by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Generally speaking, the most prevalent form of worker training – for any job classification, any industry – is informal, unstructured on-the-job training. That unmeasurable, unimprovable and undocumented one-on-one experience when one person who knows how shows someone who doesn’t how to perform tasks required of the job classification. This seems to work in lieu of anything else, since products are produced and services are being delivered…until they are not, or are but now not as timely, efficiently, consistently and/or as compliant with requirements as expected.
In an economic shake-up, these deficiencies become more pronounced and more threatening to an operation’s survival. During mass disruptions such as the Crash of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic, good performers left the organization or were released – with all of their technical wisdom and expertise – along with marginal performers, leaving the employer to rebuild from scratch in some cases. Consequently, any chance of training workers to build back the organization, at a minimum, just got tougher.
While, indeed, informal, ad hoc, unstructured and undocumented training is better than no training, this ambiguous approach can lead to unexpected consequences and inconsistent outcomes. The easy solution is to build a structure around this to make the informal formal.
The structured on-the-job training process approach is one in which the informal aspect of task-based training is structured in a way to standardize both the process of performing the task and the delivery of the training itself. The implementation “accelerates the transfer of expertise” to ensure each trainee – new-hires and incumbent workers – master the tasks of a job quickly and completely.
Much can be lost in interpretation of what a trainee hears and sees being displayed in an informal training experience. First, the trainer is usually someone who has demonstrated they can always perform the task as designed and meet all the requirements of the process. A trainer is a subject matter expert who has successfully completed the tasks of a job so many times that they have, long ago, suppressed the finer nuances they needed to master the tasks. They have become “human robots,” operating primary on rote memory. Where all training is informal, what each subsequent trainee receives may be a small subset of everything the new-hire or cross-trainee needs to master the tasks. From trainer to trainer, shift to shift, the experience may vary to even smaller subsets.
Add to that the demeanor of the trainer, which can be a consequential experience for a trainee. The state of mind of the trainer is open to a world of possibilities affected by mood, memory, and expression. If not given clear guiderails for trainer technique, this can diminish the training experience to a great degree, leaving the bewildered new-hire to assess their future in this unpredictable environment.
Trainees, on the other hand, don’t know what they don’t know and are totally reliant on what the trainer conveys, how the trainer conveys it, and whether the best practice being demonstrated is one that is standard to everyone and that will lead to an acceptable outcome. While a trainee is often reluctant ask questions for fear of appearing to be “untrainable,” the trainer may seem to not welcome too many questions without feeling shackled to an “inadequate trainee.” Looming over the head of the trainer and the trainee is the production schedule, and both parties are made to feel that the time spent in learning and mastering a task is very limited, so “they better hurry it up.”
Hopefully the informal trainer invites questions, but often the nuances of the task that the trainer originally needed in order to master the task is stored away deep in the brain and not easily accessible by a trainer informally. The solution is to build structure by capturing the “tribal knowledge and wisdom” of each task – not just the procedural steps but the safety hazards to avoid, problems that have come up in the past and how to circumvent or correct them if encountered, and what quality and engineering specifications are critical to an acceptable product or service. Is it really necessary that each subsequent trainee repeat mistakes that are known to happen because no one bothers to write them down? All of this collective wisdom can be used to create tools to help the trainer train and the trainee learn; standardize the task’s best practice and training delivery.
If the organization utilizes written processes, it is a mistake to think that is the training tool. It is “job performance aid” and not a training instrument. However, structured on-the-job training can incorporate the written process and build around it to create a task-based training plan – killing 2 birds with one stone (compliance with ISO/AS/TS quality programs by tying the written process and periodic revisions to documented training, and sound training delivery).
A lot can go wrong in an informal, unstructured, ad hoc world a worker training for which the company pays for in ways not often contemplated: unused worker capacity, unpredictable product output and quality, spotty compliance with specifications and safety requirements, and damage to equipment or product.
It’s worth the effort by the employer to, first, structure the tasks for best practice and document them in a form that is repeatable; second, spend some time training those who will be the task trainers to ensure that they are using standard best practices for training. There’s a lot of wealth employers can capture by doing so. Trainees will have of a better chance of being trained properly, to contribute to the operation, a better chance of being retained and a chance at becoming successful. This, also, can be incentivize by offering credentials for Job Mastery in partnership with local educational institutions, workforce development and economic development.
Proactive Technologies’ provides technical support and proven expertise to employers in building and implementing a structured on-the-job training systems approach to expedite each worker’s accelerated path toward full job mastery. 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. A 13-minute promo briefing is available at the Proactive Technologies website and provides an overview to get you started and to help you explain it to your staff. As always, onsite presentations are available as well.
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