BACK TO SCHOOL : Human Development Shifts to Fundamentals as Companies Reshape Corporate Culture, Retool Workers for New Jobs

By JIM SCHACHTER

Jan. 4, 1988 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

At corporations across the Southland, human capital--sometimes slighted in the competitive rush to upgrade technology--has become the object of substantial investment.

Lockheed has launched the Lockheed Technical Institute, an in-house program of graduate-level courses that provided 850 employees in Burbank with state-of-the-art engineering expertise in the latest semester.

Carter Hawley Hale has established a Center for Education in downtown Los Angeles where 1,200 supervisors and buyers from all its department store divisions take courses each year in management and purchasing techniques.

Century City-based Summit Health, which operates hospitals and other health-care institutions in five states, has quadrupled its spending on training in the past three years, in hopes of enhancing employee satisfaction and service quality.

Training and human development have become a preoccupation of major employers throughout Southern California and the rest of the nation.

Companies are using training to reshape corporate cultures, to retool workers for jobs altered by technological change, to transmit basic skills that young employees failed to acquire at school and to eke out a competitive advantage in industries where the return on investment in hardware and technology has begun to diminish.

Nationally, companies spent an estimated $32 billion in 1987 on formal training and an additional $180 billion for informal training. According to Training magazine and the American Society for Training and Development, employers provided training for one in every eight American workers--a total of 1.2 billion hours devoted to worker improvement.

Studies say that corporate training--whether provided in-house, by for-profit vendors or by public or private schools--constitutes almost as large an educational delivery system as the entire elementary, secondary and post-secondary school system.

By one estimate, 10 times as many vendors are selling training services today as 10 years ago. One database for trainers lists 91,000 seminars available for corporate use. University Associates in La Jolla, Leadership Studies in Escondido, Zenger-Miller in Cupertino and Omega Consultants to Banking in San Francisco are California firms considered leaders in their training specialties.

Historically, training has been a trendy field--especially in the domains of management and sales, where no one can teach a single “right” way to behave.

“Organizations, and people in high levels in organizations, sometimes get awfully frustrated with not meeting their objectives and losing markets,” said Jack Asgar, president and chief executive of Practical Management, a Calabasas firm that designs management training programs. “They become almost panic stricken and they try to grab straws.”

Lately, though, the tendency in training has been to emphasize fundamentals. Two-thirds of the money spent on training is skills-oriented, according to the American Society of Training and Development.

“Ten years ago, training tended to be seen as the nice to know and nice to do,” said Mark Strunin, president of the society’s Los Angeles chapter and director of training and development for Summit Health. “Now, it’s that these are survival skills.”

His own company, for instance, recognized that it would have to make a major investment in customer service training if it were to remain competitive in a health-care industry that was suddenly struggling to attract clientele after years of depending on government reimbursements for a steady income.

Customer service is a boom area in training. In October, Training magazine’s annual industry survey found a 64% increase in the number of wholesale and retail firms giving service training to employees.

First Interstate Bank did market research on how customers wanted to be treated when they walked into a bank and now is immersing branch managers and officers in the findings, according to Bill Bradley, a divisional vice president for training and development in Glendale. Employees talk of making First Interstate “the Nordstrom of banking”--a nod to a retailer considered a leader in customer service.

Growing numbers of companies, dissatisfied with the skills of high school and even college graduates, are also setting up remedial education programs or forging partnerships with schools and colleges to create a smarter labor force more capable of working at 21st Century jobs.

Schools, which provide nearly two-thirds of the training purchased by employers from outside sources, reap benefits from the relationship beyond the boost to their enrollments.

In the past five years, the nine-campus Los Angeles Community College District has provided $24 million in custom-designed retraining programs to 8,000 workers at 700 companies--primarily technical training that retools workers to keep up with technological changes.

The payoff? The district was able to keep the $3.5 million in equipment purchased for the retraining programs with state and federal grants, according to Linda M. Thor, president of West Los Angeles College in Culver City. Employers have donated an additional $2 million in cash and equipment, and they’ve become an important ally in lobbying for state support for community colleges, Thor said.

WHO GETS TRAINED

Percentage of companies with 50 or more employees that provide training to the following categories of workers.

Middle Managers 73.8

Supervisory Skills 69.3

Executives 70.4

First-Line Supervisors 58.7

Senior Managers 56.1

Office/Clerical 52.5

Administrative Employees 50.5

Professionals 48.1

Customer Service People 39.6

Salespeople 32.7