6

Training and Organizational Change

In two “lightning round” panels presenters briefly described activities related to adaptability in their organizations. Workshop participants then worked in teams to identify major points, common themes, and remaining questions that emerged from the presentations.

The first lightning round on the use of training and organizational change to enhance adaptability was moderated by Mary Ann Pacelli, manager of workforce development at the Manufacturing Extension Partnership, National Institute of Standards and Technology, US Department of Commerce. (The second lightning round is reported in chapter 7.)

CAREER PATHS FOR A FLEXIBLE WORKFORCE

Jim Johnson, Jr., vice president of US production operations for S&C Electric Company, which designs and manufactures electrical equipment, began by stating that one third of the hourly workforce at S&C Electric will be eligible to retire over the next eight years. Another third has been with the company less than five years, and half of all turnover at the company comes from this second group of workers.

To provide its employees with a recognizable career path while also building a flexible workforce, the company developed what it calls an hourly career framework, which includes a skills and flexibility program called the work elements program. Rolled out among welders and then extended to all 14 functional career paths in the company, the program is based on paying workers for developing skills and flexibility. Jobs are organized into four skill levels—basic, intermediate, advanced, and complex—with multiple work elements that employees can use to enhance their skills and flexibility. Work elements are specific tasks or procedures for operating a specific piece of equipment, such as “Low Voltage Wiring Assemblies” or “High Voltage Test Cage.”

As employees acquire multiple work elements at the same skill level, they can work on different product lines, which enables the company to stay nimble. And feedback from employees has shown that they value being able to create paths for themselves: they can come in with low-level skills and advance through the company. As Johnson put it, they “have more than just a job. They can have a career.”

The career framework even helps employees prepare for jobs at the company that do not yet exist. In the past, S&C made electrical products that did not have embedded intelligence, but today about half of its products do, and that percentage will continue to grow, said Johnson.

As a result, the company needs fewer people to fill jobs that are mostly mechanical in nature. Instead, it needs people who can advance into jobs in which demand will grow in the future. “That’s how we guide our people to naturally go where the work is going to be.”

CREATING A HOMEGROWN WORKFORCE

Felsomat USA, which builds machine tools, robots, and other automation equipment for the Big Three auto companies, employs a vast array of people but was having a hard time keeping talented workers. Hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs in manufacturing are going unfilled, said Blake Consdorf, the company’s chief executive officer and president, “and it’s only going to get worse with the retiring baby boomers. The opportunities are huge if we can get kids engaged.”

Felsomat partnered with a local community college to teach robotics, develop and recruit the best talent, instill skills in real-world problem solving, and create the next-generation workforce. The classes at the community college do not follow a step-by-step learning process. Rather, an instructor sometimes leaves out some parts or present an incorrect drawing, challenging students to be adaptable in the face of real-world problems. Graduates of the program got a two-year degree that led to jobs at Felsomat and other companies, including those that used Felsomat’s products. “They have a jumpstart in their career in the value they bring to the company,” said Consdorf. “And some of the first ones we hired turned into the best engineers, programmers, and managers in the company.” In addition, because the students were from the local community they did not require high recruitment and placement fees and they were more likely to stay.

Every city has programs that can help fund such programs, said Consdorf. But the approach requires an ongoing commitment. Felsomat has worked to build awareness through commercials and other forms of outreach. “Getting the kids excited was one aspect, but you have to get the parents excited, too.”

Manufacturing continues to be a dirty word in America, Consdorf said, and “we have to change that mentality.” Average wages in manufacturing are 20 to 30 percent higher than the national average, and the highest technologies in the world are being used in manufacturing, he said. Indeed, he suggested that a Felsomat University would be appropriate given the complexity of machinery and automation.

ALIGNING WORKFORCE TRAINING WITH WORKFORCE NEEDS

The United States does not have a systematic view of workforce development, said Steve Partridge, vice president of workforce development for Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC). It has pockets of excellence, often involving a partnership between a single college and a company, and simply hopes that these examples spread. In contrast, countries like Germany have much more fully developed systems of workforce development—although Germany, he added, is under pressure to move toward a system more like that in the United States as more students are going to university because of the need for higher-level skills.

Partridge said that his job is “to make sure every employer in Northern Virginia can find a workforce.” He and his colleagues work with about 2,100 employers a year, which is just a fraction of the number of employers in the state.

But many of these employers say the same thing: their current workers are nearing retirement and young people are not well prepared to enter the workforce. “Which makes sense, if you think about it,” said Partridge, “[because] just a generation ago about 70 percent of high school students left high school having had a summer job of some sort. Now less than a third do.” Today’s students are very busy with tutoring, sports, clubs, and other activities, but they tend not to acquire the experience with jobs that previous generations did.

Educational institutions and parents devote some attention to career awareness and preparation in the United States but not to the same extent as in other countries. Again using Germany as an example, Partridge said that 12-year-olds there are expected to arrange their own one-week internships, after which they “get some very reliable feedback about what their strengths are, and what their weaknesses are, which makes them better prepared when they’re making career decisions.”

