It Seems Fear of New Private Equity Owners Cause Local Leadership to Forego Deliberate Worker Training
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.®
Most employers I talk to say they know their informal on-the-job training programs cannot keep up in an ever-changing world and feel strongly it is affecting their ability to build and retain a qualified workforce. The evidence is in work quality, quantity and issues of compliance with work process and mandated safety. Lets not forget worker satisfaction, focus, loyalty, morale and retention. Yet, even when state training grants are available to reimburse employers up to 100% for upgrading and deliberately training workers for focused and improved outcomes, employers seem more and more reluctant to make the pitch to their corporate management.
While their own performance is measured on overall company performance metrics, it doesn’t seem natural that managers would be afraid to offer a solution which impacts departments and internal systems across the operation and could produce significant improvements, cut costs, boost revenue. Perhaps it is an unawareness that today’s grant programs, in most states, are more efficient, faster, less administrative and generous.
Many employers know that only they can train the workers they need – on their equipment, in their facility on processes unique to their operation by resident experts only available to them. Historically, though, training has been at the bottom of any organization’s list of “things to do.” As the need for deliberate, documented on-the-job training grew more urgent decade after decade, worker development moved farther and farther down the list. Employer’s resigned themselves to decreasing worker performance and marginal worker capacity. After all, product was being shipped and services were being delivered – often by adding more and more workers with the solution staring them in the face; to train each worker for all of what their job requires, not just on tasks that someone remembered to provide.
click here to expandIn the last two decades, state governments have offered more and more financial reimbursement for serious employer efforts to train their workers internally. However, it seems as companies were being acquired by private equity firms – notoriously focused on “cost cutting” and “asset harvesting” – they were instilling fear in management to adhere to that concept. Good ideas were abandoned for fear of asking the “turn-around expert” for a budget for it, even if it would be recovered through grant reimbursement for fear it would signal disagreement with the blanket edict, “if it doesn’t directly affect the bottom line, get rid of it.” Advocating for something, no matter how logical and self-evident such as making sure workers know how to perform all the tasks for which they were hired is at odds with preservation of one’s employment. Educating educated people on the need for a logical, sensible training solution is scarier than going along with the herd and deflecting the problem of under-skilled workers to educational institutions, who “aren’t generating the skilled workers they need.”
In an article in CFO.com entitled CFOs Adjust to Private Equity’s Growing Influence, Dan Niepow reports “Across several industries, PE firms are scooping up more and more businesses. Consider accounting firms, where many CFOs have gotten their start: From 2020 through September 2025, there have been at least 90 private equity-related transactions and firm mergers, according to CPA Trendlines Research. Fifty-two of those occurred in 2025 alone, demonstrating PE’s quickly growing influence in the space.”
He adds, “Many firms tend to bill PE investments or outright ownership as a way to increase access to capital and grow their business. In announcing a minority investment from New Mountain Capital, Milwaukee-based accounting firm Wipfli, for instance, hailed the deal as “a moment to accelerate, scale with purpose and help even more organizations reach their full potential.’” “While an injection of PE money can and often does provide the means to grow staff in the short term, owners are rarely in it for the long haul. That can pit founders’ long-term visions against a private equity firm’s goal to build and quickly sell.” Read More
Endlessly Scrambling to Find New-Hires Who Could, and Should, Stay but Don’t. There Is a Better Way.
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.®
An article in HR Dive by Carolyn Crist highlights a common complaint among HR Professionals entitled, “Hiring pros say they face pressure to hire quickly, leading to bad hires: A longer and more expensive hiring process is also contributing to poor decisions, studies said.” She reports on a study that explains a familiar conundrum of Human Resources departments across the board, tasked with finding workers to compensate for the steady churn of workers leaving.
Crist says in her findings, “Amid a skills shortage, 73% of hiring professionals in certain industries — such as manufacturing, logistics and engineering — feel pressure to hire quickly, but they also feel the consequences of making rushed recruitment decisions…” “This rushed hiring can lead to bad hiring decisions, with half saying they experienced increased costs from rehiring or training. In particular, respondents said they had increased costs where transferable skills were lacking, with 63% saying they observed decreased productivity and 56% saying they saw poor work quality.
