Skills Training

Many occupations can easily be broken down into various skills that grow a a worker gains knowledge and experience. By harnessing this natural development and formalizing the skill paths, we can capture expertise that used to be lost when seasoned veteran employees retired, leaving the next group to learn it on their own all over again.

Additionally, a formally laid out skills path allows your employees to know exactly what skills they need to master before advancing to the next level. It allows them to plan out a career, rather than just work a job.

Finally, a formally designed skills path gives you, the manager a concrete measurable set of criteria you can use to evaluate your employees. Standardization of training requirements eliminates a lot of the frustration of skills based training because every evaluation is carried out against the same standards. The playing field is level.

Capturing Tribal Knowledge

Every company has one; the guy who knows how to make the machinery sing. When he's on the job, things just go smoothly. Years of experience have taught him hundreds of little tricks to maintain output.

Then he retires, and all of those tricks disappear forever.

Our approach is to identify those guys and learn from them all of those little tricks of the trade. A lot of times we hear people say that their work process "is more art than science." That is rarely true in today's machine world. What they really mean is that the little things they've learned have come to them almost unconsciously, so it's very dificult to put into words. There's a gap between what they know, and how they know it, and that gap must be bridges in order for them to teach it.

We bridge that gap. Leveraging over 40 years of combined experience in running some of the most finicky processes out there, we know how hard it can be to articulate how we know what we know. Fortunately, we can also leverage nearly as many hours training others, and the combination of the two uniquely qualifies Innovative Training Solutions to bridge the knowledge gaps in your production processes, capture the Tribal Knowledge, and formalize it in a skills based program.

Standards Based Training

One of the hardest things to accomplish in On the Job Training is to maintain uniform standards while evaluating performance. Innovative Training Solutions has solved this perennial problem by developing a training method that is fully standards reliant. Before an employee ever begins to train on a task, he or she is given all the desired outcomes of the training so he knows exactly what performance tasks he must master.

Thosew training objectives are linked to every exam questions, every performance test, and every evaluated exercise so the employee always knows what she is expected to do, and has a very clear idea after an evaluation of how she needs to improve.

The final piece of the puzzle is the evaluator. It's only natural to select your most knowledgeable employees as evaluators. The problem is that excellence in performance doesn't automatically mean excellence in evaluation skills. That's why we offer training for evaluators, to teach them not only how to administer a practical examination, but what to look for, and how to impartially judge performance based on predesigned criteria.