention to hire people without degrees is seemingly growing, hiring practices remain influenced by traditional requirements… Talent acquisition pros appear to be changing their habits, but hiring has not yet caught up to the push to end degree requirements, LinkedIn data says.” Furthermore, few companies feel effective at skill validation. Unfortunately, educational institutions aren’t all that helpful, with their single-minded approach to skill validation that seems more about validating the products they have and want to market – even though often out-of-date and too general to assess job-specific skill needs.

Jobs available and job requirements change so fast that only the employer, closest to need at any point in time, is in a position to know what is needed and find who they are looking for – having a strategy for evaluating new and incumbent workers for gaps and a plan to deliberately address the deficiencies. They need to continue with task-based training to reinforce the worker’s base-skills before lost. Not many employers seem to know or believe this, nor commit to the necessary effort.

Hiring based on skills is more difficult than hiring by degree, by far. Hiring by skill requires an accurate understanding of the required prerequisite skills for the job and an accurate way to measure a candidate’s skill base relative to that job classification. Read More

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Workforce Development Partnerships With Substance: My Experience

by Randy Toscano, Jr., MSHRM, Workforce Strategist. Former Human Resources Market Director, Lifepoint/Duke Hospital System

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. I have learned that successful worker development strategies created while I was a manufacturing Human Resources Director are also very applicable to many positions in healthcare…any industry for that matter.

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

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

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

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Starting a Business Now Is Difficult at Best. Navigating the Business Through Factors Inflicted By Others Is Terrifying!

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.^®

Entrepreneurism still holds a dream-like status for nearly everyone at one time or another. When we are young with fewer commitments and responsibilities, we are tempted to take the leap. A few do and land at the right moment with the right venture, resources, strategy and financial system balance. Many do and find they were ill-prepared for the wicked ride it can become. Some excellent ideas brought forward by brilliant people time the economic booms and crashes wrong, encounter hidden but insurmountable barriers and the inconvenient discovery that what college textbooks preached about business financing and investors just waiting for their business plan were never there to begin with. Their desperate moves to navigate this “quicksand” leave many swallowed up and never heard from again.

The barriers to a small business’ operation and growth are increasing proportionally to deregulation and misguided economic policy, and outlined pretty well in another Proactive Technologies Report article “If They Haven’t Already, Local and State Econ Development Should Diversify Focus to Emphasize SMBs and Entrepreneurs.” Take, for example, the simple notion of an established small business financing itself to weather economic turmoil created by others. Legislation that started the movement of bigger and bigger banks to buy up local banks and move money from community banks to coasts(Silicon Valley and Wall Street) began in the early 1990’s. It has continued to the point of worsened prospects and dampened spirits for entrepreneurs and small businesses who always start local.

Evidence of this migration of lending capital started with the emergence of “invoice factoring” companies in the early 1990’s. The financing terms then were so onerous that they wouldn’t exist if traditional business banking was an option. A factorer was willing to lend up 50% of the face value of an invoice and charge interest on 100% of the face value. Worse yet was the fact that the factorer would tell you if they were willing to lend against the invoice after you completed the work and invoiced. In the 1990’s and to some degree today, the business would have to contract for the work, perform the work with their own funds and wait sometimes up to 6 months to get paid. The factorer would then contact your client to validate your invoice and to have the client agree to pay them directly. The facturer, also, wanted access to the business’ checking account to collect interest monthly, sometimes daily. If the business was having problems collecting on invoices then, they now risked having the full value of the invoice eaten by interest and fees. Plus the heavy- handed collection tactics might make sure the business no longer had that client. At a minimum, this relationship left the client with the overwhelming impression that the business was insolvent, not just suffering from lack of proper invoice lending in a world when the accounting industry was encouraging industry member’s accountants to “slow-pay” vendors to extend their own cash flow – even though they had access to capital and financing! Factoring – was and still in use today – like “pay day” loans to individuals, but on steroids and much more destructive.

Two revealing stories (probably out of millions) recently told in an NPR report illustrate the insidiousness of the mistreatment of small businesses when it comes to access to financing and capital. Read More

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Read the full August, 2026 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.