Eroding Organizational Capacity: The “Unstructured, Haphazard and Ad Hoc Process-based Training Effect”
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.®
If you work long enough for a variety of employers, there is one theme that seems to run common to all – the lack of structure to the all important job-based, process-based training that one would expect. Often we are shown our workstation, introduced to the area manager and then we wait for some guidance and training for what is expected of us. Sometimes we wait in vain. Sometimes we are subjected to bits and pieces of information and take it upon ourselves to make sense of it rather than wait indefinately.
None of our core skill bases and work-based task mastery history are, alone, sufficient enough to substitute for the need to know the best practices for performing the tasks for which the new employer hired us. If an employer hires a new employee not having a structure to quickly transfer job expertise from the incumbent experts to the new-hire, it is fair to say this runs counter to good business practices and economic principals. Yet unstructured, haphazard and ad hoc task training is the norm.
“Only 17% of organizations said they had developed processes to capture institutional memory/organizational knowledge from employees close to retirement, while just 13% said they were providing training to upgrade the skills of older workers.”
IndustryWeek Magazine – Steve Minter
click here to expand
We all know that inaction to rectify this doesn’t make sense, but many managers dismiss the concern and take comfort in group-thinking, “this phenomenon is the norm, why not apply my efforts elsewhere since I will not be judged on something that appears to others to be beyond my control.” Some see a problem because this deficiency has become the norm. Others see it more critically as a threat to current and future organizational capacity and competitiveness and would be receptive to the following discussion. Read More
Employers Say Fewer Jobs Require Degrees. What is Their Plan to Make Up The 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.
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. It requires “content valid” or “job relevant” hiring criteria that represents today’s version of the job classification, not yesterday’s or yesteryear’s job criteria – something most employers lack. Many employer’s job descriptions alone are grossly behind today’s technological state of operation, and what they have is guaranteed to continually degrade with each passing year. For some, it might even be so extreme that it may produce an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission violation waiting to be discovered.
click here to expandCrist further explains, “Last year, paid LinkedIn Recruiter users searched for candidates by their skills about five times more often than they searched by degrees…Degreeless hiring is growing, but the percentage of hires made often falls short of the job post rate.” So what could be the hurdle?
For one, as mentioned, sufficient job or content valid hiring criteria is typically lacking. Second, most employer’s worker development strategies haven’t kept up with the times. Unlike 20-30 years ago when an employer could get by with a “Bob, this is Jim…why not show him around” approach to on-the-job training, today’s jobs are more complex, undocumented and too broad to not deliberately train workers to master the tasks of the job classification for which the employer should expect them to be responsible.
And when hiring continues as if more bodies is the answer, while there aren’t enough “subject matter experts” nor a system of worker development in place, productivity is sure to decline and desperate decisions to seek cheaper labor(with the same challenges or more) elsewhere may be forced upon the CEO by anxious shareholders. Read More
Large-Scale Worker Training Projects Are Right for Small and Mid-size Employers
by Dr. Dave Just, formally Dean of Corporate and Continuing Education at Community Colleges in MA, OH, PA, SC. Currently President of K&D Consulting
I spent many years as Director of Corporate and Continuing Education at several community colleges in multiple states. I think back on those years before working with Proactive Technologies when employer engagement was very difficult to achieve, let alone retain. Often it was only possible to get the employer to agree to send a few people to classes, either on site or offsite, if grant money covered the cost. But the scope was limited and the results were often inconclusive.
In the mid-90s, I began to partner with Proactive Technologies on what they called “structured on-the-job training programs” meant to increase each worker’s capacity through accelerating the transfer of expertise from the existing experts to new and cross-training workers. It seemed simple and intuitively I felt something the employer could relate to. Building a training program, and an infrastructure where there was none, that the employer could recognize and has the potential to yield results they can immediately realize seemed like a new concept, but one employers told me they wished for in nearly every meeting.
