Training The Skilled Labor You Need – An Investment That Keeps on Returning

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

In a recent Manufacturing Institute-Deloitte survey, 82% of manufacturers surveyed reported encountering a moderate or serious shortage of skilled workers to fill their positions. Over the next decade it is expected 3 ½ million manufacturing jobs will likely need to be filled. Skill gaps are expected to result in 2 million of these jobs remaining unfilled. More than 75% of manufacturers report that the skills shortage has hampered their ability to expand and 69% of manufacturers expect the shortage in skilled production workers to worsen.

In a recent article in IndustryWeek by Glenn Marshall – formally with Newport News Shipbuilding – entitled “Closing the Nation’s Skills Gap,” Marshall discusses a program used during World War II to rapidly develop the skilled workers needed to quickly ramp up U.S. manufacturing to meet the needs of the war effort. Obviously there was a shortage of skilled workers; U.S. manufacturing had never been required to produce at such levels. In many cases workers were using new technology, so skilled workers could not possibly be available. The need was exacerbated by the fact that the world was in crisis.

The program implemented during WWII to remedy this was called TWI – Training Within Industry. Its basis was simple: workers had to be trained very quickly and the workers had to perform the tasks with consistent quality. The method included skills training, employee relations, continuous improvement as well, but at the center of the program was the expedited one-to-one transfer of knowledge from the trainer to the trainee. History will report that the effort was successful and the war effort received the manufacturing output it needed.

This early, but visionary, approach to training workers could easily be a precursor to Proactive Technologies’ concept of the “accelerated transfer of expertise^TM”. For the past 30 years this approach has evolved into a structured on-the-job training approach, taking advantage of the latest technology and adapting to improvements in business modeling and quality control. But the concept still holds to this day. In every job classification, and every corner of a facility, one person is training another person to do something. It may be unstructured, haphazard, ad hoc, inconsistent and undocumented, but somehow it has worked. During competitive times this uncontrolled, but critical, process receives intense scrutiny and criticism as the cost of labor becomes a more important factor.

The most effective, efficient and economical training solution is taking this process that has demonstrated it works and formalize it; structure the unstructured and make it a deliberate process with measurable outcomes. It works, but employers are sometimes afraid to go back to solutions that have been staring them in the face for decades, possibly thinking they may be lacking the tools and expertise to approach it.

The tools have been here, only improving through experience. Maybe it would be worth the while to check them out here.

Seventy years later we see a shortage of skilled labor once again – but for different reasons. The pressure today is more about changes in the economy, demography and in many cases about unreasonably lofty expectations for business performance at a time of uncertainty. For those who see the competitiveness battle similar to a war, the similarities in solutions will resonate.