Proactive Technologies Report – November, 2019

One over-hyped and inaccurate factor in the U.S. is the shortage of skilled labor, which some workers see as a veiled attempt to justify importing labor who will take the job for significantly less. There are plenty of skilled labor available who were displaced during the Crash of 2008, or recently displaced by the trade wars, and who had to change career course to feed their families. Many of these workers are still waiting, and could be quickly and easily “re-tooled” for today’s manufacturing jobs with a focused structured on-the-job training program. Some are kept from seeking out these opportunities by wages and benefits for the job they once had now offered at 50% – hardly enough to attract skilled candidates back- not to mention for retaining a “skilled worker.”

Some see this as a sort of hypocrisy; the publicized, frantic search for “skilled” and “talented” workers, while offering these skilled workers less for the job they once held with that employer or a similar employer in the industry. So, for now, many of those workers that are that skilled and talented abandoned the career of their choice for the career that pays the bills. Read More

For decades prior to the Crash of 2008, Proactive Technologies, Inc. worked with a lot of employers by job/task analyzing their critical job classifications – initially hourly positions but a growing salary class of positions as well. This approach “captured the expertise” of the aging workers to use it to develop the tools which would allow the company to train nearly anyone with a sufficient core skill base, replicating experts as needed.

Then the Crash of 2008 happened and employers found themselves unexpectedly and unwillingly accelerating the loss of technical experts at all levels. For employers late to the game, there was no longer time to capture expertise; it had already left the building.

In a Plant Services 2019 Workforce Survey report, almost 50% of employers surveyed answered that knowledge capture/transfer was one of their “organization’s biggest workforce challenges” – a number rapidly growing. Read More

The article’s author rightly pointed out that apprenticeships have been around for around 4,000 years. They were built around the job classification in the beginning because that is all that there was. There were no community college for core and industry-general skill development; just a subject matter expert transferring expertise to a fresh recruit. It was effective because training was one-on-one in relatively low- traffic work environments. Expertise, tribal knowledge, work wisdom and known safety rules were all transferred while transferring each task’s best practice, so there was no doubt how these components fit together.

This approach became more difficult to manage as enterprises grew in size, scope and complexity. For profit-motivated employers, a 10 or 15 year apprenticeship was unthinkable. Labor unions tried to focus training more into an 8 or 9 year apprenticeship, but it was still hard to administrate and non-union shops showed no interest at all.

In general, employers drifted father and farther from the concept of expert-to-novice expertise transfer, opting instead for the very informal, unstructured and occasional one-on-one prevalent in most firms. Never mind the obvious contradiction with other contemporary management strategies such as LEAN, Total Quality Management and Continuous Improvement applied to capital investments. Most employers seemed to settle on the “hope for the best” strategy when it came to human assets, hoping further that the local educational institutions would come up with a solution while they raced forward to be competitive – dragging this anchor behind them. Read More

• quickly and completely train the skilled workers they need;

• realize an increase in worker capacity, work quantity/quality and compliance with quality programs such as ISO9001:2015, TS16949, AS9100D, NADCAP, etc., as well as engineering specifications and safety;

• reduce the internal costs of training;

New-hires and incumbent workers to full job mastery and higher levels of return on worker investment (ROWI).

The task-based, structured on-the-job training infrastructure is perfect for apprenticeships; instead of marking the calendar for “time-in-job,” job-relevant tasks are mastered and documented. As if anyone needs one more reason (i.e. in addition to live online presentations, onsite presentations) to decide whether to move forward with structured on-the-job training to boost their training strategy: Read More