Is it Possible to Close the “Skills Gap” if Focused on the Symptom, Not The Cause?
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
There is nothing like the futility of trying to solve a specificproblem with a general solution…or treating the symptoms with methods that do not address the underlying problem. No one would use a screwdriver to tighten a nut or bolt. However, in an environment surrounded by a loud, unrelenting and self-interested screwdriver industry “expert” voices there may well be many who try – even those who should know better. Especially if given a “free” screwdriver.
According to the Center for Economic Research, “US Businesses lose approximately $160 billion total every year as the result of the skills gap.” According to a 2017 Training Magazine report, “Total 2017 U.S. training expenditures [employer] rose significantly, increasing 32.5 percent to $90.6 billion, according to this year’s report.” On top of this, in 2018 the US spent $50 million on STEM education (simply putting back what was taken out of education after reforms started in the 1980’s) to “address the skill gap of future employees.”
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Considering the U.S. has been warning about the “skills gap” for over 30 years, the amount of money lost – spent on accommodating, or wrongly addressing, the symptom – the total cumulative loss could be in the significant trillions of dollars…not to mention the resources misapplied. And millions of workers who want, and wanted, to work in a career and employers that could/could have employed them were, both, left empty.
This history has led some to suggest the skills gap is a farce . Even if your concerns aren’t that extreme, one has to wonder why with all of the money spent, the resources applied and the employers and trainees impacted, we seem to still be struggling with a skills gap that started to reveal itself in the 1980’s.
The fact of the matter is that employers have been just as unfocused and ambivalent about defining the problem as government has been zealous about being the only “solution.” While employers say they need and expect workers that can “hit the ground running,” “think outside the box,” “have skills for the jobs of tomorrow” and all of the other buzzwords and phrases circulating, what they really need is workers that can perform their unique tasks and processes, on their unique equipment, in their unique environment within their unique pay structure in a world of change. Not only do employers lack a clear definition of the job as it exists today, internal and external forces never allow a job to fully materialize before it is significantly changed by design or by changes in technology, or relocated out of the education system’s service area.
“We, as a nation, have been in sort of a “skills gap limbo” for years because even though employers typically have no structured, measurable, improvable and documented method of training workers once hired, miraculously workers appear to master enough of a job for work to get done. Yet if asked, many employers have a difficult time explaining how it happened, which employees can do which tasks and, when the tasks change, which employees on which shifts mastered the new procedure – that is, until something bad happens. They admit frustration in trying to improve performance, but also admit that they do not know which employees are capable of improving or how they would know. This condition deserves swift action to resolve it, not repackaged and rebranded failures of the past.”
Employees and workforce developers, relying on this input, always see the institution’s products first as the solution. Classroom education is familiar to everyone, and the institutions have built themselves stronger with every prolonged fear of the incessant skills gap and the funding that flows from it. Still, graduates too often find themselves unemployable and burdened with debt. Employers continue to complain that they just cannot find skilled workers. 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. Read More
Workforce Development Partnerships That Last; My Experience
By Randy Toscano, Jr., MSHRM, CEO of Legacy Partners 2
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
Do U.S. Productivity Measures Measure Productivity?
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
A disturbing emerging trend, particularly in the last three decades, concerns the accuracy and quality of the economic statistics reported to the public. A lot of think tanks have sprung up in Washington issuing reports and policy statements, and some put a cloak of perceived “credibility” around statements they release meant to support a policy direction or change its course – both to the benefit of a segment of interests subsidizing the think tanks. Confusing us even more is the mainstream media’s propensity to report, as “news,” press releases emanating from these think tanks as if accurate, unbiased and inherently factual. Some may be, but when they are reported through the same careless filter, it throws them all into suspicion. The decrease in the number of accurate, readily available sources of news and facts can derail a life or business strategy.
Take for example the daily explanations by news and business show anchors of why the stock market gyrates up or down, as if the collective market can always be explained simply as, “the stock market reacted to the federal reserve’s decision to not act,” or “the stock market tumbled because of the results of the presidential election” – only to recover fully the next day. Could another simple explanation be that the market moved one way or another because groups with large holdings decided to move them?
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“Unfortunately, however, figures on productivity in the United States do not help improve productivity in the United States.”
W. Edwards Deming
Another example is the preoccupation with what is referred to as “inflation,” which is based on the consumer price index (“CPI”). A “basket of consumer goods” was selected and periodic measurements of their retail prices are taken to see, primarily, if any inflationary forces exerted pressure on prices upward or downward during the period that might require an adjustment in central bank monetary policy. First, it is important to know which goods make up the basket. Read More
Read the full February, 2019 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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