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 expand
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 expand
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 expandCan’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 expandRead the full March, 2019 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
Proactive Technologies, Inc.®; PROTECH; Human Resource Management for Tomorrow...Today!® and logo; br>Accelerated Transfer of Expertise System™; Certificate of Job Mastery Program™, Certificate of Task Mastery Program™ are all trademarks of Proactive Technologies Inc.®;