When Wages Rise for Skilled Labor, Can Your Firm Maximize Worker Value and Minimize Investment?
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Ideally, wages rise for most job classifications when conditions are right to match the rising cost of living that an expanding economy brings. As skilled workers find their rightful full-time place, they leave openings behind them that employers need to fill. Competition for the most skilled of the remaining skilled leads employers to adjust wages and benefits accordingly to be competitive.
Rumblings point to the fact that wages for skilled workers have not kept up and a major adjustment is long overdue. When wages rise, will your firm feel the affects of added labor costs or will they adapt to increasing wages and realize offsetting higher returns on worker investment?
click here to expandRetiring 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.
According 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?
click here to expandApprenticeships: Be Careful Not To Minimize Integrity 
While Spiking The Numbers
Dr. Dave Just, formally Dean of Corporate and Continuing Education at Community Colleges in MA, OH, PA, SC. Currently President of K&D Consulting
In a Community College Daily News article, “Drawing Lines on Apprenticeships,” business and industry representatives seemed to have expressed to their congressional leaders the changes they would like to see in apprenticeships before they would consider participating. The opening statements from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee chair Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tennessee) and ranking minority member Sen. Patty Murray (Washington) set the debate, with “Alexander arguing that registered apprenticeships limit creativity and flexibility that employers seek because of cumbersome administrative red tape. More companies want less-formal, industry-recognized apprenticeships that allow them to work on specific skill sets, he said, adding they also are more appealing to industries such as health care and information technology that don’t traditionally offer apprenticeships.”
Ranking Member Pat Murray (Washington) rebutted this claim, “…registered apprenticeships ensure rigor and program quality. She said GOP efforts to encourage more nonregistered programs is designed to ‘weaken and water down’ programs and to open the training market to for-profit institutions.” Most people actively involved with apprenticeships know that much can be done to make apprenticeships more attractive, practical, fulfilling and feasible to employers and more attractive, achievable and valuable to apprentices. And that there is a role for for-profit training providers when the non-profit and institutional related technical instruction in the area is weak, has not been kept up-to-date or is non-existent.
click here to expandWhen is Illustrating Technical Materials Useful to the Trainee?
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Technical process documents standardize work processes in an attempt to maintain task performance at a consistent level of output. From organization to organization, process documents may vary in usefulness though required by ISO/AS/TS certification. Some may be too vague, too specific or too cluttered into lengthy paragraphs designed for human error. Nevertheless, the intended purpose is to offer guidance as to the “best practice” way of performing work. Whether illustrating technical documents is useful in achieving that goal is dependent on a few factors.
Technical processes, illustrated or not, are most useful to a worker when learning a task for the first time. Unless in a checklist format where step-by-step initials are required to document that no steps are missed, most process documents are reduced to a “reference status” Even though management and auditors want to believe process documents are followed intently each time, that is usually a “staged” behavior. In reality, once committed to a worker’s memory many documents are not seen by the user until the audit is scheduled. Unfortunate but true.
click here to expandRead the full October, 2018 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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