Confusion Over What Constitutes “Training” is Stumbling Block to Effective Worker Development Strategies
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
For the anyone searching for information to help them choose a worker development strategy, a web search of “on-the-job training methods” might produce thirty or forty informative, but confusing, charts. The search result is a mixture of domains, methods, philosophies – one seemingly in conflict with the other. A non-practitioner of workforce development strategies can gather from this search result alone why there is a perpetual state of confusion between even “experts,” marked by decades of employer and trainee disappointment in the lack of recognizable strategies and outcomes, which are often devoid of meaningful results.
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Over the years, approaches and methods have evolved out of their ineffectiveness, many diverging from the basic principals of workforce development. Markets for products to address these approaches grew and well-funded marketing began to find unaware customers. The notion of “training” morphed into branded versions of “learning,” selected not so much on their basis in logic, but more on the lack of “smart” choices and how well the marketing effort worked.
“A great first step is to clearly differentiate between “learning” and “training.” The strategies, methods of delivery and outcomes for each are very different. Without such clarity, one might mistakenly invest heavily in a strategy to accomplish worker development objectives that, instead, uses up vital resources and scare opportunity, and sours the organization’s attitude toward training for years to come.”
The acceleration started around 40 years ago. Prior to that, job classifications did not change much and were relatively simple in structure. Then panic set in over the approaching “skills gaps,” as computers were introduced into every aspect of our lives. Fear of baby boomers nearing retirement, taking their technical expertise with them, added to the challenge. Solutions started to appear out of academia, based on the world they knew and not as much on the world they were trying to improve, as they would have liked to think.
Did these methods address the workforce development challenges of their time? In 2018, employers are still concerned with the “skills gap” phenomenon. Retirees, many who put off, or came out of, retirement for economic reasons as the cost of living continued to rise and their pensions evaporated, are still in the workforce and their inevitable departure, with all of their technical expertise and job wisdom, still on its way out the door. Read More
Online Resources for the New, Reluctant “Home Schoolers” and “Home Learners”
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
A massive disruption, such as the Covid-19 virus, challenges everyone’s notion of “normal.” It can send us, especially the unprepared, scrambling for short-term solutions when the connections to established institutions and resources are unplugged.
Some workers who had not worked from home try to set-up a space to effectively perform work previously performed onsite if employers support the effort. Some workers either find themselves at home, not necessarily “working” from home, with children who are also restricted to house confinement – children whose education can be at risk if delayed or previous progress is idled for too long. Teachers and parents are painfully aware of the “drop-off” in retention that occurs just over holiday and summer breaks alone. Younger students might see this as an unexpected vacation, older students may see this as a threat to their educational attainment and next phase of their education or employment.
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No matter your assessment of the “stay at home” decrees, this disruption is particularly hard on those without internet access or lacking the hardware to connect from home. Somewhere between 21 – 162 million Americans lack access to broadband, depending on who is estimating it. Many of those that do have access struggle with decreased speeds as large providers such as Sprint and Verizon went to “throttling” of bandwidth when net neutrality rules were suspended in 2018. Then there is the problem with crowded bandwidth use as so many more people are staying at home shopping, streaming videos and music and, yes, trying to work from home.
But for those who are fortunate to have access, some of the wireless providers have made available free and/or expanded access during the Covid-19 response, and schools and philanthropic organizations in some communities have tried to make laptops, tablets and hotspots available to those whose financial resources are focused on financially surviving this period.
Parents challenged to be a “teacher” or “teacher’s assistant” when those things being taught were forgotten many years prior is still a problem for the newly “appointed.” It can be frightening to find out how much has been forgotten for lack of use and how the nature of learning is so much different today. No one wants to appear ill-prepared or uninformed to a child learning 5th grade math. Read More and View Links to Resources
Are Advances in Technology Distracting, Rather Than Assisting, HR From the Fundamentals of Worker Selection and Development?
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Billions of investment dollars are driving the advancements in technology into every corner of our lives, including the selection and development of workers. Predictably, the emphasis often seems more on the technology and the money it can make for investors than the practicality for the end-user or those it effects.
It is not just the refrigerators that talk to your grocery store, or watches that talk to the phone in your pocket. Wall Street, with an accumulating mountain of cash, can drive any idea to fabricate a “trend” that often dissipates as quickly as it emerges, sometimes leaving disruption in the wake but yields a return for investors. For investors it is the means to an end. To many, it may negatively affect their life and their future.
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In the 1990’s, investors started to look at the National Security Agency’s and Central Intelligence Agency’s “key-word search” capabilities used to scan millions of documents from around the world for specific words and phrases to expand their intelligence gathering reach. They saw applications of this technology in the civilian world, including scanning the mounds of resumes and employment applications employers had to filter in order to find a few new-hires. On the surface, this seemed to be a godsend.
Soon employers and employment candidates saw what the developers of this technology did not. The technology first had to count on employers having accurately designed job descriptions in consistent formats, using standardized terms, words and phrases to describe pre-hire knowledge, experience, skills and abilities of interest. The fact was reality couldn’t have been farther from this, with job descriptions written 50 years prior, written precisely for someone the employer wanted to hire (not so reflective of the actual job requirements), or cut & pasted from a handy library resource. Read More
Nine 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 in place. These were phased out when the push to prepare students for college took priority.
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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.
Still, 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.
Having a structured on-the-job training infrastructure in place not only allows the organization to adapt and evolve, if built correctly it can align the training of workers with the other systems of the organization and facilitate a higher level of compliance. Without it, there is nothing to ensure a worker’s mastery performance of a process to engineering, quality and safety specifications.Increased work quality and quantity, compliance, worker adaptability, worker capacity and return on worker investment…while decreasing the internal costs of training, scrap, rework and operator error. It sounds like a robust solution to me.
Nine, of the many, scenarios should make any employer wish they had structured on-the-job training for each of their critical job classifications. Several are intertwined, which explains why the lack of structured on-the-job training hobbles an organization more than realized if training is viewed as an isolated process: 1. Opportunities to Expand Market: Read More
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