Five Tips on Hands-on Training
July 18, 2022
You are ready to expand! You had your new team member shadow the current operator responsible for the manufacturing process for a whole week. After that, you transferred the process to the new team member. Soon, to your dismay, you find out the process yield takes a nosedive. Did the training happen? Yes. Was the process the same? Obviously not. What has changed? Nobody knows.
Don’t put your team in this stressful situation.
The human aspect of process development often gets overlooked, especially early on, when a significant part of the work is manual. Despite our best efforts to simplify and standardize, details get lost when one team member trains another to perform the same task. Sometimes the trainer is blissfully unaware of their own “secret sauce” that enables them to perform the process better than others.
In the never-ending effort to improve, it is important to approach your training system thoughtfully and plan ahead. Doing so will not only ensure that the right information and hands-on skills were learned by the trainee quickly and accurately, it will also set your team up to keep raising the bar to keep improving their work going forward.
Best practices in training:
Build a training matrix. List the processes, people who need to be trained, and their current and desired competency levels.
For each process, have only one “process expert” perform the training to all trainees. Avoid playing a game of telephone. The process expert has ownership of this process and is responsible for keeping training material up to date.
Involve those knowledgeable on the process and agree on the “one best way” to perform the process. Capture process details through:
Fixtures
Work area layout
Visual guides and templates
Mistake-proofing
Written procedures
Job Instruction Breakdown Sheets (for trainer to use during training)
Use TWI Job Instruction to prepare and deliver the training.
Establish objective criteria to be met before a trainee can “graduate” and perform the process independently.
As always, treat problems as opportunities to learn and improve. Think of training as a litmus test for how well you’ve set up your process. A robust process is one that is safe, intuitive, and consistently results in high quality output regardless of who performs it.