So, You Don’t Have Time for Training. Really? 7 Myths Dispelled

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

When meeting with manufacturing leaders, I am often first surprised, then puzzled, by the old standby reactions to the discussion of training workers to maximize each worker’s capacity and return on worker investment (“ROWI”). Whether it is just a reflex action, an unsubstantiated response to a misconception or another way of saying, “why am I in this meeting,” it is worth the time to explore this topic further.

It is a good bet that, in any firm, a worker’s training to perform the work for which they were hired is left to chance and coincidence. It follows then that so would the firm’s collective productivity, collective ROWI and, predictably, the firm’s efficiencies and effectiveness. But it doesn’t stop there. A new-hire worker that walks into an environment with a lack of definition and/or a haphazard, unfocused and undocumented effort to quickly train the worker receives the same reaction as one walking into a cluttered office for the first time. “How does this guy function?” “How can he find anything?’ “What is this guy’s job and would he know it?”

It is true, first impressions are important. But doing nothing to clarify or dispel negative impressions has a compounding destructive add-on effect.

• A team cannot exist when too many do not adequately know their role;
• A manager cannot lead a group when they don’t each know how to perform all of the tasks they are expected to;
• Workers cannot be motivated to do great things when the company didn’t show them from the start they truly care about being great with their workers;
• Workers can develop a sense of ambivalence;
• Work quantity, work quality and compliance with engineering, quality and safety specification are jeopardized when processes are not standardized and training is not consistent and complete;
• Lowered morale results in increased turnover as those with the most skills and marketability leave first, leaving those who need even more supervised training are left behind;
• When a star performer with decades of experience retires or moves on, without anything being written down or passed on, that expertise is lost for good and that asset’s value should be removed from the books.

So much for the predictable outcomes, let’s dispel some common myths used to put-off or ignore simple solutions with the potential for a great, positive impact:

Myth 1: “If the company waits, the schools will send fully skilled workers that can perform day 1.” Has it happened yet? How many decades are you prepared to wait for something that will never arrive?

Myth 2: “A ‘quick and dirty’ approach to training saves the company money and time.” What about the cost of malperformance related inadequate training? What about the cost of paying wages for undeveloped or underdeveloped capacity? What does scrap, rework or litigation from operator injury due to lack of training cost?

Myth 3: “The workers must be trained because product is going out the door and services are being delivered.” If you can’t explain how that happens, it probably is not happening like you think. You will know for sure when products are returned and customers leave, but is that a risk worth taking?

Myth 4: “Training is not the issue, it is the employee’s attitude.” This can be somewhat true, if their attitude isn’t bad because training is bad or nonexistent and they perceive management as an issue and not an opportunity.

Myth 5: “Racing to incorporate the latest technology to be competitive without properly upgrading worker core skills and providing deliberate on-the-job training will work itself out.” Have you ever seen that happen? Usually if any training support arrives it is after the product run is completed or the equipment becomes obsolete.

Myth 6: “We just don’t have time for training.” But you do have time for informal, unstructured and undocumented on-the-job training without really knowing who received what training to mastery, does each shift train consistently or do the trainers really know what they are doing? Informal OJT costs much more that the one or two hours you mark on a timecard, it is just that no one accounts for it like other assets.

Myth 7: “We are doing LEAN, so that will take care of any efficiency issues.” Process and continuous improvements are not possible when there is no consensus on the current process nor consistent performance. Moving processes physically around building without making sure the recipients have the core skills and have received proper training on the added tasks ensures improvements will not be realized. It just adds to the inefficiencies preciously felt.

Edwards Deming, American business theorist, composer, economist, industrial engineer, management consultant, statistician, writer and considered by many as a father of modern quality assurance and control techniques, said, “You have one chance to train a worker…only one so don’t muff it.” Not properly training a worker, or even considering improvements to your firm’s training process, is probably classified as “muffing it.”

If you recognize these challenges and have shed your fear of even looking for other solutions, check out Proactive Technologies’ structured on-the-job training system approach to see how it might work at your firm, your family of facilities or your region. Contact a Proactive Technologies representative today to schedule a GoToMeeting videoconference briefing to your computer. This can be followed up with an onsite presentation for you and your colleagues. As always, onsite presentations can be a first step, as well.