#workplace training

[cowboy-corpse]

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

[wowwforever]

i had to do a workplace education thing on how to communicate when i was hired and this image has never stopped haunting me for 2 years

[luckyrabbit1927]

In the middle of customer service training and

Is that

Is that a fucking doorstop--

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"...while most of the old-time craftsmen of nineteenth-century ironmaking - the puddlers and the blacksmiths - were gone, all skill did not disappear within the "gigantic automatons," and managers recognized their reliance on such men. Stelco's open-hearth superintendent told a parliamentary committee in 1910:

You cannot go and round up the skilled men and pick them up on the street corner. Take our melters, rollers and first helpers, they are skilled men and the next man to one of these cannot take his place . . . the same with the men at the ladles. . . .

He might also have noted the considerable numbers of machinists, moulders, blacksmiths, stationary engineers, electricians, and other craftsmen who were now needed in much greater numbers to maintain the complex new machinery. Disco had 400 of them by 1910 (in a work force of some 4,000), and by 1923 its "Mechanical Department" that grouped these workers had 891 men (out of a total of 3,862). The firm continued to maintain a small apprenticeship system for training some of these valuable workers. Not surprisingly, many of these skilled men in Canada's steel mills took the same pride in their role as producers that the old-time craftsmen expressed. A retired open-hearth worker insisted:

When I worked there, men were proud to work there, and they took pride in their work, I'll tell you that. . . . It's the men on the furnace - that's who makes the steel.

Without a complete payroll list for any of the plants, it is difficult to determine the precise proportion of the new steelmaking work force that might be considered skilled, but there was undoubtedly a considerable number of steelworkers whose knowledge and judgment were crucial to the production process, especially in the open-hearth and rolling-mill departments. At the same time, however, it is clear that, relative to the volume of output, far fewer of them were needed than in the nineteenth-century mills. Nine puddlers at Londonderry could produce only twenty-five tons a day, whereas by the 1920s the three-man crew on each open-hearth furnace could produce up to four times that amount in one eight-hour heat. They were consequently less expensive for the steel companies, since the cost of their labour added less value to each ton produced.

The new mechanized processes in Canada's steel plants were thus reducing the demand for labour at both ends of the occupational hierarchy. But they were also opening up a much larger category of new jobs in between - the so-called "semi-skilled" jobs of operating the new machines. This major new occupational group within the twentieth-century working class has perplexed social analysts for some time. The optimists who celebrated the successes of capitalist industrialization have characterized the appearance of these workers in industry as a process of upgrading the less skilled into better jobs. Hard-nosed critics of these developments, however, have pointed to the extremely low training requirements for such jobs and stressed the mindless repetition and grinding degradation of the work. Neither is an adequate perspective on what happened in the steel industry (and probably in several other mass-production industries as well), since both miss crucial dimensions of semi-skilled work. We need to look more carefully at the jobs of these machine-operators.

...

Many other jobs around a steel mill demanded this kind of familiarity with the machinery and the properties of the metal being handled. A reporter visiting the Algoma rail mill in 1902 learned that the man who chopped up the steel blooms with giant shears had to judge the quality of steel bars approaching him from the rolls and to reject any unfit to be sent on to the rail mill. Four years later a technical article on Disco's rail mill noted the similar care needed in shearing off the ends of the rails to take account of shrinkage when hot:

A skilled man handling the stops can, from experience, judge the precise temperature of the rail bar when cutting and hence places the rail stops so accurately that all the rails are found to be the required length when cool.

A little further along, the writer observed, the rails passed through a "cambering machine," which a skilled operator could adjust "so as to get an almost straight rail when cooled off on the hot bed."

Regular and efficient production in Canada's steel plants depended on the judgement of many semi-skilled machine-operators like these, which was based on their accumulated experience on the job. In the late nineteenth century, there was a category of workers in many industries, including iron work, known as "helpers," who were expected to have a similar level of competence as the new groups of semi-skilled; but, as their title suggests, they were primarily the craftsmen's assistants, whereas the semi-skilled were directly responsible for output at the centre of production. The dividing line between skilled and semi-skilled could also be much less distinct in mass-production jobs than the old distinction between craftsmen and helpers or labourers. The question might follow: at what point could "experience" be converted into the technical competence we call "skill"? This was hotly contested terrain in the early twentieth-century steel mill, between the owners who would never countenance the transformation of these occupations into anything like crafts or trades and the workers who wanted their indispensability recognized. In 1915 a board of inquiry into industrial unrest among the New Glasgow-Trenton steelworkers heard this confrontation in the testimony presented by Scotia's workers and managers. Several workmen voiced their bitterness at the low pay they received for applying what they called their "skill." One rolling-mill hand insisted that "skill and experience are necessary for rolls. It is a very important job . . . . All the work around the mill is skilled labor"; yet, he claimed, the average daily wage was a paltry $1.54. Repeatedly, the worker witnesses insisted that their jobs could not be done without some training. One asserted that "practically any branch of the work can't be done until you get into the way of doing it." Another related a story of a "green hand" working with him who lacerated himself on a hook after only half-an-hour's work. An axle-cutter thought an untrained worker trying to do his job would be "liable to do some damage," while a disc heater was certain an inexperienced worker "would not get production."

