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 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.
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. Read More
Retiring Workers and the Tragic Loss of Intellectual Property and Value
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
The warnings went out over two decades ago. Baby Boomers were soon to retire, taking their accumulated expertise – locked in their brains – with them. But very little was done to address this problem. Call it complacency, lack of awareness of the emerging problem, preoccupation with quarterly performance, disinterest or disbelief, very few companies took action and the Crash of 2008 disrupted any meager efforts that were underway.
cording to Steve Minter in an IndustryWeek Magazine article on April 10, 2012, “Only 17% of organizations said they had developed processes to capture institutional memory/organizational knowledge from employees close to retirement.” Who is going to train their replacements once they are gone? Would the learning curve of replacement workers be as long and costly, repeating the same learning mistakes, as the retiree’s learning curve? Would operations be disrupted and, if so, to what level?
“In our new “outsourcing nation,” a widely held belief is that employees are simply costs to be cut and not assets to be valued.” …. “Manufacturing faces a two-sided problem: it not only has thousands of people retiring, but it does not have the training programs to train skilled workers to replace them.”
A Strategy to Capture Tribal Knowledge IndustryWeek- Michael Collins 5-23-16
In the last few years, it seems an alternative to the concentration of expertise in a few subject matter experts has become to use lower-wage temporary or contract workers who specialize in smaller quantities of processes, and who can be “traded-out” with a minimum amount of disruption. History will tell us just how costly that approach was and if anything was learned. Read More
The Skills Gap Solution; Employers Are Still Reluctant to Commit to Role Only They Can Fill
by Proactive Technologies, Inc. Staff
Education cannot, and should not be asked to, close the “skills gap” on their own. Employers have been concerned about the “skills gap” since the 1980’s, and the nature and location of the job has continued to change…at an accelerating rate. Employers have convinced themselves to wait for education to close the gap. In the meantime, tremendous resources continue to be expended, but the gap continues to grow.
Educational institutions are not suited, staffed, funded and equipped to train workers for every job, for every employer, nor should they
be. Educational institutions do their best work when they build the labor supply with strong, relevant basic and core skills (including STEM), and industry-general skills. Whether those efforts are worthwhile and the resources well-spent depend on two important things: 1) does an employer see value in hiring a graduate, and 2) is there a method in place to ensure those skills are integrated into mastery of the job-tasks the employer needs performed; the value that will influence the employer to retain them.
Only employers can train the worker on tasks they need performed and that affect their bottom line. They have the need, the facilities, the most current equipment for their operation and the personnel with current expertise. Yet, in reality most employer’s methods amount to hardly more than pairing two people and hoping for the best. This is where the gap is most profound and continues to grow. Read More
Costs Associated With Unstructured, Haphazard Worker Training – Part 2 of 2
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Last month’s issue of Proactive Technologies Report’s Part 1 of “Costs Associated With Unstructured, Haphazard Worker Training,” offered a number of examples of unstructured, haphazard and ineffective worker training that I experienced in my early years in manufacturing. We all have had similar experiences throughout our lives to draw on, I am sure. It is still perplexing that – in view of all of the advanced systems, process controls and metrics that keep an enterprise operating competitively – management would assume that such a “hands-off” approach to developing the critical worker component wouldn’t detract from the other metrics. Why would management expect anything more than skeptical results?
“New equipment that leads to decreased output, more workers added but productivity and capacity falling, or more workers producing product but most of it going into the scrap or rework bin. All of these counter-intuitive outcomes – signs of inadequate or non-existent task-based training – will eventually grab upper management’s attention!”
It is a given that new technology and equipment are dependent on someone learning to either program, service and/or operate them correctly. The incumbent workers, in the job classification before the transition, are the obvious choices for learning. Conceptually, they were doing the work prior to automation with previous version technology and understand the theory and current best practice of the work to be done. These worker’s attained skills will now be tested against the new skill requirements. Unfortunately, training of current workers for even obvious new technology requirements such as setup, operate and changeover of the equipment, is often overlooked or its significance downplayed. Consequently, often the economic benefits that advances in technology are to provide are marginally, or never, realized despite the costly investment.
click here to expandUntil the processes associated with the new equipment and technology are stabilized for maximum efficiency, learning of the processes – from the each worker’s perspective – is seen as fluid and ambiguous. Even if a noble effort is attempted to indoctrinate the worker in the use of the equipment, the erosion of the worker’s skill base compared to the evolving standard practices and technology is ongoing. Multiply one worker’s learning experience times the number of workers needed to operate the equipment – learning the same tasks in different ways on different shifts from different trainers – the direct costs of training, as well as the opportunity costs of under-utilized “worker capacity,” can be enormous. Calculate this cost for every job classification for which task training is needed and the costs can be “attention-getting.” Read More
Read the full May, 2023 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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