Welcome to the Premiere Fluid Power Training & Engineering Services Organization


THOUGHTS FROM THE PRESIDENT

Are you spending training dollars or are you investing in your maintenance employees’ learning needs? There’s a big difference. It is plant management that determines the value of training expenditures not the training provider because it is plant management that chooses the people that provide the training. The success of the planned training is in their hands.

The term investing implies that there will be a measurable return over time. Good maintenance training should, over time, increase plant production machinery efficiency by reducing down time. Improvements in efficiency and productivity and reductions in equipment down time should contribute more to the bottom line than the cost of the training with continuing returns as time passes. Or, as we often say, maintenance training pays it doesn’t cost. Unfortunately, maintenance employee training often ends up being an expense with no reasonable and measurable return.


The most important (first) step for initiating employee training is to find out the qualifications of the training provider, the instructor. Is he or she qualified by their professional training and their work experience to be the instructor? Instructor qualifications are paramount. Just because the trade school, junior college or community college is local and in your neighborhood, is willing to provide convenient scheduling and is well known does not mean they are a quality provider of reality-based training suitable for your facility’s needs.

I worked with an engine manufacturing facility that, for many years, used a local C.C. I heard many complaints regarding either the quality or the appropriateness of the maintenance employee training. Finally, I asked why they continued to use this local institution for training. Their reasons were scheduling convenience and they could get it for free. The school offered after hours training classes that didn’t interfere with the maintenance department’s manpower scheduling and the school could get grant money to essentially make the training free to the company. This is a multi-billion dollar international corporation – one of the top 50 largest manufacturers in the world!

Let’s translate this company’s HR department answer to my inquiry. It was important to them that the training was free so they did not need to justify a request for training money during the budgeting process. Their workers would attend classes after their scheduled work and in addition to their normal work shift. Therefore there was no need to coordinate classes with worker’s scheduled shifts. I wondered how much learning occurs when someone worked from 10 PM to 8 AM and then attended classes from 8 to 4 PM. Some of the workers told me they slept a lot during the daily classes and they didn’t get much out of the training. Other workers told me that the instructor the local school brought in knew nothing about the plant equipment and that he appeared to lack knowledge about the underlying technology. On another occasion at another company, maintenance workers told me about a school that used an instructor that read a textbook for 4 hours each evening class session. And, no student questions were allowed. Referring back to my original question, these are examples of spending training dollars without any practical return.

The school or private training provider the plant facility decides to use can be no better than the instructor. Ask about the qualifications of the instructor. Is he or she the right person for the job? If you are not certain that the instructor is the right person, keep looking.

Rich Yanzsa