by Desiree Schnoor

If you are a manufacturing plant manager, you have no doubt seen the effects that a lack of skilled labor is having on all aspects of your company. Terry Grayson-Caprio is familiar with them too. She has over 20 years’ experience as a managing partner and senior manager, and is skilled in external audit, accounting, and advisory services.

Terry is an expert who not only sees a consistent need for companies she serves to have skilled labor, but she quantifies the negative impacts unskilled labor has on companies, financially. Terry frequently sees higher direct and indirect costs for automotive and other industrial based companies associated with lack of skilled labor showing up in heavy turnover statistics and higher costs associated with logistics, storage, re-work, and overtime.

The hardest hit companies take, related to a lack of skilled labor is in training and travel costs, she says. When a company is going through significant training (sending employees to train or bringing in management onsite to train) it gets expensive. Many of her clients send their employees for training or re-training to an offsite location where they spend 6-8 weeks training, often overseas, incurring high training and travel costs. But that’s not all. A downstream cost is workforce downtime and slowed production, because of retrofitting employees’ skills.

So, just how much are these traditional ways of training costing employers? Terry says it’s “Not unusual to see an uptick of 20-25% increase in a period of change”. When asked if she thinks Video Work Instructions can help save companies money, Terry said, “There would be opportunities for video training. It might reduce time away from the workforce. It’s intriguing”. 

What impact will the continual rise of baby boomers' retirement have on your company? Today, 80% of baby boomers are still in the workplace, but over the next three years, that number will be drastically reduced by half, leaving only 40% of baby boomers still working. What do we stand to lose along with their retirements? Invaluable tribal knowledge. Many baby boomers are the only employees at their facilities that have certain knowledge, skills, expertise and experience. The question is, how do we keep those things from leaving with the retirees?  

Video Work Instructions preserve invaluable tribal knowledge forever. It's not just housed, but utilized by current and new employees whenever you need it. You may be able to hire new employees in place of those retiring, but you can't replace their experience. Let Video Work Instructions help you reserve it, harness it, and use it.

by Desiree Schnoor
Have you ever thought about how your work instructions impact the layout and organization of your workspace? Video Work Instructions contribute to a streamlined, organized way to get the most work done, safely and effectively. 

by Desiree Schnoor

Have you ever thought about how your processes that are working well enough could work even better? Did you know, one function of Video Work Instructions is being used for continuous improvement? If you have more than one senior operator, or multiple operators whose operations you would like to capture, Virtual QE can make a work instruction that combines the best practices of more than one operator into a single, best practice Video Work Instruction, giving your company a new standard to work from. Let us make your processes work even better for better training, production and results. 

by Desiree Schnoor

Many industries are finding a solution to employing more people, and are opening their doors wide to more viable options for new hires. In fact, last year, 50% of people who got hired, don’t have a college degree.  This isn’t just talking about jobs not typically requiring a degree. For even advanced manufacturing positions, employers have sought and found other ways of making candidates qualified besides the degrees they hold. Large Fortune 100 companies such as IBM and Lockheed Martin are re-thinking their hiring qualifications by engaging in community college collaborations and apprenticeship and vocational training programs- essentially producing many job ready candidates. Traditional terms like “white” and “blue” collar positions are being replaced with what is known as “new collar”- those positions not requiring the traditional college path and degree, but more practical, vocational training, specific to certain tasks. 

However, methods like this are slow in coming for many in the manufacturing industry. And for a typical small to medium manufacturing company, expansive, expensive and long-standing training or apprenticeship programs are usually not practical. But what big companies are achieving with a lot of money and a lot of time can be achieved by the rest of us with Video Work Instructions.

Video Work Instructions are an affordable way to get many of the same results that large companies do, short-cutting most of the cost, outsourcing and effort. With video, training time is drastically reduced because a video of an expert technician completing a task can be dispersed to all your new hires at once, freeing up your experts to do other things. Now your new hires can perform tasks like experts in a matter of hours, and you can seamlessly cross train on new tasks. Even people with no manufacturing experience can train quickly and effectively with video. 

by Desiree Schnoor

​In its 37th year, “the training industry’s most trusted source of data on budgets, staffing and programs”, The Training Industry Report offers data from companies over 100 employees. 41% of respondents were midsize companies (1,000 to 9,999 employees) and 61% of those completing the survey were managers or above in the organization. Finally, Manufacturing was well represented (10%) among the industry classifications, third only to Health/Medical Services (17%), and Finance/Banking (11%).

