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We have two sample CD-ROM's of movies, one for Macintosh (plays movies best), and one for Windows (plays movies only okay but good enough -- same movies, but it's a Windows world.) The Windows CD-ROM runs just like a Web page. It is, in fact, a web page; someday it will run on corporate intranets, someday even on the Web itself. Not now. For now, such a thing runs on a CD-ROM or local hard drive. We'd love to bring this to your office and demo it for you.
Here's some quick information we gathered about OJT, structured vs. haphazard, and what we would do about it:
A Quick Look at On the Job Training:
Most firms engage in ad hoc, indigenous on the job training. It is effective, but it could be a lot more effective.
A study by Professors Clair Brown and Michael Reich at UC Berkeley, "Developing Skills and Pay through Career Ladders: Lessons from Japanese and US Companies", found:
a. The US system is characterized by unstructured OJT (with some sporadic formal training;) a key feature distinguishing Japan from the US is not the amount of training, but the highly structured and organized character of the OJT system in Japan.
b. US firms could improve the efficiency of their training by providing structured OJT to incumbent workers. Structured OJT is training to impart specific skills, received by an employee on site in a specified manner using a designated trainer and materials and with a plan for certification.
c. Making firm-based training more effective would generate increased productivity.
d. OJT constitutes the most important means by which workers learn the skills needed for their jobs, and OJT appears to be the most cost-effective form of skill development. Recent hires spend eight to twelve times as many hours in OJT as they do in formal training.
e. Unstructured OJT costs twice as much as structured OJT when indirect costs are included (supervisor's time and reduced output or quality.)
(Brown and Reich's work is available on the Web at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~iir/ncw/wpapers/career_ladders/page2.html)
"On the Job Training: A Case Study" by Scribner and Sachs at CUNY looks at the process of stockroom training in an electronics plant (their study is available on the Web at http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/literacy/on-the-job-training.txt.) The study found:
a. The company recognizes that new hires need training.
b. The bulk of the training is done by recent trainees. There are no special training materials. Work during training is organized strikingly differently from experienced work. The trainer's talk is sprinkled with interjections of "Right?" and "OK?", an indication that trainers are not using the classic teacher model of testing trainees by asking questions and evaluating the answers.
c. Management had assumptions of what training should look like, assumptions that were not written down. (Supervisors cited two weeks as the training period, but one manager stated that it may take up to two years.)
d. Trainees are not explicitly prepared for problem-solving.
Scribner and Sachs hypothesize that training could be more effective, and it should provide some training for problem solving.
Summary: The ad hoc, indigenous on the job training most firms engage in is effective, but the same time and effort would be a lot more effective if the informal, unstructured, haphazard OJT were turned into structured OJT.
One more note from the literature: "In an individualist culture where effective performance often equates to performance without assistance, and individuals are monitoring themselves, and not others, asking for help is difficult."
from "The Influence of National & Organizational Culture on Human Performance", Cmdr Ashleigh Merritt, NASA/UT, in The CRM Advocate, Issue 93.1, October, 1993, Published Quarterly for the Professional Air Crew Trainer
What we propose:
We provide a simple instrumentality -- esthetically compelling digitized videos, exhibited in a well-honed interface -- for the firm's trainers to impart specific skills to their trainees:
Watch me; watch the digitized video a number of times; try it for yourself; watch the digitized video some more; try it some more; get an evaluation from me.
Implicit in this process is the structure: There are designated materials (the digitized videos); there are specific skills; there is a designated trainer; there is a mechanism for certification (the computer can keep track.) Result -- structured OJT.
About problem solving: The digitized video for a specific skill always depicts an experienced worker. Every experienced worker is a problem solver, looking around for both potential malfunctions and potential improvements. The trainee picks up on this attitude. (Additionally, there are digitized videos of problem situations, and we show the experienced worker in the first steps of solving the problem.)
FrogOJT Systems for Structured OJT.