Proactive Technologies Report – January, 2021

“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

In short, the report led one to believe that employers overall wanted to make pay fairer, but one got the impression that there was no clear path. It is difficult in this environment to talk about raising workers wages without shareholders mounting a revolt. But with the reported shorted of skilled labor, the difficulty in training workers with a lean staff and no structure, strategy or record keeping, etc. an area of compromise has to be reached. If not, skilled workers will not apply, or stay, and the shareholder profits will definitely be affected. It is the “bullet that needs to be bit” to get the economy working like it did so well post World War II when everyone felt they had a chance at doing well for themselves and their family.

One easy-to-set-up, easy-to-implement, low investment/high return strategy for paying workers for the documented value the employee has accumulated has been discussed in previous Proactive Technologies Report articles, most recently “A Pay-for-Value Worker Development Program – Fair to Management and Workers, and Effective Too!” and previously in “Pay-For-Value Employee Programs.” Read More

There are many examples of this. The individual who can do his/her taxes each year, but would not be qualified to do others. Someone who can figure out what is wrong with the dishwasher, but reaches a point where the repair is out of reach. A lawyer who has passed the bar, but failed to specialize in an area of law to be the “go-to” guy for a particular case.

The “master of none” element appears to have been added to the phrase later to augment the meaning of the compliment; making the statement less flattering to the person receiving it. Today, the phrase used in its entirety generally describes a person whose knowledge, while covering a number of areas, is superficial to all of them.

Some modern apprenticeships are so generally focused that it is unclear who they benefit. Including general industry skills and even skills that may become useful in the future is well-intended, but the primary focus should be the mastery of tasks the current or identified future employer needs performed. That is the historic meaning of an apprenticeship. Even as a secondary priority, the hedging of bets that industry-general skills will be needed in the future depends greatly on whether jobs requiring them will materialize and the apprentice will get to apply these skills before they forget them from nonuse. An over-emphasis on predictions can yield students that graduate with irrelevant skills, and employers left with the responsibility to provide more than the task-based training one would expect. Read More

Publicly traded companies, and even some privately held companies getting ready to go public, seem preoccupied with increasing quarterly earnings per share above all else. A consistently high level of earnings per share over the long-run no longer seems adequate for some. If the market is slack, an organization might carve costs out of the company from even a lean operation rather than disappoint investors. When labor is viewed as a “cost” rather than an asset, the temptation might be to cut benefits and wages. This may prop-up numbers for the short-term, but a demoralized workforce might not produce the same levels of output and quality yield as before. Sadly, a decision might be made in following quarters to cut benefits and wages even more, followed by workers if needed to make the magic number. All the while, worker and operational capacity, along with enthusiasm and loyalty, are eroding.

How does this erosion happen? When workers are cut, the work they used to perform gets transferred to the remaining workers. If there isn’t a mechanism to quickly “transfer expertise” to the worker expected to take on the new responsibilities, capacity drops until the trainee comes up to speed. For as long as the transfer takes, one well-paid subject matter expert trainer is being paid to train the paid trainee, yet productivity improvement may be negligible. And further complicating the process, perhaps no one thought about capturing the exiting workers expertise before they left the building, so some “reinventing the wheel has to occur.” Multiply this across all affected workers and the labor and opportunity costs may wipe out any anticipated gains by cutting worker payroll.

Proactive Technologies Report has presented many articles about the value of workers, how structured on-the-job training increases the worker’s capacity to perform more tasks to a level of mastery, the high cost of worker turnover, and more. It is a concept we feel strongly about. Yet we are continually surprised how this topic is avoided by company’s accounting departments and upper management when they feel inclined to trim costs here and there, avoiding cultivating the enormous wealth before them – waiting to be harvested. What would be the value of just a 10% increase in worker capacity, operational capacity, quality and quantity of work, and worker compliance (safety, ISO/TS/AS, etc.) to any operation?  Read More