Retraining is BMOC as Workers Strive for Competitive Edge
It’s Friday night and Madeleine Kent, weary from a long day’s work as a clerk at Beacon Electric in San Diego, takes her seat in a Mesa College classroom and settles in for a three-hour session.
It’s not that Kent doesn’t have more enjoyable ways of spending her time. She’s giving up a Friday night because it could render her invaluable to her boss.
The scene is Mesa College’s computer lab, and the class includes receptionists to executives, who, on the eve of their weekend, are working side by side at computer terminals during a workshop to learn the popular spreadsheet program called Microsoft Excel.
Keys are pounding and computer mouses are scampering alongside terminals as the class follows the lead of instructor Rudy Abraham, whose computer monitor images are projected onto a screen at the front of the room.
Kent, a single mother who is responsible for giving quotations on lighting projects, recently persuaded Beacon Electric to pay for the class so she can customize the company’s accounting software. At the same time, she says, “this is for advancement . . . . I’ll be more efficient and I’ll be the only one at work who knows anything about” Microsoft Excel.
Kent’s enrollment is an example of how more workers these days are trying to enhance their job skills as a means of ensuring advancement during a down economy.
But the Mesa class differs from traditional job training, which is designed to teach new skills to unemployed workers. The Mesa course is part of a growing curriculum at area campuses that is geared to people who already have jobs--and want to hold on to them.
In an effort to provide computer software and multimedia training for companies, particularly small ones, Mesa’s School of Information Systems, Foreign Language and Instructional Resources began a series of computer software training courses this summer. The short-term courses--most of which last six hours--teach word processing, database, spreadsheet, art and other software skills that can help workers with job advancement, enhancement or survival.
At a recent workshop on Microsoft Excel, David Gajdzik, executive vice president of Helix Electric in San Diego, explained that he and about a dozen other Helix employees were taking the class so that each could perform tasks that were once specialized in the company.
“Our work fluctuates during the year,” he said. “We need to minimize personnel. That is, employees need to do more than one job, and if everyone is trained on our software system . . . then everyone has that flexibility. No one is just a secretary or someone in accounts payable.”
This was the first time Helix has offered to pay for training for a group of its employees, Gajdzik said, adding that in the past such training was offered only to a select few employees.
“We haven’t done a good job of educating all employees at the same time on our computer system,” he said.
In the wake of rapid changes in technology and the economic mandate for every employee to be able to handle as many tasks as possible, more employers have turned to periodic but continuous training for their employees, according to Wayman Johnson, dean of Mesa’s School of Information Systems, Foreign Language and Instructional Resources.
By the year 2000, an estimated 75% of all workers now employed will need retraining because of changes in the nature of existing jobs or the development of jobs requiring new and higher levels of skills, according to the American Society for Training and Development.
Johnson said community colleges and universities in San Diego County and across the country have begun to offer competitively priced training programs, creating public-private partnerships.
Such partnerships keep college curricula relevant to the realities of the workplace, and the fees charged to companies or individuals training at the campuses are used to bolster the schools’ coffers. That is, fees for employee training are used to buy computer equipment used by all students, Johnson said, which is vital in light of recent state budget slashings.
“We used to get hundreds of thousands of dollars (from the state) for lab equipment every year,” Johnson said. “Now we see the entire community college district getting less than $1 million a year, or about as much as Mesa College used to get. We can no longer rely on the state to take care of our technology needs.”
In choosing software and hardware for training programs, he said, “we know if the employers need it, then the students will need it, too.”
Only about 7% of the U.S. work force gets any formal training on the job, and most of those are executives, managers and scientists, according to the American Society for Training and Development.
The organization also reports that most workplace training occurs in about 15,000 employer institutions nationwide. That number represents only half of 1% of the nation’s 3.8 million companies.
Yet an estimated 42% of the work force need training to be able to continue to do their rapidly changing jobs properly. Only about 7% get such formal training from their employers.
The society also points out that, although the United States does a good job educating professional elites, it generally does a poor job preparing non-college-bound high school students--about half of all high school students--for the transition from school to work. By contrast, the nation’s most successful economic rivals in Europe and Asia concentrate their training efforts on this population.
And while small businesses tend to hire from the population that needs training most, those employees are far less likely to get formal training than employees of large companies.
The goal of the Mesa program is to help small and mid-size companies meet the needs of a changing San Diego business market through retraining courses, which can be customized by employers, offering instruction in popular computer spreadsheet, graphics and word processing programs.
Employers or individuals can sign up for six-hour courses that cost about $90 and include no more than 15 students. For about $140 an hour, Mesa provides instruction customized to the employer in the campus’ IBM Demonstration Lab. For $500 a day, a company can use Mesa’s computer labs without instruction.
“The price is reasonable,” said John Paul Jones, vice president and director of group sales at Wadsworth, a Belmont-based textbook company that will use one of Mesa’s computer labs and faculty to train about 200 of its employees early next year, when Wadsworth holds its national sales meeting in La Jolla.
Wadsworth sales representatives and other employees will use Mesa’s facilities for two days, during which they will get an introduction to multimedia computer systems that include video and audio data used interactively. Mesa is leading a consortium of nine community colleges statewide in providing multimedia training for instructors.
This is the first time Wadsworth has offered employee training of this kind, Jones said, and “in the future we’ll do some in-house training and consulting. But this (training at Mesa’s computer lab) will give us a common base of knowledge to build from in the organization.”
For part of the two-day training session, he said, the company’s own software specialists will be teaching the employees. But Wadsworth saves money by using Mesa’s facilities--hauling computer equipment into and paying for a hotel meeting room would probably be far more expensive.
