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OH Incumbent Worker Training Voucher Grants Round 4 Announced! Applications for Submission Need to be Prepared ASAP! Stacey Lett, Senior Consultant, Proactive Technologies, Inc.
In 2012, the State of Ohio, Department of Development released the first round of the Ohio Incumbent Worker Training (IWT) Voucher Program funded by contributions from the Ohio casinos. Approximately $20 million was available for the first three rounds of grants for targeted industries, including manufacturing. The fourth round was just announced September 14th, andapplications need to be submitted by October 14th, so there is no time to waste. With over 600 employers approved each round, anyone submitting an application should plan to be near the front of the line to have serious consideration before all funds are obligated.
This is a reimbursement program. Once the employer applies and is accepted, the employer completes the approved training and submits the receipts and rosters to the OH IWT office. The employer will then be reimbursed for 50% of the cost. If the proposed training isn’t held and no cost is incurred the employer simply has nothing to submit and no further obligation. Visit the state’s IWT website here.
This is, by far, the easiest grant money to use and the paperwork, once set up, is relatively easy to complete. Proactive Technologies, Inc. has assisted client-companies to successfully apply for, manage, document and receive reimbursement for almost $2,000,000 in projects in just the last two years alone, a substantial amount of which was reimbursed to the clients by the state to lessen their initial out-of-pocket investment on a project that can lead to substantial results! For more information on how Proactive Technologies can help your organization take advantage of this great opportunity, click here.
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Can’t Find The Right Workers? Why Not Train Workers to Your Own Specification? Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
According to a recent report by Career Builder.com, more than half of the employers surveyed could not find qualified candidates: 71% – Information-Technology specialists, 70% – Engineers, 66% – Managers, 56% – Healthcare and other specialists, 52% – Financial Operations personnel. According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, nearly half of small and mid-size employers said they can find few or no “qualified applicants” for recent openings. And anecdotal evidence from manufacturing firms echoes the same challenge with specialty manufacturing jobs such as maintenance, NC machining and technical support positions. This, in large part, can be attributed to the upheaval caused by the Great Crash of 2008 and the following disruption of several million careers. Sidelined workers saw the erosion of their skill bases while waiting years for an economic recovery that, for many, has not reached them yet. However, many or most of these workers can be “reskilled” or “upskilled” for the current workforce. The solution lies not in waiting for the labor market to magically produce the needed qualified candidates, but rather in each company investing a little to build their own internal system of structured on-the job training. With such an infrastructure, any candidate with strong core skills can be trained quickly and accurately to any employer’s specifications. Furthermore, a strong training infrastructure has factored into it methods of acceptable basic core skill remediation when the benefit outweighs the cost. Read More
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Ensuring Worker Training Complies With ISO, AS, TS and Other Quality Mandates Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Each of the quality programs typically modeled by manufacturers and service organizations is rooted in the American National Standards Institute (“ANSI”) program for quality assurance and control that served us up to the 1980’s. What each of the subsequent models tries to achieve is simplicity, standardization and verifiability. Audits are used to ensure these attributes are present.
When compliance with ANSI requirements became inconsistent among manufacturers, International Standards Organization (“ISO”) rewrote the standards to make them more compliable and encouraged an international acceptance of the standards. ISO models allow the host to be certified to a part/process, or to its people performing a process or as an overall facility producing and product(s)/service(s) for export. In any model from a worker’s contribution to the product or service, the fundamental standard is whether there are clear, compliable processes in place to control and measure a repetitive, consistent level of quality. The next standard is whether the host makes a documented effort to train/retrain workers to the processes (when changes occur). The third standard is whether the host has a records system that accurately tracks each worker’s progress toward “mastery” of the processes they are responsible to perform. Read more. |
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Apprenticeships That Make Money? Not As Impossible as it Seems
Part 1 of 2: The European Difference
Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
I recently had dinner with a friend of many years, Günther Hauser, in his hometown of Neckarsulm Germany. I met Günther several years ago when Proactive Technologies, Inc. (“PTI”) was working on a project in South Carolina that required PTI staff to travel to the LÄPPLE manufacturing plant in Heilbronn, Germany where Günther was the manager of the apprenticeship program. During that dinner, our conversation naturally drifted to an area of shared interest; worker training and apprenticeships and the differences in the United States and European systems of workforce development. Read more. |