An NVCC labor market research group has been analyzing skill deficits identified by employers: communication was number 1, problem solving/critical thinking number 2, and relationship management number 3. But Partridge pointed to an inverse relationship between the skills companies say their employees need and those they will pay to develop in their employees. Many companies will pay for their employees to develop coding skills, yet these are near the bottom of what they say they need. In contrast, only about 5 percent of companies will pay to

develop communication, problem solving, critical thinking, or relationship management skills.

Community colleges need to help change that dynamic. “We can train for anything,” said Partridge. “Our people are good, they can learn, but we don’t give good market signals about what skills are needed…. If your company doesn’t tell you how to invest in yourself, how do you know what skills to go out and be [learning]?”

Northern Virginia Community College is seeking to fill this gap by working with partners in the community to create a database of where the jobs are, where the jobs are going, and what skills employees need to stay competitive. America cannot afford another experience like that of the last recession, Partridge said, where many people who had not gone back to the classroom in 20 years or more lost their jobs. “How do we change that mindset?” he asked. “That’s new for a college, but we’re going to own that.”

A NEW NORMAL FOR ENGINEERING PROGRAMS

The Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) is a partnership of higher education institutions adapting their undergraduate engineering programs by working to increase students’ curiosity about the future and develop their interest in economic and societal value, said Douglas Melton, program director at the Kern Family Foundation. KEEN’s 31 partner institutions represent about 58,000 undergraduate engineering students and about 3,500 engineering faculty members—about 10 percent of all undergraduate engineering students and faculty members in the country.

The partnership seeks to put value first and tools second, he said, so that “know-why” is supported with “know-how.” This transformation cannot be done by simply adding one or two classes, he explained. When students start a new project, they consider the demands of stakeholders, the economics of engineering solutions, sustainability, the broader societal context, and possible unintended consequences.

The key statement of the partnership is that the adaptability of the future technical workforce depends directly on the adaptability of its education. “You have to get that in place.” And the Kern Family Foundation is considering strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis of adaptability to speed progress.

Melton quoted Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum: “In the new world, it’s not the big fish that eats the small fish.

It’s the fast fish that eats the slow fish.”¹ The KEEN partner institutions are the fast fish of engineering, he said. While each is unique and adaptation is occurring at different rates, all are persistent and committed. The result, he predicted, will be a new normal for engineering programs.

EVALUATING AN ADAPTABILITY PROGRAM

Carra Sims, senior behavioral and social scientist with the RAND Corporation, elaborated on RAND’s evaluation of the US Army Asymmetric Warfare Adaptive Leader Program (AWALP) described by Straus in the previous session (chapter 5). AWALP uses an outcomes-based approach that emphasizes flexibility in how the tasks to achieve an outcome are executed. It encourages trainees to take the initiative and adjust their actions to adapt to a situation, using independent thinking and problem solving.

The evaluation of the program was designed to promote ongoing improvement by identifying both facilitating factors and challenges in applying adaptability knowledge and skills on the job. After the training, the instructors (guides) facilitated an after-action review to promote self-discovery of lessons learned and found numerous positive outcomes and impacts of the training.

However, the training as structured is resource intensive, Sims noted. Units had to be willing to part with personnel for the ten days of the training session (without coverage of participants’ job responsibilities). Some of the scenarios used paid actors, and a lot of time went into creating the structure of the course. The program also had a high ratio of guides to trainees.

The most common areas of implementation three months later were things that the trainees could control themselves, Sims reported; these included coaching, training, delegating, and seeking subordinate input. Challenges to implementation included the command climate and entrenched leadership.

Possible approaches to future training include short train-the-trainer versions of AWALP elsewhere in the army and outcomes-based training designed to enhance some adaptability dimensions even if it is not specific to adaptability.

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¹ “Are you ready for the technological revolution?” February 19, 2015. Available at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/02/are-you-ready-for-the-technological-revolution/.

TAKEAWAYS AND REMAINING QUESTIONS

After the presentations, workshop participants discussed takeaways and remaining questions.² Among the takeaways were the following:

• Adaptability is related to sustainability and durability, in both educational and workforce settings.
• An emphasis on mindsets in addition to skill sets has the potential to be transformative in education.
• Companies and educational institutions must keep the communication lines open about existing and anticipated company needs, especially in nontechnical skills.
• Community colleges can create excitement through competition, challenges, and partnerships.
• Workers can be educated to move up a career later rather than headed into dead-end positions.
• A healthy innovation ecosystem requires diverse inputs, and flexibility and adaptability are one way of achieving diversity.

