Proactive Technologies Report – May, 2024

“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.

New 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.

click here to expand

---

Is AI the Next IoT? When Considering a Major Shift in Worker Selection and Development Strategy, Haste Might Make Waste

by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations, Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the all-consuming topic of the day. The media, as with the Internet of Things (IoT), is the vehicle with which a well-financed marketing campaign is transformed into an illusionary “trend” train that we are all shamed into boarding lest we will be left behind. Whether being left behind is a good or bad thing is yet to be determined.

Potential employees have already been showered with generative AI employment scams, does it really make sense to turnover the recruiting, selection, training and managing responsibilities over to AI as well? The rush to IoT has left the backdoor open to any form of lone wolf or criminal organization to exploit as we are experiencing every day. Without repairing the holes in the existing interconnectivity, does it make sense to add more known risks to it?

Where there is money, there is the “newest trend” to consider. Often not actually a trend, they are more like a well-funded marketing scheme as we have come to know by hedge funds that have amassed trillions and need things to invest in to expand their presence and dominance. AI represents the culminative test of the employer’s ability to read to tea leaves correctly and the most significant challenge to employee’s gainful employment yet.

Companies collectively spent $101.6 billion last year on related technical instruction, most of it informal, unstructured and undocumented on-the-job. Structuring what is already in place to make it deliberate, efficient and documented is a tremendous start and employers do not need AI for that. But it does take incorporating a coherent worker training strategy into the firm’s business model and treating employees as “investments.”

click here to expand

---

Two Common, Unfortunate Mistakes: The Importance of Setting Up Separate Accounts When Receiving Training Grant Funds

by Frank Gibson, Workforce Development Advisor, retired from The Ohio State University – Alber Enterprise Center

Two common, unfortunate mistakes that can derail a company’s sincere effort to address the training gap at their firm are easily overcome, but toxic if unaddressed. Getting upper-management on-board with trying to build a deliberate training infrastructure is not easy, as most who have tried have found out. Taking preemptive measures to avoid these land mines seems worth the while.

The first, the champion who took the initiative to create a training strategy, lobby for it and attempted to implement it at their operation fails to establish proper leadership of that effort. W. Edwards Deming often said, “divide responsibility and no one is responsible.“ And something as important as establishing a new, deliberate training program to address the neglect of the past has to be led by someone who recognizes that fact, understands the implications and knows how to lead the effort to successfully reach its goal.

Some firms believe that putting two or three stakeholders in charge, for which none of them have the background and experience, to manage a training strategy is sufficient to lead the effort. This false notion that “political buy-in” outweighs selecting the right leader, or elevating people with time on their hands to something they lack experience for is sufficient, can be a fatal miscalculation. This usually leads to the project falling far short of its goals and/or interest waning as results seem to come up short of expectations. This can lead to those in charge vacillating between taking blame or credit instead of making sure the project succeeds. Another example is when the “leadership group” is lopsided and one, or a few of, the team has more knowledge and experience in setting up and implementing a training strategy but lacks the votes on critical decisions.

click here to expand

---

“Inflation;” It is More Than the Rate That’s the Problem

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

The main reason the fight over inflation lingers year after year, decade after decade, isn’t just the rate that is reported. That is important, true, but what is more important is what happens after. Once prices rise to an impactful level, do the prices return to a more acceptable level or are they just a step in a long-term plan of inflationary surges that drive the prices higher still?

Prices are, what economists call, “sticky in the upward direction” – a glossy way of saying once prices have risen higher, good luck getting them down. The term sticky was a more legitimate description associated with business cycles of 30 – 40 years ago, when inflation was more determined by consumer demand. Higher prices resulted in lower consumption, causing business analysts to find where the supply and demand curves cross; equilibrium point.

What changed was the concentration of market share, both laterally and vertically. In the past, policymakers took steps to preempt monopolies and oligopolies from forming and operating. Many remember the break-up of AT & T in the 1980s when it was thought it had too much market dominance. Too much market share controlled by one or a small few firms meant that price coordination was easier and competition jeopardized. Since the late 1990s, a new interpretation of classical economic theories for incoming neoliberalism, followed by The Third Way of the political left (both pro-business, against new regulations and for laxed enforcement of existing regulations – both attractive to large-political contribution donors) so new economists were needed to dominate the messaging. We were meant to understand that so many potential competing multinational companies, the odds of monopolies and oligopolies emerging were slim..

click here to expand

---

Read the full May, 2024 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.