Who Replaces the 'Old Guys'?

摘要

The july 17 edition of The Wall Street Journal contained an article with this provocative title: "Just Whose Job is It to Train Workers?" While highlighting the training efforts of a manufacturer of dental instruments in Chicago, the article makes the larger point that employers nowadays expect new hires to be plug-and-play; i.e., possessing all the required skills to do the job from Day One, with no supplementary training required or needed. The article presents Hu-Friedy, the dental instrument maker, as an exception to current practice, in that it actively trains and retrains line workers in the finer points of metallurgy behind the instruments they make. Successful graduates from their training program understand not just the "how" but the "why" of what they do. Hu-Friedy has established a bona fide apprenticeship to develop engineers and, perhaps, managers of the future. Yet Hu-Friedy is very much in the minority when it comes to in-house worker training; the article was not optimistic for the prospects of worker training in American industry generally.