Various participants raised the following questions:

• To what extent can best practices in building or understanding adaptability be generalized from one industry to others?
• To what extent do theories of adaptability in one domain apply in other domains?
• How can industries be convinced to invest in the workforce skills that they say they need?
• How can organizations put systematic and appropriate programs in place to address gaps in workforce development?
• Which skills can be built in a self-guided way, and which need support?
• How can experiential learning be structured so as to enhance adaptability?
• What is the concrete nature of adaptability skills? How widespread are they and how can they be measured?

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² The following lists are the rapporteurs’ summary of the main points made by individual speakers during the general discussion. Given the unstructured nature of the discussion, it was not possible to clearly identify every speaker or attribute every comment or idea. The statements have not been endorsed or verified by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

• How can the measurement of outcomes linked to adaptability be improved over time?
• How can effective measures for quantifying adaptability be developed?
• How can measurement systems for adaptability be made more affordable and accessible to more organizations?
• What roles should local leaders, such as mayors and community college administrators, play in local and regional workforce development? For example, how can they help draw local employers into more active involvement in workforce preparation?
• How does adaptability differ from and relate to resilience? For example, when is the persistence of adaptations desirable?
• What are the best ways to identify and share best practices?
• Which adaptability skills are best developed in K–12 education and which in higher education or later?
• How can adaptability best be taught in the K–12 environment?
• Has anyone studied the effect of gender on adaptability? Can adaptability programs be used as a way to retain women engineers?

DISCUSSION

In closing this session, the presenters addressed a question posed by the moderator about what they saw as the most important steps to advance training and organizational change. (Additional steps, suggested by the workshop moderators and attendees, are presented in chapter 8.)

Johnson said that education and industry need to be more in sync. Are two-year and four-year institutions preparing students with the kinds of skills that companies need in the workforce? Industry needs to provide information and feedback to institutions of higher education to improve this alignment, he said.

Consdorf emphasized the broader culture. “Do we ever talk about why, or vision, or culture, in the school system?” An emphasis on the bigger picture might make it easier to explain to displaced workers why their jobs are gone and not coming back and why they need to be adaptable to respond to such changes. He also asked whether researchers could find any correlation between professions or degrees and levels of adaptability, because that information might help foster adaptability.

Partridge cited the value of internships. Most businesses do not do internships for high school students, and if they do they tend to use the internship more as a recruiting tool. Internships and job shadowing on the scale that is done in Germany, for example, are “unheard of here.” For most college graduates, their first job after college is now probably their first job ever. In addition, two thirds of today’s college students will work in jobs that do not yet exist, he pointed out. “How is higher education or K–12 education going to prepare students for jobs when we don’t know what they are?”

Melton mentioned that companies have made changes to increase the speed, quantity, and variety of innovations they incorporate, but innovation and adaptability require systems-level thinking. “We have 31 institutions [in KEEN] that have bought in wholesale to this mission. That leaves about 390 that are working it out their own way.”

Sims made the point that adaptability and innovation must be approached at multiple levels, and added that people have to be inspired and organizations need to not stifle that enthusiasm. “Societally, we need to give people the space to be creative and to change.”

The panelists addressed the question about how to motivate people and institutions to take needed steps. Johnson said that the driver for his employee-owned company’s program was to benefit the workers. “[W]e make decisions based on long-term investments, and it all starts with our people.” Upfront costs were not so important given the expected value to the company. “Of course, we’re in business to make money, don’t get me wrong,” he said, but the culture of the company enabled it to take a chance that the program would pay off.

Consdorf agreed that costs were associated with the program at the community college, though they were soft costs rather than the costs of providing hardware. “[Two of] our people were teaching, and for a year half their day on Tuesdays and Thursdays was dedicated to teaching those kids, not working on our machines.” But the expense was essential, since “the future is dependent on it.”

Partridge noted that discussions of costs need to be handled carefully, because US companies can be scared off by large projected costs. “The way it’s presented sometimes can make it harder to get people to come along with you.” He also pointed to a problem with the valuation of companies, because workforce talent is not valued on the bottom line of a company’s books. Even if a company has the top people in the world, that talent will not necessarily be quantifiable in accounting terms.

The German program could not be moved wholesale to the United States, he acknowledged, and is changing as pressure builds to send more students to university instead of along the vocational track as workforce demands change. But apprenticeships cannot be seen as the lesser choice in the United States, he continued, because parents will not want to choose an option for their child that is perceived as less beneficial. For that reason, the United States should do a better job with the “stackability” of degrees and certificates, he said, so that students can continue their education. That is the case in Germany, where someone who goes down a vocational route can later change to a university route. In Germany “there [is] no wrong door,” he said.

In the United States, Partridge said, marketing a two-year degree as “the other college degree” is a mistake. “Parents aren’t stupid. They’re going to say, ‘That’s not a college degree.’” Two-year degrees need to be able to lead to a bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree.

Melton reported that, rather than work with individual institutions, the Kern Family Foundation decided to work with a network. The result has been an interdependency “that comes from relationships [and] regular meetings, [which] led to an acceleration in sharing of the work.”