Eight Scenarios That Would Make You Wish You Had a Structured OJT System
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
I think one can confidently say that most employer’s focus on training the workers they need – to perform the tasks they were meant to perform – has become detrimentally blurry, counterproductive and often non-existent. There are many reasons for that – some legitimate. But without a deliberate, measurable strategy for quickly driving each worker to mastery of the entire job classification, an employer’s labor costs (not just wages, but opportunity costs and undermined return on worker investment as well) can be substantial and act as a drag on an organization’s performance.
Many employers are still waiting for the educational institutions to solve the problem. After all, look at all of the money spent on education directed at “training the workers of tomorrow.” Yet a lot of the institutional strategies appear to include repackaged tools from the past…and not the ones far enough past that seemed to work. For example, the recent comments made by education insiders saying we should have kept the high school vocational programs that were relatively effective until the late 1970’s in place. These were phased out when the push to prepare students for college took priority. Now, there is a push for community colleges to “pump out” more apprentices which, if done only to meet numbers but not emphasizing quality of the general training, could be another waste of scarce resources of time, money and opportunity for the trainee, the employer and communities. Another decade lost.
click here to expandStill, no matter how well or how poorly institutions prepare the workforce for employers, the employer cannot deny their responsibility to continue the training process and train the worker for the organization’s specific use. The degree to which they take this responsibility seriously will determine the success of the institution’s efforts to prepare workers, how much value the worker adds to the operation, and how well the operation performs in the market. Any apprenticeship that lacks an aggressive structured on-the-job training program cannot be the robust experience it is meant to be. By definition, an apprenticeship without structured on-the-job training really isn’t an apprenticeship.
But the success/failure doesn’t stop there. A successfully and fully trained (to the tasks required) staff prepares, and keeps, the organization prepared to seize opportunities, adjust to disrupters and weather unforeseen forces. Failure at preparing and maintaining each worker’s job mastery, as part of system, can exacerbate an organization’s challenges and, potentially, lead to failure or irrelevance of the organization. Read More
Employers Say They Struggle With a “Skills Shortage,” Yet They Cut the Training Budget. What Gives?
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Everywhere you read these days, you find commentary on the “skills gap” that employers seem to face when trying to find the workers they need for their critical job classifications. Either there is a skills gap or there isn’t, and more and more economists are challenging that premise. Some, like Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman, say that if there is such a skills gap creating a shortage of skilled labor, then wages should be skyrocketing for those positions in a capitalistic, free market model.
Some point to the exploitation of loop-holes in the U.S. H-1B visa program, recently highlighted in a CBS 60 Minutes episode entitled “You’re Fired” that allows employers to replace long-time, experienced employees with lower-wage temporary workers (with no benefits) from countries such as India – even requiring the laid off worker to train their replacement or forego severance pay.
click here to expandYet other companies, genuinely experiencing a shortage of skilled workers in their region, seem to either accept the skills gap theory as the norm or have made assumptions that the right skilled workers already came through the front door. Some surprise everyone by redirecting training dollars that should be used to make sure each employee can perform the tasks for which they were hired to programs that are meant to improve performance – skipping the obvious. Trying to improve the performance of employees before being certain they can perform each task exactly seems incredibly counter-intuitive. Focusing dollars on LEAN, Kaisan, Six Sigma, etc. before being certain that employees have mastered each required task may be not only be a waste of money but probably will need to be repeated if the employees finally do master each task, since by then they will have forgotten any improvement techniques or how to apply them to the processes they are performing.
Some wonder why companies have not added to, or are even cutting, their training budgets in response to the challenge. Many of these companies seem to be forgoing structured on-the-job training that only they can deliver, hoping the local educational system, with all they federal funding they have received, will somehow wave a wand and all the skilled labor needed will appear. In a January, 2017 issue of the Proactive Technologies Report entitled “An Anniversary That You Won’t Want to Celebrate: 30 Years Later and The Skill Gap Grows – Is it Finally Time to Rethink The Nation’s Approach?” the point was made that employers having been waiting on solutions from other than their own operation for decades, but to no avail.
