The Key To Effective Maintenance Training: The Right Blend of Structured On-The-Job Training and Related Technical Instruction

by Dr. Dave Just, formally Dean of Corporate and Continuing Education at Community Colleges in MA, OH, PA, SC. Currently President of K&D Consulting

I spent a lot of my career as Dean of Corporate and Continuing Education at community and technical colleges, in several states. Where we could, we tried hard to provide the best core skills development delivery for technical job classifications the employers in our community requested. We often did this working off the limited, and often suspect, job information the employer could provide to us.

Often we were up against budgetary constraints that limited our efforts to customize programs and keep the programs up to date when the instructor was willing to maintain the relevance of the program. If that wasn’t enough, school leadership often showed ambivalence toward adult and career education due in part to the fact that its demand was driven by gyrations in the economy. Furthermore, the institution was built upon, more familiar with and understood better credit courses for the more stable subjects such as math, science, literature, history and the social sciences.

We tried a lot of innovative programs for employers in the community within the constraints mentioned, but if I was to be honest we rarely kept up. What we thought we knew of the targeted job classifications and their requirements, and upon which our programs were built and measured, seemed to become increasingly misaligned within just a few years. Not only was advancing technology putting pressure on the content of our learning materials and program design – a constant push toward obsolescence – the employers were continually rethinking the design of their job classifications to meet their business goals and budgets. We were finding less and less similarity in job classifications between employers, by job title and job content.

Inevitably, and not from lack of effort or desire, it was difficult to keep technical curriculum current to within 5-10 years. The “Maintenance” job classification was a perfect example and could be incredibly different from company to company. In the early days, Maintenance was thought of as multi-craft; a maintenance person was responsible for maintaining all aspects of the operation. Some companies tried to hold onto that concept of Multi-Craft Maintenance but, as Multi-Craft Maintenance Technicians were becoming harder to find and therefore required higher pay, more and more companies began to deviate from multi-craft to specialty and single-craft positions that cover only limited areas such as facilities, electrical or mechanical. Some Maintenance positions did not include HVAC, some were primarily focused on servicing machines but not repair. Some employers subcontracted out facility maintenance and instead had their Maintenance employees perform preventative maintenance tasks on everything from manual machines to PLC driven multi-axis machines, to robots and robotic manufacturing machines – leaving the servicing to the warranty and/or contracted OEM experts. Trying to find the right balance between an effective Maintenance program that gives every employer what they wanted but does not train for skills that one might never have a chance to use and master and most likely would forget, proved increasingly difficult to say the least.

This dilemma for program and instructional design, I believe, is worse today. Institutions are still struggling to be relevant in a world that allows little time. Some colleges are still expending large sums on building manufacturing training centers that, by the time the doors are open, sit idle as the targeted employers relocate to other parts of the world. State-of-the-art equipment installed in these centers have less of a shelf-life today than they did 10 to 20 years ago, so their value declines each day that passes even if in mint condition from non-use. However, leaders of these educational institutions feel they have to show some effort, strategy and purpose to avoid being re-purposed or dissected during the next budget cut. Since predictions are harder these days, taking 3 -4 years to build a center buys time and gives the community hope, even though that hope may turn to despair and anger later.

The reason I began partnering with Proactive Technologies, Inc. over 2 decades ago, was that I saw a simpler, more sensible and more effective design for Maintenance, and other technical job area’s, training programs. Instead of the school chasing an ever-changing job classification with increasingly shrinking resources and trying to cover all bases, it made sense to focus the related technical instruction we had on the point of “maximum utility.”

Proactive Technologies’ approach to job/task analysis – breaking down each critical task of a job classification for its best practice procedure and required core skills and competencies – of each Maintenance job classification for each employer, gave me a wealth of data to determine which classes we already had that laid a good foundation upon which to learn the tasks of the job classification, which classes needed to be updated and which courses we did not have internally and, therefore, it made more sense to contract with a specialty training provider. This data allowed us to customize and focus the core skill development program for each employer’s Maintenance position rather than offer a broader program with little job relevance to any one position; too little prerequisite core skills covered or too many in which employers were not interested.

Proactive Technologies would set up the structured on-the-job training that lead every trainee to mastery of all the tasks required by the employer. This was something our client, the employer, understood and valued. This allowed our community college to focus on what we did best; ensuring graduates were eligible for work for that specific employer had and that they had a strong foundation for the structured on-the-job training they were about to receive. In addition, incumbent workers for that employer had solid resources for core skill remediation or development.

Our focus went from trying to make bold promises we did not have the resources to deliver to merging our related technical instruction with Proactive Technologies’ structured on-the-job training in a “hybrid approach” which were registered as apprenticeships for many employers.

Not everyone understood the efficiencies this model offered and the potential for maximized results for the student, the worker and the employer. Some schools seemed intimidated by the model because it ran counter to the paradigm they all operated under for most of their careers. But the employers seemed to appreciate our efforts and, as word spread, our projects grew larger as we partnered with other community and technical colleges, career centers, colleges and universities, workforce development agencies and economic development to bring this approach to the employers in their region or those employers ready to move to their region.

After leaving the community college system for the private sector, I still partner with Proactive Technologies. My company helps employers select and implement selection testing (determined by a proprietary assessment that we administer) and follow that with related technical instruction from a library of online and instructor-lead courses for maintenance and technical positions.

We focus on the core skills each candidate needs and encourage employers toward adding structured on-the-job training, which will allow us to further align our assessment and training modules with the job/task analysis data Proactive Technologies provides for the employer’s targeted job classification. Related technical instruction is conducted concurrently with structured on-the-job training to develop a worker’s potential for the job for which they were hired faster and with a lower required investment. Certificates of course completion are given for the courses and certificates of job mastery™ are awarded those who master all of the tasks of the job classification.

Any Maintenance or technical job classification is eligible for this approach. We have proven it many times, with many manufacturers, in many sectors around the U.S. If you missed it, you can read more about this partnership approach in the August, 2016 Proactive Technologies Report article, “Developing the Multi-Craft and Specialty Maintenance Technicians You Need; To Specification, With Minimal Investment.”