Many employers are still waiting for the educational institutions to solve the problem. After all, look at all of the money spent on education directed at “training the workers of tomorrow.” Yet a lot of the institutional strategies appear to include repackaged tools from the past…and not the ones far enough past that seemed to work. For example, the recent comments made by education insiders saying we should have kept the high school vocational programs that were relatively effective until the late 1970’s in place. These were phased out when the push to prepare students for college took priority. Now, there is a push for community colleges to “pump out” more apprentices which, if done only to meet numbers but not emphasizing quality of the general training, could be another waste of scarce resources of time, money and opportunity for the trainee, the employer and communities. Another decade lost.

But the success/failure doesn’t stop there. A successfully and fully trained (to the tasks required) staff prepares, and keeps, the organization prepared to seize opportunities, adjust to disrupters and weather unforeseen forces. Failure at preparing and maintaining each worker’s job mastery, as part of system, can exacerbate an organization’s challenges and, potentially, lead to failure or irrelevance of the organization. Read More

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?

In the last few years, it seems an alternative to the concentration of expertise in a few subject matter experts has become to use lower-wage temporary or contract workers who specialize in smaller quantities of processes, and who can be “traded-out” with a minimum amount of disruption. History will tell us just how costly that approach was and if anything was learned. Read More

Education cannot, and should not be asked to, close the "skills gap" on their own. Employers have been concerned about the "skills gap" since the 1980's, and the nature and location of the job has continued to change...at an accelerating rate. Employers have convinced themselves to wait for education to close the gap. In the meantime, tremendous resources continue to be expended, but the gap continues to grow.

Educational institutions are not suited, staffed, funded and equipped to train workers for every job, for every employer, nor should they be. Educational institutions do their best work when they build the labor supply with strong, relevant basic and core skills (including STEM), and industry-general skills. Whether those efforts are worthwhile and the resources well-spent depend on two important things: 1) does an employer see value in hiring a graduate, and 2) is there a method in place to ensure those skills are integrated into mastery of the job-tasks the employer needs performed; the value that will influence the employer to retain them.

Only employers can train the worker on tasks they need performed and that affect their bottom line.  They have the need, the facilities, the most current equipment for their operation and the personnel with current expertise. Yet, in reality most employer's methods amount to hardly more than pairing two people and hoping for the best. This is where the gap is most profound and continues to grow. Read More

Last month's issue of Proactive Technologies Report’s Part 1 of “Costs Associated With Unstructured, Haphazard Worker Training,” offered a number of examples of unstructured, haphazard and ineffective worker training that I experienced in my early years in manufacturing. We all have had similar experiences throughout our lives to draw on, I am sure. It is still perplexing that - in view of all of the advanced systems, process controls and metrics that keep an enterprise operating competitively - management would assume that such a “hands-off” approach to developing the critical worker component wouldn’t detract from the other metrics. Why would management expect anything more than skeptical results?

Until the processes associated with the new equipment and technology are stabilized for maximum efficiency, learning of the processes - from the each worker’s perspective - is seen as fluid and ambiguous. Even if a noble effort is attempted to indoctrinate the worker in the use of the equipment, the erosion of the worker’s skill base compared to the evolving standard practices and technology is ongoing. Multiply one worker’s learning experience times the number of workers needed to operate the equipment – learning the same tasks in different ways on different shifts from different trainers - the direct costs of training, as well as the opportunity costs of under-utilized “worker capacity,” can be enormous. Calculate this cost for every job classification for which task training is needed and the costs can be “attention-getting.” Read More

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