How Manufacturers Can Accelerate Time-to-Productivity with Systemized Competency Management

It’s time to call attention to a significant issue in the manufacturing world regarding the frontline.

We know 80% of the global workforce is made up of frontline workers and they generate 90% of your revenues. Frontline workers are the powerhouse of your business.

Here’s the issue: research tells us they’re only receiving <10% of your structured training investment. It’s clear we need to bring the frontline back to the forefront of the priority list, quickly, or the ~90% of revenue they’re generating will become stagnant and outdated, impacting your bottom line in the long run. Failing to examine your training investment leaves money on the table and sabotages your competitive edge.

The next question becomes: how can you sustainably achieve faster time-to-competency while maintaining accurate proof-of-competency? Competency management is the process of identifying the skills required for each employee to excel in their job role, evaluating their proficiency against set benchmarks. Well-executed competency management allows for strategic workforce development and yields validated data to inform operational decisions. But the real key is to make sure your competency management process is fast and verifiable—that’s where having the right technology to structure training comes into play.

In this blog, we’ll explore the benefits of accelerating employee competency and how you can maximize your business performance through effective training.

Why Fast, Verifiable Employee Competency Matters

Increased Productivity and Efficiency

One of the most significant benefits of accelerating employee competency is slashed time-to-productivity and boosted efficiency. In real cases we’ve seen with customers that implement structured competency management, they’ve measured a 38% reduction in time-to-productivity.

When employees are trained and competent in their roles, they can complete tasks more quickly and accurately, leading to higher productivity levels—our customers have saved 10,000 hours per year. 

This increased efficiency can also result in cost savings for the company. Whether it’s costs saved due to improved efficiencies on the frontline or through faster training—we’ve measured up to $1M per year for Seertech Learning users—it adds up.

Improved Quality of Work

Competent employees are more likely to produce high-quality work. With proper training, employees gain the skills and knowledge necessary to perform their jobs to the best of their abilities. This leads to improved quality of work, which can positively impact customer satisfaction and retention. 

Better quality of work goes hand-in-hand with error reduction and incidents. Better training greatly reduces risk on the frontline. We’ve seen an average up to 90% reduction in errors and incidents with structured competency training.

Reduced Employee Turnover

Investing in employee competency training can also help reduce employee turnover. When employees feel valued and supported through training opportunities, they are more likely to stay with the company long-term. This can save businesses significant amounts of money in recruitment and training costs.

Enhanced Employee Morale

When employees feel confident and competent in their roles, it can have a positive impact on their morale. Competent employees are more likely to feel satisfied and motivated in their jobs, leading to a more positive work environment. This, in turn, can lead to increased employee retention and improved overall company culture.

Accelerated Employee Competency Management

The key to fast, effective competency management (or re-evaluating the competency management process you already have in place) is to implement structure through a systemized process. Ideally, your frontline workforce is achieving optimal productivity in less time:

Determine and Assess Competency

For manufacturers and other industries where quality must comply with standards, ISO 9001 regulations require the employer to determine the competence of personnel performing the work. Education, training, skills, and experience are all factors to be considered. These organizations are also required to assess and fill competency gaps. 

Measure and Track Improvement

A skills matrix is a valuable tool for measuring and tracking employee competency. It provides a visual representation of the skills and competencies of employees within an organization. By using a skills matrix, you can easily identify skill gaps, track employee progress, and make informed decisions regarding training and development initiatives. 

However, managing a detailed skills matrix can be labor intensive for any large organization, given the multitude of diverse job types and the need to update them regularly as skills evolve. For many organizations, the skills matrix is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that is updated manually, making it prone to errors. This makes it difficult to deliver the appropriate training to close skill gaps. 

Organizations need to invest in comprehensive learning management systems that assess competencies, automatically deliver the required training based on assessments, and record gaps that have been filled. 

Identify Training Needs

Formal education, structured on-the-job training (OJT), and a certification process are common methods for closing knowledge and skill gaps. But before implementing any training programs, it’s essential to identify the specific training needs of your employees. This can be done through performance evaluations, surveys, and discussions with employees and managers. 

By understanding the areas where employees need improvement, you can tailor training programs to address specific needs and compliance requirements for each role. Not only will you ensure business needs are met, but you also create a career development framework for your employees. Ideally, employee personal development plans (PDPs) offer personalized learning suggestions and clear career planning while also giving leaders better control over talent growth, compliance, succession planning, and skills alignment.

Eliminate Variability 

Without a systemized approach to closing skills and knowledge gaps, organizations risk the proliferation of tribal knowledge and practices. For example, repair technicians commonly develop their own informal procedures, resulting in significant variations across the factory floor. Tribal knowledge is the single biggest risk to production consistency and quality. 

A systemized approach ensures that training quality is consistent and repeatable and eliminates variation. Regarding on-the-job training, standardizing training through a central system and structured process means the quality of training is not entirely dependent on who provides the hands-on training. 

Evaluate Effectiveness

It’s crucial to measure and track progress to ensure the effectiveness of your training programs. While traditional Learning and development teams are good at creating and offering training content, very few are good at measuring its effectiveness. ISO 9000 requires organizations to not only provide training to close competence gaps but also verify that the training was effective. 

This can be done through pre- and post-training assessments, inspections of an individual’s work, and regular evaluations of employee performance. Most competitive businesses incorporate mobile assessments, where frontline supervisors use digitized checklists to validate competencies. Some tools make it possible for supervisors to upload a video of the worker performing the task that can be attached as part of the official record. By tracking progress, you can identify areas where employees may need additional training and adjust your training programs as needed.

One of the most direct ways for shop floor personnel to assess competence is through a live skills demonstration.  However, evaluating employee competence on the shop floor is challenging because skills demonstrations are often unstructured, and evidence is difficult to record without systematic solutions. 

Organizations need to create a checks-and-balance approach when evaluating competency skills. A standardized checklist process where both the trainer and supervisor separately evaluate the employee’s demonstration of the skill before signing off that the employee has mastered the skill needs to be established. 

Maintain Records

Maintaining a record of competency activities benefits both employers and employees by providing a skills path for growth. But for manufacturers and other heavily regulated industries, ISO 9001 mandates that employers provide evidence of competency. 

A key obstacle for many manufacturers is that they lack a streamlined technology to quickly identify skill gaps and capture a digital record for skills evaluation activities. Consequently, they often rely on managing paper records and/or manually consolidating data from various fragmented data sources. According to 2024 research by the Manufacturing Leadership Council, 70% of manufacturers still enter data manually. These inefficiencies contribute to a suboptimal quality management system and may result in audit findings. 

Invest in Technology

The right technology can significantly accelerate employee competency, reduce risk of error, and improve business margins. By investing in a comprehensive learning management solution that supports training and development, tracks competency skills, and automates learning processes, you can provide employees with a more efficient and effective learning experience. 

As we highlighted in the benefits section at the beginning of this piece, we’ve perfected how to implement and automate competency management thanks to 20+ years of feedback and partnership with the industry’s most innovative businesses. Our learning enablement platform (LEP) adds structure to learning and on-the-job training and systemizes competency management, unlocking this accelerated, verifiable process. 

Seertech’s platform unifies all the features you need to accelerate and automate competency management by optimizing workforce capacity, ensuring consistent training execution, and providing real-time validation of developed skills. Features like automated training plan execution, skills assessments (including mobile), and compliance tracking—integrated with existing operational systems—empower manufacturing leaders to make informed, data-driven decisions that drive operational excellence and ensure regulatory compliance.

Ready to accelerate your competency management? See how our unified solution can streamline training, validate skills, and optimize your workforce performance.

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