Employers that do very little to retain employees, such as adequate compensation, reasonable benefits, proper task-based training and opportunities for recognition and advancement, are often struggling to maintain staffing levels to keep the operation going. Some reported a turnover of retirees and dissatisfied employees reaching daunting levels of 30, 40 and higher percent.
click here to expandFor companies unlike the reputable employer described, HR Departments are pressured to keep finding new bodies in a difficult market with declining relevant core and general skills. They do their best to recruit, interview and hire, knowing that even some of those hired will not show up or will stay only for a few days. Recruiters end up living out of a suitcase.
HR Departments sometimes feel a stronger onboarding process is the key. In reality, it can be helpful but is no replacement for formal, process-based training. Some see the solution as Process Documents, Safety Sheets and Policies, which are helpful for re-enforcing strong performance but are not training tools. They are considered “Job Performance Aids,” meant to aid the worker in repeating performance without relying on memory alone AFTER proper training has been performed. Think of the last time you tried to assemble a toy or a desk from the manufacturer’s instructions. Once you had assembled it for the 3rd time, the instructions made more sense but the first attempts without training might have been disasters.
Someone still has to take that candidate and immediately start their task-specific training that their performance will be measured against. This is the point where most employers fail miserably, believing pairing the new-hire with a resident expert will magically create another expert. In reality, the expert is usually pressured to continue to produce at the same rate while imparting expertise to the new-hire without structure, clarity, focus and documentation of success. A fine new-hire, who expects better, will leave out of disappointment because they can. The potentially fine new-hire will stay, but without a development plan may not rise above their perceived incoming potential. Read More
Reshoring Manufacturing Would Be Great, But Can We All Agree that “the U.S. Lacks Skilled Workers” 
Isn’t a Credible Excuse Not To?
by Frank Gibson, CEO and Interim Chairman of the Board of the North-Central Ohio Employer-Based Worker Training Partnership, Workforce Development Advisor, retired from The Ohio State University – Alber Enterprise Center
We continue to hear conflicting reasons why employers are reluctant to reshore manufacturing to the United States. Reshoring represents an opportunity to reset the relationship between manufacturing employers and workers, which has been under escalating disruption the last 3-4 decades.
The belabored reason used why some manufacturers are reluctant to return is the same one used for why they left: “they just couldn’t find the skilled workers they needed here in the United States.” It lacks credibility since from the moment U.S. Firms were offshoring manufacturing, manufacturers from around the world were moving in and didn’t seem to have trouble finding workers.
One credible reason manufacturers moved offshore is that the importing country of their goods required them to build and maintain a local plant – often with technology transfer, local ownership and local labor requirements. The tradeoff to the U.S. manufacturer might be usually lower wage rates and looser regulatory regimes which, for years, let producers produce and export to the U.S. the same product made cheaper, raising profits. U.S. manufacturers were willing to trade off U.S. jobs for broader market opportunities, lower wage costs and increased profit margins.
click here to expandThe Covid-19 Pandemic exposed weakness and risk in supply chains, and lately with the growing global geopolitical risks to shipping and uncertain tariffs, there is a movement of manufacturing nearer to the U.S., still seeking lower wage rates than the U.S. can reasonably offer and looser regulations. So, one would think manufacturers moving their operations back to United States would need some incentives, but can they be balanced with the worker’s need for a livable wage and opportunities for advancement?
When manufacturers move their operations overseas, a red herring that was floated was that “manufacturers just couldn’t find the skilled workers they needed.” It seemed more like they were really saying that they “couldn’t find the skilled workers they needed who would work at a reduced wage, less safe working environment and less benefits.” That’s at least the sentiment of many workers and community leaders in the United States.
