Learning a process is an ongoing process

Cover for basement window looking up to the driveway.

How do you train your employees? It is a simple question, but when you think about it, how easy is it to answer?

Large companies have orientations and videos to get the ball rolling, but smaller shops like ours have to dive head-first in the shallow end and get our hands dirty.

Good training comes at a cost. You don’t normally train your experienced employees unless you purchase new equipment or new software. The vendor usually sends someone to your facility, and you dedicate as many people as possible or needed for training while still keeping the ball rolling on the production floor.

You have a limited amount of time to soak up all that knowledge, and the next questions have to be handled from a telephone or remotely connected computers. (The older generation didn’t have this luxury!) All the questions you have won’t be thought of until the comfort zone instructor has left the building. I’m sure you’ve experienced this before.

What happens when you have a machine that has been around for a while and you have a new employee who needs to learn how to use it? You should have a few people who know how and can take the time to teach the new worker. The experienced employees have to use their time to educate, and if you are lucky, they can do their jobs while class is in session.

There’s also the situation in which you have a machine that no current employee knows how to use. This is very rare, and I highly recommend not allowing it to happen. It sounds dumb, but this can happen pretty quickly in a small shop with few employees.We have a Tauring CNC angle roller that sat in our warehouse for several years, because the employees who were trained to use it were no longer with us. We basically had to force ourselves to relearn it, so we hired a guy to fly out from California to teach us.

This time we had a few guys with notepads in hand giving him their full attention, myself included. We’ve since made up lost production time with successful jobs on the machine, but like all training, it came at a price.

Our laser has been around for eight years, and our current laser operator, Jason Barnes, has been excelling at using it for a few years now. I was his trainer, and I vividly remember telling him that I couldn’t teach him some things until the teaching occasion came along. I didn’t have a schedule or timeline on how I was teaching him, because I also had my own job to do. We basically worked together, and I taught him as we went.

I remember when he asked how I learned how to run the laser. I told him that I had a week with an instructor at our shop. The look on his face was priceless! He said, “You learned how to run the laser in a week?” I told him no. I had a week to learn as much as I could from the instructor. It takes a long time to learn the peculiarities of a laser, and I will never stop learning them. Everything you learn on a day-to-day basis needs to be put in your library of shop knowledge.

When the laser is down and our team of guys can’t fix it, we call in a service tech. Jason uses this time as on-site training by picking the tech’s brain as much as he can in the short time he is there. Training can be in disguise. You need to always be on the lookout for it.

Half-inch curved laser cut parts ready to be drilled and counter bored.

Over the past few years, I’ve trained a couple of interns, my nephew Anthony Moleta, and a couple other people on how to use Autodesk® Inventor®. I’ve learned several lessons, but I still can’t say that I have a training program. I also can’t say that I want one. Some methods work and others don’t. YouTube is a big help, but not all videos are preaching what I need to be teaching to get the job done our way. Sending employees off to training is costly, and small job shops may not have the time or money to invest.

In our shop, everyone has their role, and it is often done while wearing several hats. We are our own substitutes for jobs that often rely on one person. Who can teach you what you need to know? When you are busy every day, you don’t have time to constantly train the next guy. Learning as you go is a team effort, and we aren’t shy to ask for help or another opinion in our shop.

We’ve come to the realization that we need to be our own experts. You can’t sit around and wait on the next guy to solve problems. This is done as a whole in our shop. Learning is continuous, but we don’t sit down regularly and say we are “training.”

How does your shop go about training?

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