When we began talking with employers and were able to get them to commit to setting up structured on-the-job training programs for one job, maybe two, as a pilot. Inevitably, employers saw the value and expanded the programs to include other jobs critical to their operation and opened the programs up to more employees for training and cross-training.
click here to expandMany of these manufacturers in South Carolina took the same path and expanded projects to include other jobs and other employees. They found that it also help them with their compliance issues with ISO 9001:2015, IATF 16949, AS 9100 type of certification programs. These quality certification programs have a provision that required process-based training documentation to support it, evidence that the employer was serious about the effort and requirements that the job information and employee information is current and accurate. All of these provisions were supported by Proactive Technologies and it’s many ways of reporting this information.
Project expansion was not a coincidence. It was the result of providing something that mattered to employers and that they always knew in her heart was needed, but might have been led to believe it was impossible to do so they never pursued it. In South Carolina we were able to sign-up 24 tier 1 and tier 2 manufacturing suppliers across the state – many suppliers to BMW – to commit to structured on-the-job training programs in just two years. The number of job classifications targeted at each employer started at two but expanded to as many as seven in short order. Many were registered as apprenticeships. Although most of these firms were significantly disrupted by the Crash of 2008 like others across the nation, some continued on throughout and others resumed their programs as they recovered. The community college, again, had an unbroken connection to market their product and services to these employers. Read More
It’s Past Time to Be Honest with Students and Workers About the Future of Work in America and America’s Future
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.®
So much is going into the marketing of “the promise artificial intelligence (AI).” Without the necessary security, protections and guardrails in place, the message can be confusing and overwhelming to say the least. So far, AI seems to be a boom mainly for those who would use it to harm others rather than to help humanity. And those who are financing and benefiting from the imposition of AI on all aspects of life are betting the farm on AI thriving long enough to pull their profits out before it is realized for what it was only meant to be.
Let me be clear up-front, I am not against AI when it is used as defined and confined to the things it is proven to be good at and still in the controlled testing stage. But in this day and age, and with the wealthy and opportunistic investors seeing this as “the next big thing” to increase their wealth, so much in the way of safety, security, practicality, and efficacy is tossed out the window. In fact, changes by this administration have removed even more regulations and oversight, and we the people who are most vulnerable are, as we have been for some time, the guinea pigs.
For decades, the narrative students and workers were hearing was that manufacturing jobs were leaving America and are never coming back. At the same time, we saw that German, Austrian, Swiss, Korean, Japanese, Swedish and many other countries were building manufacturing plants in the US. The predominant pretext for leaving we heard from US employers and politicians was that they “just couldn’t find skilled workers” while manufacturing jobs established here were shipped overseas where there were literally no skilled workers but magically a way was found to make product. Now students and workers are kept guessing over whether job are going to be insourced or near-sourced to a neighboring country, but told if you hurry and change career paths again you might be OK.
Currently, the media binge-feeds on the conflicting messages with every press release on AI development that is lopped onto the market to stoke investor fires. Nothing needs to be fully tested and secure, just rush it to the market before investors lose interest. So many big tech companies have staked their futures and reputation on AI. Daily assessments of jobs that will be lost to AI, of intellectual property that will be illegally misappropriated for someone else’s use and enrichment, project a hallucination that we will all somehow be better off when it is just the narrow few. This movement represents an attempt at a monumental “repurposing” of the worker in a capitalist democracy…without defining or ensuring that purpose.
click here to expand“Now we are in a race with China to be the most competitive in the world AI market. With 1 in 4 of the 734 million workers in China at threat of losing their jobs to AI, why don’t we let them win this race and see how all the displaced workers there will reward their government for making them obsolete?”
Threatening the role of the employed worker and the path to employment, if we are to believe the AI hype, there doesn’t seem to be an occupation that won’t negatively impacted if someone will make money off imposing hardship on others. And it is unclear if the employer will really benefit or are they being misled as well.
No human should be OK with the way this technology is being rolled out and imposed. Read More
Read the full July, 2025 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
Proactive Technologies, Inc.®; PROTECH®; Human Resource Management for Tomorrow...Today!® and logo; PROTECH©® System of Managed Human Resource Development™; Accelerated Transfer of Expertise System™; Certificate of Job Mastery Program™, Certificate of Task Mastery Program™ are all trademarks of Proactive Technologies Inc.®;