Training a SkillsFuture generation: Are workers workplace-ready?

Training is an inherently expensive endeavour, and current efforts to train workers to meet the demands of employers are no exception. Thankfully, the SkillsFuture Credit, Earn and Learn, and Mid-Career Enhanced Subsidy schemes introduced by the Singapore government have taken the bite out of training fees for the individual.

But what about businesses? As it stands, there are no measures aimed at helping businesses provide timely and relevant on-the-job training, both of which are important in allowing an individual to successfully apply their skills to real-life situations. This may lead to a training as opposed to a skills gap, as employers are under-incentivised to invest in highly mobile resources such as labour.

Despite this, there are a few means by which the cost of training can be reduced, while increasing learners' preparedness for real-world tasks. These involve thinking about the primary role job opportunities play in developing the professional learner, and the requirements involved in designing appropriate and job-specific training tasks.

Representative tasks – a key step to better performance
According to Ward, Williams, and Hancock in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, representative tasks were very effective at improving performance on a real-life task later. This was provided that the representative tasks captured the relevant or essential characteristics of a task – a point we will return to below.

Having established the above, we can contrast the above behaviour – using representative tasks in place of real-world tasks, where the cost of mistakes is much higher – with the behaviour of local firms. While some firms have developed training programmes, the majority of local firms have a "hit the ground running" mentality, on the assumption that employees should have the motivation or drive to learn the essential parts of a job.

Low cost? Definitely, provided that employee retention and productivity issues do not cause the bottom line to take a hit. Effective? Not so much. This is where the importance of instructional design – as opposed to letting employees flounder until they learn – comes in.

Instructional design – putting representative tasks to work
As stated above, representative tasks – those which seek to mimic and emulate the key characteristics of a given task – can be a means of transferring expertise from more to less experienced employees, while reducing the fixed costs of training.

This is because a set of instructional scenarios can be maintained and reviewed over time, whereas the informal transfer of expertise between employees requires existing employees to explain themselves to new employees again and again. Such activities may not only distract existing employees from their work, but may also be viewed as a hindrance to their own advancement, since existing employees’ KPIs may not be directly linked to training results in the new employees below them.

One alternative, then, would be to link supervisors' work directly with the training of their new employees, in a manner similar to the "Training Within Industry" method used by Toyota and other proponents of lean production.

This often has the effect of changing a supervisor's role from "supervisor" to "instructor", and may not be acceptable for employers inured to previous processes, in which supervisors are there purely to hold people to standards, and not assist them in reaching to the top. In such cases, supervisors only transfer skills intermittently or sometimes grudgingly, which can often lead to a dearth of skills at the bottom and micro-management from the top.

For these companies, external help is necessary – most often through external trainers and training institutes – but the question remains: have they remade their processes, and captured the productivity and efficiency gains to be made from training their people? Such a question will determine if a company will be able to make full use of investments in productivity and automation technologies, and whether it will stay competitive in the years ahead.