It is also significant to note that the U.S. is currently in a new presidential administration that seems to be set on cutting the funding for many of the Departments of Education and Labor workforce training programs these employers have come to rely upon. Read More
Some Community Colleges Moving Back Toward 70’s Approach to Vocational Programs; Why Did it Take So Long?
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
In a recent article in the Community College Daily News entitled, “A Shift Back to Trades,” , which is an excerpt from an article by Matt Krupnick entitled, “After Decades of Pushing Bachelor’s Degrees, U.S. Needs Mores Trades People,” it appears that many in institutions of higher learning are accepting the realization that not everyone is suited for college or a career requiring 4-year, or more, college degrees. Some people learn better, faster and become more productive from a program focused on training rather than the conveyance of knowledge.
Societies have always had a natural division of labor, represented at one end of the spectrum by those who predominantly work with their hands (e.g. craftsman, builders, fixers) and those who primarily work with their accumulated knowledge (e.g. managers, lawyers, teachers). Closer to the center of the spectrum, some of these types of labor overlap, requiring the application of knowledge in practical uses, such as doctors, accountants, software programmers. Traditionally, careers in the latter required a 4 -year education or more and experience in the field since the positions were heavy on knowledge requirements and industry-general standardized practices.
click here to expandAt the other end of the spectrum, training is focused on tasks routinely required of the worker – this becomes the focus of mastery of specific tasks of the job area. This is what an employer values and which make workers valuable. Knowledge conveyed at the point of utilizing it in the task, coupled with the convergence of core skills and core abilities, followed by repetitive practice of precise procedural steps develops trade-specific, higher-order skills. These skills yield a meaningful unit of work that is marketable to an employer in the industry. While one can say that occupations at the other end of the spectrum perform units of work as well, the type of work performed is more “situational” and less repetitive the higher up the organizational chart.
Leading up to the 1970’s, this was understood. In fact, many high schools around the country had very effective “vocational” programs, in many cases as good and relevant as the local community colleges. Read More
Can’t Find The Right Workers? Why Not Train Workers To Your Own To Specification?
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
According to a recent report by Career Builder.com, more than half of the employers surveyed could not find qualified candidates: 71% – Information-Technology specialists, 70% – Engineers, 66% – Managers, 56% – Healthcare and other specialists, 52% – Financial Operations personnel. According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, nearly half of small and mid-size employers said they can find few or no “qualified applicants” for recent openings. And anecdotal evidence from manufacturing firms echoes the same challenge with specialty manufacturing jobs such as maintenance, NC machining and technical support positions. This, in large part, can be attributed to the upheaval caused by the Great Crash of 2008 and the following disruption of several million careers. Sidelined workers saw the erosion of their skill bases while waiting years for an economic recovery that, for many, has not reached them yet.
However, many or most of these workers can be “reskilled” or “upskilled” for the current workforce. The solution lies not in waiting for the labor market to magically produce the needed qualified candidates, but rather in each company investing a little to build their own internal system of structured on-the job training. With such an infrastructure, any candidate with strong core skills can be trained quickly and accurately to any employer’s specifications. Furthermore, a strong training infrastructure has factored into it methods of acceptable basic core skill remediation when the benefit outweighs the cost.
click here to expandNo matter how you examine it, an employer is responsible for training workers to perform the essential and unique tasks of the job for which they were hired. It is not economically feasible or practical for education systems to focus this sharply. Waiting for them to do so or allowing it to happen by osmosis is risky and costly for the employer, since every hour that passes is one more hour of wage for unproductive output. Add to that the hourly wage rate of the informal on-the-job training mentor/trainer efforts multiplied by the number of trainees and this becomes a substantial cost that should attract any manager’s attention. Read More
Read the full March, 2019 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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