MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT

Retaining valuable skills

In six out of the ten mills I have worked with during the past eight months, I have found that 30% to 40% of the mills' craftspeople will retire within the next five years. Within the next ten years, 40% to 65% of the mills' craftspeople will retire.

In summary, out of ten mills, 60% will lose 30% to 65% of their craftspeople within five to ten years. Most of these mills have not planned a way to retain the valuable skills that will be lost when these craftspeople leave. Only one of the mills I worked with has a comprehensive apprentice program. Most mills said that "we hire people with skills, so we do not need to worry about this." However, while hiring skilled craftspeople might be possible to do now, will it be as easy five to ten years in the future?

I often talk with people in the 15-to-25 year age group. Frequently, I discuss with them their future work plans. Since many have the impression that industry work is noisy, dirty, and stressful (a fact that can seldom be denied), I have not met many who have planned a career in industrial work. Furthermore, I have yet to find those who have set their dreams toward a future in a mill's maintenance department. If I am not misinformed, I do not think that the industry can expect to easily find skilled craftspeople to employ.

Something must be done-for example, in-house training and apprentice programs. For many years, there has been a strong push toward more work flexibility, which I think is absolutely necessary. However, sometimes it leads to the loss of highly skilled craftspeople. The design of new work systems has perhaps focused too much on horizontal work flexibility and has forgotten the need for vertical, highly skilled craftspeople.

U.S. TRAINING LAGS. The education and training of craftspeople in the U.S. are, with some exceptions, very poor when compared to that of many other countries. Training in the U.S. is commonly the "follow Joe" type. This means new employees are teamed up with experienced employees, and the new employees are expected to learn on the job. However, this method does not always ensure that all necessary information is passed from the experienced employee to the new one.

For example, Joe-an experienced employee-will teach Ed-a new employee-about his work. First of all, Joe might only know about 70% of what he should. Secondly, Joe might not teach Ed everything he knows, keeping some skills to himself because of pride and job security. However, even if Joe teaches Ed 70% of what he knows, Ed probably will not remember all of this. For example, Ed might only learn 70% of what Joe teaches him.

One day, many years later, Ed will be the one to teach the next new employee. If the same phenomenon is repeated as described earlier, it is easy to see that an organization's skills will not improve and will, in fact, continuously deteriorate! This scenario can be described in the following formula:

PRODUCT INFORMATION IS NOT TRAINING. If I ask craftspeople when they last attended a training class, the answer is commonly "never." Another common answer is, "The latest training I attended was a year ago. A salesperson was there to demonstrate some new tools and seals."

Remember, product information is good, but it is no substitute for training.

TRAINING BY VOLUME. Training is commonly measured by the number of people who attend a classroom-type session. The human resources department can then show a good statistic on the number of hours that the company spends training its employees. However, the sad fact is that the training is not targeted and the results of the training are often very poor.

For example, a mill is setting up a training session in hydraulics. The training room can take up to 25 attendees, so it is requested that each supervisor send five attendees to this class. Will the supervisor send the people who need the training or the ones he can spare? Most probably, only five people in the whole organization need this training and will actually use the skills that are taught. The other 20 attendees will never use the skills, so 80% of the training was wasted. However, the mill still claims that it has invested in training 25 employees.

ACTIONS AND RESULTS. I strongly believe that training should be followed by immediate actions to use the skills taught. If possible, the training should contain more practice than theory. Also, the effects of training should be possible to measure. In my next column, I will discuss ways to accomplish such training.