​While the total training expenditures from 2017 to 2018 decreased 6.4% to $88 billion, “training staff payroll” increased $5 billion, and “spending on outside products and services” increased more than $3 billion. For more specifics about how much all aspects of training are costing U.S businesses, see the accompanying infographic. 

by Desiree Schnoor

It’s no question that apprenticeships and extended on the job training programs are effective in producing employees who are trained and ready to start working using the skills they’ve acquired. But how much do they cost? How long do they take? How many trainers do we need? Is there a better, faster and more cost-effective way to get employees working on the tasks you need, now?
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Only 1 out of every 3 Americans has a college degree, yet we spend $180 billion dollars on higher education. That’s a terrible return on investment. Is the answer spending more money? Sadly, more money and time is lost when those who have degrees leave their jobs to get more or different training? There must be a better way to get more people the training they need to get working sooner.
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Video Work Instructions do just that. Find out how, here.         

by Desiree Schnoor

A few weeks ago, the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board met to discuss national priorities concerning the intersection between a low unemployment rate, positions that are available but hard to fill, and government and private industries solutions that are re-thinking job classifications and qualifications as a whole. Attendees were private sector managers, state mayors and business CEOs. Two such companies, IBM and Lockheed Martin reported on impressive measures their companies had taken to tackle the issues above.

The representative from IBM stressed the adoption of the paradigm shift that there are multiple pathways to good paying jobs and that “skills are as important as a diploma”. IBM noted the number of people in the job pool with traditional 4-year college degrees that are unemployable although they have spent time and money studying a certain discipline, and lack a specific skill or expertise needed in many open positions, or need to be re-skilled part way through their careers.  IBM reported that last year 15% of their hires consisted of those with “new collar skills”- not 4-year degrees, and that they’d spent $½ billion re-skilling mid-career employees, such as baristas and veterans, for specific skilled tasks. 

Last year, Lockheed hired 14,000 new employees, half of which are non-degreed. They have started offering on the job training apprenticeship programs from many of their advanced manufacturing positions. They also team up with community colleges to make apprenticeship programs that make trainees job ready. 

These two companies, and probably others have had success in bending the traditional methods of hiring and training, in part because of their sizable budgets to do so.

​But what about smaller companies, ones with the same problems, but that don’t can’t spend billions to make changes? Virtual QE, a quality engineering company has a solution, Video Work Instructions. They allow you to train new hires or cross-train your seasoned workers 10x faster than you currently do, for a fraction of the price IBM and Lockheed are paying. Forget about long, involved, expensive apprenticeship programs when your expert technicians can preserve and duplicate their tribal knowledge an infinite amount of times with Video Work Instructions.

To learn more or to find out how much your current way of training is really costing your company, fill out this quick calculator, here.

by Desiree Schnoor

Virtual QE continues to make strides to improve the working environment for workers and employers, by making training accessible to employees of differing abilities. Their signature product, Video Work Instructions, may open the door to labor availability for manufactures in even more ways. For example, a new hire who is deaf, can train using a Video Work Instruction, because the combination of video and captioning is more effective than most traditional classroom-like training, which often lack visual aids, or captioned safety films. 

Speaking of captioning, did you know that any work instruction can have subtitles embedded, in any language? This is another way to instantly open hiring to workers of any language or language preference.
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Finally, workers of all learning abilities are easily able to understand Video Work Instruction content, in fact, all of our brains prefer to learn with video. The need to hire specialized, skilled workers who understand the technical terms and jargon laden in traditional text instructions, are a thing of the past. 

by Desiree Schnoor

​What if your new hires could perform like your best technicians? Imagine if you could have more of your best people, now. Video Work Instructions are designed to give you an edge in nearly every aspect of your company, from hiring to production to quality scores, and everything in between.
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Implementing Video Work Instructions can be likened to using a personal trainer; you get accelerated results that you will never want to be without. And like any good workout regimen, the results are seen long after you put the weights back on their racks. In the same way, the impacts of Video Work Instructions can be traced from hiring to training, to cross training, to production, to job satisfaction, to retention, to quality and beyond. What could a personal trainer do for your company?

