No Wonder: On-the-Job TRAINING Is Rarely Taught in College
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.®
We have heard for the last 40 years that employers “just can’t find the skilled workers they need.” Why aren’t there more people taking a critical look at this bold declaration? It gets regurgitated at every conference, in many newscasts and business publications as if it is a proven fact or biblical commandment, not the folk lore it really is. It was created in the 1980s as a pretext for employers moving their operations to lower-wage labor markets that have absolutely no local skilled labor and few candidates with a good foundation upon with to train.
As employers continued to lean on the phrase to disingenuously express their dismay with state’s workforce development and educational institutions – whose only legitimate role has been, and should be, in developing graduates with a solid general and regionally technical skill-base upon which employers could build upon through task-based on-the-job training that only they could, and should, deliver – the pressure was so great that institutions transformed themselves many times in sincere efforts to accommodate the fabricated reasoning. Each time it resulted in little to no impact on the supposed problem, given the continued “we just can’t find the skilled workers” shifting of blame.
click here to expandAnd as private equity bought up more and more firms, initially gutting any semblance of internal worker training efforts as “costs to be cut,” educational institutions followed by further modifying their curriculum for Human Resource Managers to de-emphasize a practice developed during WWII to quickly train the manufacturing workers needed from mostly no experience and weak core skill-base new-hires. This approach emphasized structured on-the-job training for the task-based, process-based competency needed. Any deficient core skills were remediated through focused classroom delivery, which aligned directly with the structured on-the-job training to follow. This intentional omission from college curricula yields graduates with a misunderstanding of on-the-job training; that it means classroom learning and attendance rosters while employed. ‘Training” and ‘learning“ have, unfortunately, become known as the same.
Unaware of the significance of this harmful omission, academic leadership and education administrators embraced this elevation of learning over training as “more work for them.” Education will do it all, leaving employers more “off the hook” for training new-hires on the equipment, processes and tasks unique to them. New phrases like “work-ready” were construed to mean “this worker could hit the ground running;” “plug and play,” no training required. Of course, employers continued to vocalize their disappointment in the results, but in reality they didn’t mind. They were set to offshore jobs anyway.
Private equity-acquired firms began laying off seasoned HR managers with valuable on-the-job training experience (since these HR managers typically were accordingly more highly paid), replaced by HR Generalists and HR Managers who may not have had a chance to gain the practical personal experience with informal “on-the-job training” through previous employment, but were willing to work for a lower wage,
To better understand the widening disconnect between practical worker development solutions and educational curriculum, take a peek at the course offerings and requirements for a degree in human resource management at the top 25 Colleges for Human Resources Degree Programs-2025 (College Factual®) . “HR degrees are usually offered out of business schools and as such, frequently require a business core curriculum involving the following subjects: Read More
What Are You “Turning Over” When You Say You Have “High Turnover?
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.®
It is not hard to overhear human resource managers commiserating over the high rate of “employee turnover“ they are encountering and struggling to remedy. In listening a little more closely, it is not entirely clear as to what that phrase, seemingly ubiquitous, means today. Is this a conversation where both parties seem to believe they know what the other is talking about, but underlying each case are different facts?
Not too long ago, turnover meant the rate of loss of employees to replace those who exited the company. It usually referred to those employees in which the employer had made an investment to develop them into an asset. it appears many still see that as a general description, but the source of their struggles seems to address other structural issues.
It is important to distinguish between four different types of labor turnover to be focused. First, there are the individuals that apply for a job, are hired, but do not appear the first day of work. The only investment the company made is the time it took to interview the individual and log them in as an employee.
click here to expandThe second type of turnover concerns the individuals that have gone through the interview process, showed-up for work, stayed for a few weeks and then decided the job wasn’t for them for whatever reason. In this case, the company has more of an investment in developing the employee, but it is still rather insignificant.
The third type of turnover concerns employees that have been hired, who received a significant amount of training and pay while in training and have stayed for several months – almost reaching a recognizable level of productivity and return on the employer’s worker investment. Understandably, the employer has more of an investment in this type of employee and their loss is felt more.
The fourth type of turnover is more critical. The loss of employees that have been trained, have been with the company for the long-term, in whom the company has made a significant investment and their contribution to the operation is felt more deeply if they leave. Read More
New Year’s Resolutions That Can Right This Skills Gap…Thing
by Frank Gibson, Workforce Development Advisor and President of the North-Central Ohio Employer-Based Worker Training Partnership
Jessie Potter, Director of the National Institute for Human Relationships, is said to have originated the quote, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.” For the last 40 years, manufacturing employers have expressed their despair at “not finding the skilled workers they need,” while employees say employers are not doing their share to train workers and educational institutions churn billions of dollars each year doing their best to develop entry-level workers with industry level skills only to find those targeted jobs were sent overseas. With the new year upon us, maybe it is time for all parties to take a step back, face the issue honestly and pragmatically and put an end to the buck passing, the “shell game” and the misplaced expectations to make the American workforce the envy of the world.
There are three important stakeholders in this equation going forward: the employer, the prospective employee and the institutions that make the effort to prepare workers for the employer. Although prospective workers can come from any background, it is a relatively linear path to the employer’s front door. What happens next has seemed to be a bit of a mystery to the employer and stakeholders in the community, and that ambiguity affects the quality of the inputs preparing potential workers.
The Prospective Employer Needs:
click here to expand- To have a long-range plan in mind when you have a serious discussion about the type of workers that will help you succeed in that plan.
- To critically assess your firm’s internal worker training program. Is there one? Follow a typical new worker from hiring to full job mastery or somewhere close. Is the process defined, deliverable, measurable, adaptable and improvable?
- To create a system and documentation to track every worker’s progress to full capacity. Informal on-the-job training is far more costly and ineffective – with questionable outcomes – than a deliberate strategy to accelerate the training. Once the system is in place, assess the incumbent workers for any training they might have missed and set them on the path to close their unique gap. Do these things with every job classification you have staffed and they will be completely made up of star performers.
- To work towards standardization and consistency. Process documents are a good “Job Performance Aid” but not a replacement for structured on-the-job training to first drive a worker to task mastery. Job Performance Aids refreshes someone’s memory when too much time has elapsed since the last performance to trust one’s memory.
- Consider worker training as “continuous improvement” that should not stop once their current job has been mastered.
- To view every worker as an asset. As with any, an asset becomes a cost when not developed and utilized completely and correctly. Add these under- and undeveloped assets up and the cost clearly warrants deliberate attention on training.
The Prospective Employee Needs: Read More
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 a busy 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.”
click here to expandThen came the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2019 – 2023 that affected the world. The economic disruption that it is caused, once again, tested 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
Read the full February, 2026 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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