Looking for additional training

Throughout my career, I’ve made it a point to take training classes every year for my personal betterment, and I urge others to do the same. Be it training through work or other avenues, it is time well spent. Training comes in a lot of different forms, and it’s important to use any and all training opportunities that may help further your career. My experiences with training have been many and varied.

Training offered at work can last from 4 to 8 hours to a week. The company may also provide online training about subjects such as ethics, contracts and import/export requirements. Each session typically consumes an hour or so.

More exotic training occurs when companies implement programs designed to change the company culture, such as lean initiatives. Kaizen event training associated with lean lasts several days, while training for rapid improvement events, which are used to quickly change processes, takes less than a day. An RIE may involve changing the location and size of a work area or adding/modifying existing equipment. The RIE itself will take less than a week.

I also enjoy attending seminars or workshops held by machinery dealers and toolmakers at their facilities. Granted, these events are often promotional, but I still get something out of them.

The local technical college is another avenue for off-site training. Typically, their workshops last from a few hours to a full day, with some involving multiple sessions held a week or two apart.

For example, last year, my local technical college offered American Production and Inventory Control Society workshops on operations management, fundamentals, resource master planning and professional certification. At less than $200 for half-day sessions and $300 for full-day sessions, these workshops were relatively inexpensive.

A couple of years ago, I took a one-day workshop at the college on total productive maintenance, which turned out to be about overall equipment effectiveness. I came back to work the next day all fired up and started to put some of the new-found education to use, and vowed to take additional courses as they came up.

Training doesn’t always work out, however. For instance, last year the tech college offered 10 additional process improvement workshops that covered topics such as lean facility design, risk assessment using failure modes and effects analysis, and lean problem solving. Unfortunately, as the time approached for the first class, the college canceled the course due to lack of interest and rescheduled it for May of this year. The college typically allots for 24 people, but only three had registered. A few weeks later, my next scheduled workshop was also canceled due to lack of interest. After being moved to February this year, it was canceled again. All of the subsequent classes wound up being canceled as well. I was truly disappointed. The college is trying to provide these workshops online, but I prefer to interact in a true workshop environment with live people sharing what they know.

The school tried to make amends by offering to have an instructor come out for half a day and evaluate our company’s processes, but we declined since our managers are already knowledgeable about lean manufacturing—I was just trying to get a different perspective on our processes through the courses.

I’m not sure why the school had such a hard time filling the seats, although it might have had something to do with our especially harsh winter weather. Whatever the cause, the lack of interest was a disservice to the technical college. These schools are doing their best to serve our industry, and they deserve our support. CTE