The modern workplace is becoming increasingly demanding – employers must work harder to ensure their employees meet the ever-moving bar for skills standards. Publications and news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, are constantly reporting on the “skills gap” plaguing major industries like manufacturing. In fact, it’s been estimated that nearly 20% of the workforce will be underskilled for their jobs as soon as 2030. More imminently, talent shortage could result in $8.5 trillion of unrealized revenue in 2023 alone, according to Korn Ferry.

What does the skills gap mean for businesses?

With the skills gap growing at this rate, businesses must work harder and smarter to keep ahead of the curve. Many employers are discovering that talent pools in certain fields are limited, leading to prolonged vacancies. This shortage of qualified professionals can have multiple adverse effects, such as:

  • Decreased productivity
  • Increased staff turnover
  • Reduced employee morale
  • Declining work quality
  • Stalled business growth
  • Lost revenue

To fill the skills gap and avoid its ripple effect on overall business health, many organizations are exploring ideas to improve employees’ learning experiences. This includes on-the-job training (OJT), where new employees apply what they’ve learned in the classroom or online. OJT is an essential training component for many industry sectors, such as healthcare, manufacturing, and others with front-line workers. The problem with OJT is that it frequently relies on informal and undocumented tribal knowledge-sharing practices. While tribal knowledge may seem like a convenient way to train a new employee, it poses a significant threat to production quality. Furthermore, it is hard to measure its effectiveness.

So, how can employers be sure that their OJT training is effective if it is not well documented or tracked? How can they get their employees where they need to be faster than the competition when relying on this training model?

Read on to learn the three essential steps to get your OJT training program a boost to close the skills gap faster.

Fast, Effective On-the-Job Training in 3 Steps

1. Standardize Training

A major contributor to the skills gap is the lack of standardization across the enterprise. Standardized training ensures all employees receive consistent training experiences with streamlined training materials and methodologies, regardless of an employee’s shift or location. Standardized training can help improve the quality of work, reduce costs, and increase training effectiveness.

In industries like manufacturing, 84% of employers report this as a primary issue. Standardization ensures that employees receive consistent training, regardless of who delivers it. This approach provides measurable skills development by allowing you to assess employee performance consistently. It also improves accountability and ownership between the trainee and trainer, leading to higher quality and more predictable training outcomes.

2. Centralize Training

Many organizations suffer from fragmented systems to deliver, manage, and track training activities across the enterprise. In addition, the responsibility for enterprise-wide employee development is often dispersed across different departments, leading to unpredictable business outcomes and higher cost to manage and support.

Centralizing your training processes first involves implementing a single source of truth to manage and track employee training. When you combine this with a more robust organizational design to govern and implement centralized programs, you improve ownership and efficiency. This also makes it easier to standardize training to reduce the incidence of incorrect tribal knowledge transfer which leads to human errors and even accidents. Another key advantage of centralizing training is that it centralizes the data source to provide a more accurate and comprehensive view of an organization’s learning progress and shortfalls.

3. Systemize Competency Management

A systematic approach to competency management ensures that training is completed and effective. Without proper systemization, companies risk falling out of compliance with standards like ISO 9001 which can lead to operational failures. To avoid this, organizations must maintain comprehensive records of completed training and employee proficiency – not just check a box. Job instructions should be clear, up-to-date, and easily accessible. Systemization should also deploy automation to improve productivity and foolproof your training programs, allowing you to scale efficiently while maintaining compliance and operational quality.

How On-the-Job training impacts your people’s productivity

Making skills development a priority and improving on-the-job training (OJT) is a strategic investment in your company’s long-term operational efficiency. By standardizing, centralizing, and systemizing OJT, you can significantly enhance business performance in several key areas:

  • Reduced Onboarding Time: New hires reach full productivity faster with a well-structured OJT program, minimizing the time they spend learning and increasing the time they spend contributing.
  • More Efficient Workflows: About 85% of quality events are caused by human errors. Systemized OJT helps identify and resolve inefficient workflows that could be slowing your business down as employees gain a more in-depth understanding of processes by practicing them in real scenarios.
  • Fewer Mistakes: Performance errors can be dangerous and expensive. According to a study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), 50% of serious workplace injuries and fatalities in the manufacturing industry could be prevented by better training completion accountability. Systemized OJT training helps prevent these mistakes by ensuring employees are proficient before they’re tasked with mission-critical work.
  • Increased Employee Satisfaction: Employees feel more confident and engaged when properly trained. Systemized OJT provides consistent hands-on learning that many employees crave, increasing satisfaction and reducing turnover. In fact, studies indicate that a more structured onboarding process can result in 54% lower turnover rates during the first year.

All these factors contribute to operational efficiencies and an improved bottom line. For example, businesses implementing Seertech’s OJT3 workforce competency management solution report impressive results: a 40% decrease in time-to-competency, $1M+ in cost savings, and over 10,000 person-hours saved.

Interested in learning more about how you can achieve results like these?

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