In summing up the men's case, their spokesman, Clifford Dane, insisted that "the men on the mills are a class of expert and highly skilled mechanics." To hammer home his argument, Dane reported that the No. 1 mill could not work earlier in the week because three key rollers were absent: "With 2,300 men on the steel company's plant, these three men were so necessary that the mill would have to close down unless they went to work." Comparing their meagre wages with those of machinists and bricklayers, he declared: "These wages are not fair, are not just and moreover do not compare favorably with the wages of skilled mechanics whether in Nova Scotia or elsewhere in Canada." In their own estimation, then, these steelworkers were skilled men. The corporation's efforts to deflate these claims in the same hearings are revealing. Scotia's general manager intervened frequently to ask about how much explicit training these men got for their jobs. Most admitted that they had picked up their expertise informally by watching and learning from older workers. One explained: "I was often around there and saw how it was done. I was not like a man coming out of the woods and starting to work." The general manager hammered away at the lack of a formal apprenticeship: "you cannot compare a mill man with a machinist one has served an apprenticeship, the other has not. You cannot put their earnings on the same basis for that reason."

In fact, most machine-operators in steel plants worked their way up job ladders into their more skilled positions. "The laborers are put into better positions as they are needed and as they show aptitude for the work," Scotia's president explained, and the personal histories of the men who testified before the board of inquiry, as well as of those interviewed years later in all the steelmaking centres, indicate that kind of progression through the ranks. Steel companies could therefore claim, with some justification, that the self-styled "skilled" men in their plants owed their competence to their employer - after all, hadn't they taken farm boys and turned them into productive factory hands? Their special competence, moreover, generally had no value outside the steel industry. Perhaps most important, they were vulnerable to replacement by ambitious men in the plant who had picked up the basics on the job through "being around there and seeing how it was done." Yet at the same time, the corporations knew what they would not admit to a public board of inquiry - that the knowledge of production still lay out in the plant, not in the front office. They had not been able to follow the dictum of F.W. Taylor, the prophet of "scientific" management, to gather up all that knowledge in management's hands and parcel it out to the workers. Scotia's president sent his son to McGill University for professional training, but put him on the end of a shovel in the firm's open-hearth department and sent him off to broaden his experience in other plants in the United States before fitting him into a managerial position at Trenton. When a young man began work as the Algoma president's secretary in 1920, he found the corporation relying on a widely used metallurgical manual put out by us Steel, but he also found himself promptly sent out to spend a summer working amidst the smoke and dirt to find out how steel was made. A few years later another man arrived at Disco with a degree in metallurgical engineering from McGill University, but was immediately put to work as a labourer in the blast-furnace department, where he remained for more than a year before assuming the position of superintendent. These shop-floor "apprenticeships" were normal in the steel plants. In fact, many department superintendents, and some plant managers, had worked their way up without any technical training in a university."

- Craig Heron, Working in Steel: The Early Years in Canada, 1883-1935 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 63-64, 66-70

[drag-tween]

The Problem With ‘In Demand’ Jobs

Federal workforce-training programs prepare people for dead-end jobs that no one wants

[infographicjournal]

Microlearning is the Future of Workplace Training

Having trouble reading infographic here?

Check out the full size infographic at - https://infographicjournal.com/microlearning-is-the-future-of-workplace-training/

[wannabe-british-fangirl]

Just came across the most bizarre illustration in this workplace training course about safely lifting things:

Um.

Sir?

I notice your very spiffy shoes and professional khakis. Very nice.

But. Um.

Sir?

Where is your shirt?

Sir?

Sir.

SIR, PLEASE, THIS IS A PLACE OF BUSINESS. EMPLOYEES CANNOT BE PERFORMING MANUAL LABOR WHILE HALF NUDE.