We sometimes run into a conundrum when promoting the concept of structured on-the-job training: finding who is responsible and accountable for the decision to provide training within an organization. It doesn’t seem like negligence, but it often feels like every decision-maker is saying it is someone else’s responsibility, sincerely believing the other has this important area covered.

But it is also surprising when no one inside the organization asks who is responsible when any of the many symptoms of lack of training shows up.

In this environment that seems like “training anarchy,” it is easy for loud voices and strong personalities to step outside their zone of expertise to tackle, what may appear to be, a simple challenge – only to come up short.

Sadly, although the proposed solution wouldn’t rise to that provided by an experienced professional or recognized as “training,” others may not know this. They might vent their disappointment by denigrating the notion of training or seek blame of the trainee saying things like “these workers just don’t want to be trained.” The legitimate role and purpose of training is tarnished, but never the solution’s architect.

Enormous amounts of money in direct expenditures, workers and management time, opportunity costs, etc. could be expended, only to wind up at a under-whelming end. At the same time a seasoned expert in worker development would have predicted the failure if someone could coherently explain to them what the plan was. Far too often the training strategy boils down to putting two people together and hoping for the best, with a class here and a class there, a job/safety analysis that is never used, illustrated work processes that quickly grow obsolete and unusable, color-coded pie charts that really don’t say much and/or a policy saying workers will be trained that is ignored. Granted, a few of these strategies combined might provide recognizable progress if aligned and implemented correctly. But often each of these has a different brain behind them, residing in a different department with a different directive and budget – each unaware of the other’s activities. Read More

Starting in the late 1980’s, employers became increasingly concerned with succession planning; ensuring salary workers were being groomed to replace critical senior employees in the event of retirement or voluntary/involuntary separation. It was realized that the potential disruption - direct and the ripple effects - caused by an unplanned void in the leadership chain might be perceived as a threat to shareholder value. Shareholders, too, wanted assurances that maximizing a firm's performance was not tied to one or two invaluable people.

Compounding the concern was the realization that the workforce was aging at all levels, and that retirements were a certainty. Prior to the Crash of 2008, employer’s concern over this was amplified by anecdotal reports from other employers already experiencing the impact. A movement toward a remedy began to take shape, and not just for high-ranking salary positions, but technically critical salary positions and even hourly positions that with a loss of one or a few technical experts might disrupt operations and impair a firm’s viability.

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. We saw this phenomenon repeating itself with the Covid-19 pandemic.

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. Today, employers have been urgently revisiting the expertise capture idea, and not for just hourly positions such as tool and die, production worker, machine operator, maintenance and quality control, but for critical support positions such as material buyer, office manager, administrative assistant, and metallurgical lab technician – typically in that “gray area” of jobs considered as indispensable... until the resident expert is gone. Read More

Partnerships between employers and local educational institutions/training providers are a tricky thing. Not every employer knows clearly what they need nor can they articulate the need, and not every educational institution can understand the need, or has products or services available or relevant enough to make a difference. If either of these realities are present, or worse both of them, it can make worker development partnerships difficult to disappointing.

Employers are closest to the work that they need performed by the worker, which is usually very different from the employer down the road. Yet employers rarely bother to document what makes up that work to articulate it in an understandable way to an educational institution or training provider. If you doubt that, take any of your job classifications and try to explain it in enough detail to train from it.

"Our partnership, located in northern Ohio, was the first implementation of the US Metalworking Skill Standards in the country."

When in doubt, some employers pull out a sample written process and a few random specifications for compliance to focus the discussion. Seriously, I have been in meetings when an employer pulled out a 15 year old job description, which was a cut-and-paste of a 20 year old job description, and gave it to the community college and said, “we need workers trained for this.” Not surprisingly, they are disappointed and disillusioned when what the community college came up with seems irrelevant when shown to workers currently in the job classification.

There are at least two critically important reasons why current and accurate job data makes or breaks a worker development partnership. First, the education and training provider’s role with related technical instruction is to build each candidate’s core and industry-general skills foundation upon which the employer can train them further for their employer-specific work tasks. If the employer cannot accurately define and express their specific needs for each job area they need workers to the training provider, everyone’s time and money is wasted. When that employer–specific data is unavailable, educational institutions turn to “industry-general” standards, developed by a panel of retired CEO’s and educators over coffee and donuts. It is better than nothing, but not even close to finishing the job of worker development. Read More

According to Ed Timmons, CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers, “our labor costs in the U.S. are still 20% too high.” If he means that employers may be paying too much for unused or unusable worker capacity, and they should seek methods to develop it, I can agree with that. If he means employers should focus on spending enormous amounts on finding alternatives to labor, or randomly cutting workers, or asking workers to work for less wages and less benefits, I would say "hold on a minute."

Given the growing fear and discontent by workers who still haven't recovered from the Crash of 2008 and now knocked down with the Covid-19 pandemic, they may want a seat at the discussion. These workers will be trying for some time to, once again, regain value in their 401K and other impacted assets and to rise to the wage level they once had for the talents they possess. Many have the perception, wrongly or rightly, that their employer and their shareholders built great profits while workers slid backward. Many families, today, are challenged by rising prices of nearly everything...against eroding wages. This preoccupation with driving down labor costs, while reporting to Wall Street record quarterly profits, may benefit shareholders in the short-run, but it is surely illusionary and self-destructive in the long-run as the Crash of 2008 should have demonstrated, but the Covid-19 pandemic might remind. 

As reported in Industry Week, a group of CEOs from major U.S. corporations, The Business Roundtable, released a statement saying that shareholder value is no longer its primary focus - shifting their practices to line up with their new definition of the “purpose of a corporation.” The new vision emphasizes investing in employees, supporting communities, dealing ethically with suppliers and providing customers with value. “The group signed the Business Roundtable's new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation. It's a sea change that moves companies away from the age-old philosophy that companies’ main goal is to look after shareholders.”

"There is an effective, proven alternative to cutting labor costs through gutting organizational capacity."

Focusing solely on shareholder profits has stunted the long-term viability of many a thriving organization. Under the cover of “making the firm more efficient,” when more profits could not be derived from expanding the market and market penetration, some investors forced cuts on firms that determined the firm’s long-term capability to compete, take advantage of emerging market opportunities, and adapt to changing markets and turbulent economic forces. Read More

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