The Accelerated the Transfer of Expertise™
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines expertise as, “specialized knowledge or skill; see expert.” Expert is defined as, “Having or demonstrating great skill, dexterity or knowledge as a result of experience or training.” Transferring “expertise” to a new worker is a much different process and experience than simply conveying knowledge. One measure of gaining expertise is the utilization of the knowledge in the skilled performance of a task.
When it comes to task-based expertise, this definition can be applied with a little elaboration. Some examples of technical task performance are: setting up a multi-axis NC lathe to material, machine and engineering specification; welding exotic metals; sterilizing surgical instruments; or troubleshooting an electronic circuit board. These all represent higher order skills developed over time and with practice. Knowledge of “how to” never is enough when it comes to high-order skill requirements of technical tasks.
click here to expandrelevant core knowledge + relevant abilities + relevant core skill competencies = capability to learn new tasks
capability to learn new tasks + (new task instruction + repeated successful practice) leads to expertise in a practice or process.
This is the basis of apprenticeships from the birth of crafts and trades. While knowing about a process is important, and being physically (e.g. vision clarity, finger dexterity, hearing acuity) and psychologically (e.g. ability to tolerate low lighting, able to withstand heights, tolerance of interpersonal relationships) capable of learning a process is necessary, being skilled implies the synthesis of these components plus requisite core-skills for the task (e.g. trigonometry, reading to appropriate level, basic manual lathe operation). Add new task knowledge with practice to achieve a higher order skill of benefit to an employer or customer.
It is for this reason that apprenticeships in the middle ages lasted a lifetime for some trades. It was felt that some higher order skills were so technically difficult that only a lifetime of practice could allow someone to become an expert. In modern time, until 2008 apprenticeships lasted more in the neighborhood of 6-8 years. Given the fact that it is widely recognized today that most employees transition from one job to another several times in 3-4 years, it became more difficult to complete an apprenticeship if part of an employment opportunity. Finding employers to host apprenticeships was even more difficult for this reason, citing the high cost and low return of doing so. Read More
Challenges Presented by the Widening Skill Gap
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
There are at least five growing, major challenges to maintaining a skilled national labor force. These forces are causing those organizations who could help to, instead, spend tremendous sums of money on “whack-a-mole” type efforts. Sure, this approach sustains all of the profit and non-profit organizations that sprung up to take advantage of the chaos, but if we are serious about solving this issue that has undermined economic recoveries and stifled economic growth for over 30 years, we need to get serious.
It starts by critically evaluating the challenges that have plagued the U.S. labor force and have been barriers to an employer’s commitment to American labor. Like nearly all challenges, one can choose to target the underlying cause, treat the symptoms, mask the symptoms, define an alternative – but not necessarily relevant – cause and focus on that, or ignore symptoms and cause and hope for divine intervention.
click here to expandChoice of action matters. Take, for example, the choice to take a prescribed “cholesterol lowering” statin that inhibits the body’s production of lipids – fats and fatty substances, producing a cholesterol number within an acceptable range but at a cost of blocking or impairing other vital body functions and often producing “side-effects.” Your doctor may have good news about your cholesterol level during this visit but soon he might be discussing other, more serious issues with you such as, according to the Mayo Clinic, your muscle pain and damage, liver damage, increased blood sugar and type 2 diabetes, neurological side effects… Choosing to treat a symptom without determining why your body is producing excess lipids in the first place may leave the underlying cause unaffected.
Focusing resources on symptoms and ignoring the underlying cause of a non-systems approach to worker development may lead (and one could say may have already lead) to depleted resources and lost opportunity. Continuing to turn out graduates, some with outdated or non-essential skills which are bolstered by marginally relevant credentials, may lead to a feeling of action but yet the skill gap widens. Unless each of the following five major challenges are addressed, it is unlikely that the skill gap will move towards closing, and any effort to bring back the generations of lost workers into meaningful employment prohibitively difficult.
Jobs have become a moving target. Accuracy of on-the-job training has to be sharper. It should be supplied by the employer (on equipment equipment and to employer processes), and is more urgent and accuracy-dependent than existing employers have prepared themselves. Educational institutions can have any meaningful impact if focused and relevant. Workforce development efforts and resources need to be applied in a way to facilitate these adjustments, not distract from them. Read More
“Full Job Mastery” means “Maximum Worker Capacity” – A Verifiable Model for Measuring and Improving Worker Value While Transferring Valuable Expertise
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
It is no secret that with the traditional model of “vocational” education, the burden of the job/task-specific skill development falls on the employer. It is not economically feasible nor practical for educational institutions to focus content on every job area for every employer. So they, instead, focus rightly on core skills and competencies – relying on the employer to deliver the rest. This is where the best efforts of local educational institutions and training providers begin to break down even if highly relevant to the industry sector.
Employers rarely have an internal structure for task-based training of their workers. Even the most aggressive related technical instruction efforts erode against technological advances as every month passes. If core skills and competencies mastered prior to work are not transformed quickly into tasks the worker is expected to perform, the foundation for learning task performance may crumble through loss of memory, loss of relevance or loss of opportunity to apply them.
click here to expandNew workers routinely encounter a non-structured, rarely focused, on-the-job training experience. Typically, the employer’s subject-matter-expert (SME) is asked to “show the new employee around.” While highly regarded by management, the SME (not trained as a task trainer and having no prepared materials) has difficulty remembering the nuances of the tasks when explaining the process to the new employee, since that level of detail was buried in memory long ago. Each SME, on each shift, might have a different version of the “best practice” for processes, confusing the trainee even more – rendering the notion of “standardization” to “buzzword” status.
New employees have difficulty assembling, understanding and translating the disjointed bits of recollection into a coherent process to be replicated. Each comes with their own set and levels of core skills and competencies, and learning styles vary from the self-learner/starter to the slow-learner worker who, with structure to make sure they learn the right best practice, may become loyal, high-quality workers.
The more time the SME spends with the new employee in this unstructured, uncontrolled and undocumented experience, which is the prevailing method of on-the-job training, the more the employer is paying two people to be non or minimally-productive. Adding employees can actually lower short-term productivity and add little to long-term productivity for an organization, but the costs will attract notice internally and may lead management falsely believe the problem is cost related.
Read the full May, 2018 PT Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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