Now that discussion circles around tariffs “intended to drive manufacturers back to the U. S.” or foreign producers to set up plants in the U. S., we are hearing the same complaint from those reluctant to reshore. This time, though, it is coupled with a new threat: the threat that AI can replace every job in time. It is no wonder workers are skeptical of their futures,, with around 52% of workers survied feeling “hopeful about the future of work, and around a third feeling depressed.” Read More
Perfect Example of “Penny-Wise but Pound-Foolish” – DOGE Attempts to “Cut Waste, Fraud and Abuse”
by Proactive Technologies, Inc.® – Staff
What have we learned? For one thing, the projected $2 trillion in budget savings touted as the reason for going after “waste, fraud and abuse” ended up being less than $202 billion as reported by them, and some of that doubtful. But was the upheaval inflicted upon what seemed to be working government programs worth the rationale to offset unnecessary tax cuts for the privileged worth it? It seemed to be taking a jackhammer to dig a pin hole – the hole just gets bigger with no improvement and the original purpose lost.
The daily drip of new chaos across the media spectrum of legal challenges is tiring and affects our collective mental health. What is lacking in the rush to report it is enough information to allow us adequately process the events into a logical conclusion as to whether it is a relatively “good” of “bad” thing. It becomes one more bit of uncertainty on the pile of uncertainty we all face – businesses and workers.
Take, for example, Elon Musk’s management tactics, as they apply to his own businesses and then the federal government, which at face value seemed reckless and mindless. The advertised rationale was they were truly meant to save America money, reduce the debt and make government more efficient. Was it that or a classic case of what is wrong with accounting practices grossly neglecting “worker value” and investment from the discussion? Depending on the source of one’s news, it is presented as both.
click here to expandAs widely understood in business, the cost of replacing a private sector worker in which the organization invested time, money and other resources to develop and utilize that expertise, can be enormous. To indiscriminately and vindictively fire a worker asset, along with the technical knowledge, proprietary and, in this case classified and historical knowledge, should be viewed with great caution.
To use an industry standard published by Gallup, employee turnover costs U.S. businesses $1 Trillion annually. To put that into perspective, a recent American Machinist magazine article which focused the analysis on manufacturing, “Continuous Learning in the Shop:” Read More
Five Most Important Ways Employers Can Reclaim and Retain Worker Value With Structured On-the-Job Training
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.®
In a Proactive Technologies Report™ article entitled “10 Reasons Structured On-The-Job Training is a Vital and Necessary System for Any Organization,” a few of the many important reasons that structured on-the-job training – at least Proactive Technologies’ version – were explained that should be part of any organization’s operational strategy. Here are 5 ways this approach to worker development that integrates an organization’s existing systems unlocks tremendous wealth and yields substantial returns – just for doing what every employer says they want anyway but most find a reason to avoid it.
Too many employers still, wrongly, believe that they have little in the way of tools and metrics to develop and measure the value of each worker that comes to the organization. No structured training program in place means no one has analyzed the job for the tasks required to be performed, the compliance criteria, the core skills and knowledge necessary to master the tasks, or why a task resides in a job classification. If there is no structure, there is no way to measure what percent of the job a worker has mastered or, if still in development, how well they are progressing to the expected level of job mastery and performance. If no structure or metrics exist, there is nothing to improve or, at least, notice an improvement. And if something goes wrong and worker malperformance is suspected, there is little from which to draw evidence to support a conclusion and proper course of corrective action.
And then there is the endless number of issues related to how well a worker was developed, on what were they developed, and how well that expertise has been maintained through all of the changes faced in competitive world. Any worker that has been deliberately, or coincidentally, developed to a recognizable high level of job mastery is considered being of “high value,” although the value is not quantifiable. Every employer wants to retain that worker, replicate that worker and relies on that worker to informally share expertise with others. If that worker leaves the organization for any reason, disruption, confusion, chaos and costs can occur.
click here to expandSo, why do so many employers take their role in developing and maintaining each worker’s capacity so lightly? Why do they often embark on proposed solutions that, at face value, seem a stretch? Are they unaware of all the tools out there, or are they relying on voices that may lack the experience and expertise themselves, or have another motive, to propose a credible solution? Read More
Read the full October, 2025 Proactive Technologies Report™ newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
Proactive Technologies, Inc.®; PROTECH®; Human Resource Management for Tomorrow...Today!® and logo; PROTECH©® System of Managed Human Resource Development™; Accelerated Transfer of Expertise System™; Certificate of Job Mastery Program™, Certificate of Task Mastery Program™ are all trademarks of Proactive Technologies Inc.®;