Closing the skills gap: for small and midsize companies, the challenge is to customize solutions to a broad problem - includes a related article on the best way to train employees

Nation's Business, March, 1996 by Michael Barrier

For small and midsize companies, the challenge is to customize solutions to a broad problem.

If, as the saying goes, all politics is local, the same often could be said of efforts to close the skills gap that companies are finding throughout the American work force. Sometimes, though, local and national solutions to the skills shortage intersect at a business, in a way that shows how they can reinforce each other.

NortonManufacturing Co., in Fostoria, Ohio, south of Toledo, has pursued intensely local solutions to the need for skills training--but it is also taking part in a national program that promises to yield results that are highly adaptable to an individual company's needs.

Norton began in 1950 as a two-man tool-and-die shop, started by the grandfather of Rick Norton, the current owner. As the company expanded, says Randolph Toscano Jr., who was Norton's human-resources manager during the recent period of the company's most rapid growth, "we found that making crankshafts was going to be our niche."

So successfully has Norton occupied that niche that over the past five years it has increased its work force tenfold, to some 400 workers. The number of employees doubled in 1995 alone.

With that expansion came an urgent need for employee training and testing. "We're trying like beck to train our own people," says Aurice J. Hoover, Norton's vice president of operations, "because the schools are not getting it done for us."

In 1994, for example, Norton assessed the skills of its machine operators. One assessment covered math, and Norton found that some of its operators had mastered the subject only to a seventh-grade level, Hoover says. "That scared the heck out of us because [math is] what this is all about."

Norton responded to the results by giving the low scorers 20 hours of classroom training, and then it tested them again. "They aced out," Hoover says, by testing at a college-freshman level.

More recently, Norton contracted with Vanguard-Sentinel Vocational School to have an instructor based at the plant, offering perhaps two hours of instruction every week to each of the three shifts.

The class work will range from what Toscano calls "machine-shop math" to basic blueprint reading to statistical process control and other Total Quality Management concepts. "The hands-on training, we can pretty well do that on the shop floor," Hoover says. "But we need somebody who can come in and do that classroom work for us."

Workers benefit immediately from such training because "they can apply it to the job," Toscano adds. "It's not theory-based education, it's application-based education."

Norton is using the school and other institutions as "resource centers" to help manage the rapid growth that the revival of the U.S. auto industry has fueled, he says. "They've helped us find grant money for training and tapped us into finding skilled workers."

Now, Norton has "a humongous network," says Toscano. "It's a unique partnership to have a business, a community college, a vocational school, and two or three government agencies sitting in a room together, discussing how we're going to make a company grow, how we're going to train workers. That's exactly what happened, and that continues to happen every month."

On a national level, Norton has played a role in developing standards for some of the skills required in metalworking. Congress created the national skills-standards program in 1994, under the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, with the aim of encouraging voluntary standards applicable nationwide in a variety of industries.

Metalworking was one of the 22 projects funded at the federal level; standards are being developed by private organizations in all 22 areas. The National Tooling and Machining Association, based in Fort Washington, Md., has been developing tests of 19 kinds of skills, including three tests that will be used to measure the machining skills of metalworkers at as many levels.

About 15 of Norton's employees--a cross section--"piloted" the first such test, Toscano says. "We selected a few of our employees to take the test to validate it"--subjecting it, in effect, to questions like these: Have cultural and race biases been removed from it? Is it too difficult?

The idea is that, ultimately, as national skills standards come into wide use, metalworkers who have passed such a test will be certified as having mastered machining skills at a certain level.

At Norton now, only 5 percent to 10 percent of the workers go through formal, state-regulated apprenticeship programs that result in such certification. Otherwise, when someone says, for instance, "I'm a machine operator," the only way to test that assertion is by putting the employee in front of a machine. Much the same is true, of course, of other metalworking skills and skills in other industries.

Certification at a certain level won't mean that a machine operator or someone certified in another kind of work is necessarily just right for a job--but it should give an employer an accurate picture of that person's skills.