CS 6 – Turn-around Strategy
The Scenario: Thousands of technical employees are facing significant job displacement.
Organizational Profile: Hundreds of employers and the membership organization to which the workers belong.
Outcomes: Increased flexibility for workers and employers, and improved information about skill development.
The Industry in Crisis
The communications industry has experienced deregulation and significant displacement over the past several years. This has resulted in numbers of technical workers facing downsizing and economic hardship.
Most technical workers are too narrowly trained for their skills to be easily transferred to new positions in other companies, emerging technologies, or to other parts of the country. The same job title in two parts of the country might easily contain significantly different skills. There is little consistancy in how terms are defined and used.
The workers’ organization had begun the development of a training program to assist these workers to make the necessary transitions. However, the lack of consistancy in how job titles were used and the narrow training usually provided technicians created a problem in effectively delivering the training.
a. Workers were hired for positions based upon job titles, but their skills did not fit the employers’ actual needs.
b. Workers needed more individualized training, but there was no accepted assessment to determine skill gaps.
c. Some workers possessed skills for which there was no assessment throuoght which they could be certified.
Employers were interviewed to determine their current and projecgted skill needs. From those open interviews, employer surveys were conducted to quantify the specific skills sought. This data was analyzed using employer and technican interviews to define skills in very specific terms.
A two part assessment was developed from this data. The first part was a paper and pencil test measuring specific skill performance for three levels of technical ability and four specific industry subsections. The second part provided technicans a format for describing the skills actually used on-the-job with confirming feedback relative to both the content and the competency of the skills performed.
A nationwide pilot was run using the assessments used. Validity and reliability were determined using standard statistical tools. A national committee of employers and experts evaluated the pilot and statistical data.
The employer committee determined that the assessment provided useful and consistant information for employers in their hiring decisions. The experts on the committee agreed that the data analysis was conducted in a manner that correctly measured the skills and competencies of the technicians.
Using the data from this study, the membership organization developed and submitted for approval the first competency based apprenticeship program. The program, including the demonstration of competency from the assessment, was later approved by the American Council on Education. The validity and reliability study has been published by a major publisher.
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