Foundations of Training 1 - First Post

Welcome new readers!

I started this blog last month, and see no reason not to piggyback my Learning Blog assignments onto it. Since this is a blog about my returning to serious study of classical singing in my mid-fifties, it is a blog about learning. I probably won't make my class blog assignments about singing, so if my regular readers who are interested in my singing posts want to skip the Learning Blog posts, they can feel free.



I found the handout from Tuesday's class very evocative of my past work situation in that it referred to the Scientific Management concept of Frederick Taylor, stating that "his goal was to reduce the skill needs of workers to as close to zero as possible", and then went on to analyze the sequelae of Taylor's work. First Frank and Lillian Gilbreths built on it with their time and motion studies which identified and eliminated "elements (usually human tendencies) that blocked the process" and then their successors continued the process of turning workers into a part of the machines they were using.

In the twenty-first century, much of what has happened with technological advances is that tasks that used to involve interpersonal interactions such as conversation, or written notes, now can be done via spreadsheets and databases that collect metrics, but don't necessarily tell a manager anything about the thought processes of their staff, or how their staff are learning.

When I started working at my last position in the mid-90s I was supposed to be running an indexing department. For people who don't know, indexing is similar to library cataloging and much of it is about reading comprehension and use of language. When I started there we wrote on paper printouts (data was eventually entered via keystrokes by data entry clerks) which probably wasn't the most efficient way of doing things, but seeing handwritten notes from staff (I could always tell who had done what because I recognized their handwriting) helped me, when I reviewed their work, to understand how each person was processing information. The data entry clerks did not need to have indexing ability, but they needed to have a familiarity with certain coded fields and with how we used capitalization, acronyms, and punctuation, and they had to pass a proofreading test.

At a certain point in 2006 or thereabouts, there was a shift, and work was sent to the Phillippines for scanning, after which computer programming would "clean things up". So instead of teaching data entry clerks about our house style, I was now thinking up programming strings that would prevent or fix error patterns. So my job was no longer primarily about language but more about programming.

Indexers still worked their craft, of course, and probably worked more quickly without the intermediate step of using paper, but it was now much harder for me to identify whose work was whose in certain situations and staff were less likely to leave notes about how they had done their research, so it was harder for me to understand the thought processes they were having that led to making certain mistakes.

And the primary focus became on collecting metrics (a harkback to Taylor) on how fast each person was working rather than on who had really learned the nuances of indexing.

Question: What are your thoughts on how technology affects on the job training. What do you see as the pros and cons?