by Desiree Schnoor

Virtual QE’s customers know best the impacts that Video Work Instructions have on their hiring, training, production, quality and retention rates, but what about the impact Virtual QE makes, as a company, on our communities? Shawn Findlater, Virtual QE’s CEO is passionate about giving back. “Our heart is family. We focus on improving quality engineering, and making the manufacturing industry a better place to work. But, we try to keep in mind the employees, the dads and moms who are working for their families, that young millennial, who just started a family, we work to improve not just their work, but their lives.” Just like the benefits of Video Work Instructions have been shown to have a domino-like effect across many aspects of manufacturing companies, it is Virtual QE’s hope that their products and services have a ripple effect that crosses over from work to the rest of life.
As a company, Virtual QE gives some of their time and money to organizations that bring hope and support to families across the globe. They understand that a worldwide impact is not just about quality engineering, but an increased quality of life for all.
“We are so thankful to our customers, who partner with us, and inspire us to continue to improve and continue to give.”  Find out more about the heart of Virtual QE here.

by Desiree Schnoor
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I bet you’re not surprised that YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world, only Google is searched more often. YouTube gives you instant access to videos about anything, in any language. If the whole world uses video to reduce the learning curve, why not the manufacturing industry? Now, that is changing. Find out how Video Work Instructions allow you to train new hires 10x faster. 

by Desiree Schnoor

Did you know that by 2025, three quarters of the workforce will be made up of millennials? Everyday 10,000 baby boomers are retiring everyday. As the labor workforce gap widens, it seems like more bad news for manufacturing. Even though the general perception is “manufacturing as vital to the domestic economy”, , millennials ranked manufacturing last on list of career preferences.  So, if millennials are to be the workforce of our future, what can manufacturing do to attract and retain them?

In 2018, 3 million manufacturing employees quit their jobs, yet a reported 77% of those who quit said they could have been retained. How? Millennials need informal learning and job rotation. Younger workers are most receptive to informal learning, in fact 53% reported that on the job training was the most effective training and development method. 

Millennials are among the group who leave their jobs because the want more career development, opportunities for growth and security. Or because of job characteristics, meaning they want more ownership and confidence in what they are doing. Video Work Instructions give them both. A recent study showed that millennials are driven by career development, which means they seek positions they like and can grow in, they are willing to change jobs often, and sometimes go back to school for specific skills training. Essentially, they want to grow and perform well. Video Work Instructions are designed to give millennials what they need to be successful because training with Video Work Instructions is 10 times faster than traditional work instructions, and almost immediately levels the playing field between new and seasoned workers.

“Millennials are accustomed to instant access to information, so companies should consider on-demand digital microlearning that’s available via desktop and mobile to better engage their employees.” A successful retention strategy for deterring the average millennial from job hopping every two years, is job rotation. Video Work Instructions make cross-training both experienced and novice employees easy, and is a benefit wise employers will use to keep millennial workers engaged.

Finally, What could a mentoring relationship between lead technicians and millennial new hires look like? Mentoring millennial workers is of great importance. Not only will providing direct input, attract more young workers to your company, but it will also retain more of them.

The opportunities for connection and learning are endless. For example, senior techs can show their diverse skill set while work with millennials by cross-training them at new stations for new challenges, and understanding why task illegibility is important for them. How could your veterans and new hires learn from each other’s patience and perseverance, and fast, changing and creative work preferences?

by Desiree Schnoor

It’s one thing to show you how implementing Video Work Instructions can improve your company in areas like training, tribal knowledge, turnover and employee satisfaction, but how about some cold, hard figures showing how much not having video is costing you now and what that will mean 5 years from now?

Virtual QE is introducing their True Cost of Training Calculator. Easily accessible on their website, you can get an accurate picture of some serious savings. Just complete a ten-item questionnaire to find out the real financial impact your current training methods are having on the health of your company, and the value of Video Work Instructions, and what it will cost your company to not have them now, and 5 years down the road. There is even a cost benefit analysis, displaying the impact Video Work Instructions could have on your company over the next 5 years.