So, You Don’t Have Time for Training. Really? 7 Myths Dispelled
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
When meeting with manufacturing leaders, I am often first surprised, then puzzled, by the old standby reactions to the discussion of training workers to maximize each worker’s capacity and return on worker investment (“ROWI”). Whether it is just a reflex action, an unsubstantiated response to a misconception or another way of saying, “why am I in this meeting,” it is worth the time to explore this topic further.
It is a good bet that, in any firm, a worker’s training to perform the work for which they were hired is left to chance and coincidence. It follows then that so would the firm’s collective productivity, collective ROWI and, predictably, the firm’s efficiencies and effectiveness. But it doesn’t stop there. A new-hire worker that walks into an environment with a lack of definition and/or a haphazard, unfocused and undocumented effort to quickly train the worker receives the same reaction as one walking into a cluttered office for the first time. “How does this guy function?” “How can he find anything?’ “What is this guy’s job and would he know it?”
It is true, first impressions are important. But doing nothing to clarify or dispel negative impressions has a compounding destructive add-on effect.
- A team cannot exist when too many do not adequately know their role;
- A manager cannot lead a group when they don’t each know how to perform all of the tasks they are expected to;
- Workers cannot be motivated to do great things when the company didn’t show them from the start they truly care about being great with their workers;
- Workers can develop a sense of ambivalence;
- Work quantity, work quality and compliance with engineering, quality and safety specification are jeopardized when processes are not standardized and training is not consistent and complete;
- Lowered morale results in increased turnover as those with the most skills and marketability leave first, leaving those who need even more supervised training are left behind;
- When a star performer with decades of experience retires or moves on, without anything being written down or passed on, that expertise is lost for good and that asset’s value should be removed from the books.
So much for the predictable outcomes, let’s dispel some common myths used to put-off or ignore simple solutions with the potential for a great, positive impact: Read More
The Use of AI in Human Resources Could Come with Peril
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Most everyone will agree that technology has been introduced at an alarmingly increasing rate. So much so that it seems we have little time to become competent in one version before it is replaced by another, impairing the touted “it will make you more productive” claims meant to reassure us. Now we see Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) being pushed onto our phones, out desktop browsers and applications, to mundane equipment we use daily in our lives, robots to replace workers and now human resource department functions to make hiring decisions of humans (but, ironically, not for robots).
On matters concerning technology implementation by the consumer and the effects of technology on consumers, lawmakers have been slow to act or are absent from the discussion. Consequently, decisions on the ethical use, consumer privacy, theft of intellectual property and proprietary information, and cybersecurity in general are decided by the profit-oriented initiators of the technology. And when Wall Street investors latch on, the push to proliferate the new technology to all corners of society are overwhelming…until the next fad comes along that investors can cash in on.
Specifically, with regard to cyber breaches, “there were 2,365 cyberattacks in 2023, with 343,338,964 victims. Around the world, a data breach cost $4.88 million on average in 2024. Business email compromises accounted for over $2.9 billion in losses in 2023.”
Concerning identity theft, “American adults lost a total of $43 billion to identity fraud in 2023…That includes $23 billion lost to traditional identity fraud, which affected about the same number of people – 15 million – as in 2022 (when the number was 15.4 million). But total losses grew by 13 percent last year, according to the report, “Resolving the Shattered Identity Crisis,” produced by Javelin Strategy & Research.”
Concerns over AI adoption have come from every angle and yet little has been done to build enforceable “guard rails” to ensure its safe use – not just for the user but by the collateral populations as well. Among the criticisms of AI that have emerged: 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 and prior experience, it is a relatively linear path to the employer’s front door. What happens next has seems 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: Read More
What Makes Proactive Technologies’ Accelerated Transfer of Expertise™ So Effective
by Proactive Technologies, Inc. Staff
There are a lot of buzzwords thrown around these days. “Skills Gap,” Education-Based Apprenticeships, Industry-Recognized Certifications, “STEM and STEAM” – many confusing to those in management whose primary function is to ensure products and services are delivered in the most cost-effective and profitable way. It can be especially confusing to those who are specialists in business operations but unfamiliar with effective worker development strategies.
For anyone unfamiliar with Proactive Technologies’s PROTECH™ system of managed human resource development for the accelerated transfer of expertise™, it might help to clarify what makes this approach to worker development and continuous worker improvement so effective. This unique approach, in practice since 1986 and always improving, was designed by someone who endured the pressures of maintaining the highest quality staff in a world of constant change and pressures to do more with less.
We start by collecting client data about each of their targeted job classifications; data that is all around anyway (e.g. people’s heads, operator’s notes, engineering processes, quality standards, EHS specifications). Usually, we find that this information isn’t readily available or discoverable by new hires and incumbents. This makes learning and mastering the tasks — unpredictable, ineffective, open to interpretation and conflicts (including legal), costly and not conducive of standardization of high performance. And the continual revision of all of these bits of information adds to the challenge and makes process improvement and implementation efforts difficult, at best.
Many times we find that tasks are not proceduralized for best practice performance; either not defined at all or defined vaguely such as “Perform _____,” leaving it up to each new trainee to guess what was intended. We job/task analyze undocumented tasks for the missing bits and work with engineering, quality and management to make sure we have the best, best practice before we develop any training or certification tools from it.
Our proprietary software allows us to quickly gather and consolidate the many sources of data and to generate the tools of the human resource development process for use when and where needed. Our technical support, 12 months (renewable) included in every project, allows the client’s organization to focus on business while we set the programs up and manage them for them. Our software automatically generates all of the tools of the human resource development process to allow for big-scale projects at a small-scale investment; from today’s job description and entry level tests, to structured on-the-job training materials and checklists, to technical procedures and performance appraisals. One revision updates all of the tools! The system keeps track of each trainee’s training progress and provides detailed reports to monitor each worker’s capacity no matter which job classification they are assigned. Read More
Read the full January, 2025 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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