April 15, 2008

Focus on O&M (April 2008)

CONTINUING EDUCATION

Back to school

One of the biggest myths about Thomas Edison is that he was not formally educated because he spent very little time attending traditional schools. In reality, his mother had the radical idea that learning could be fun—something she didn’t see in traditional schools—so she personally tutored the fledgling inventor using a rigorous program. And when young Edison’s thirst for knowledge outstripped his mom’s ability to deliver it, she brought in other tutors to continue his formal education. By founding his first research laboratory at the age of 23 and surrounding himself with a team of bright scholars, Edison demonstrated that he valued education highly and recognized the need for continuing, lifelong learning.

Spurred by competitive pressures, some power producers—Edison’s heirs, in some sense—are now making the same commitment: establishing ongoing training programs for employees at all levels of the organization. A rural electric cooperative in the Southeast, for instance, recently established an education program for its workers that begins with the basics, including a review of math and science, and progresses to the most challenging aspects of their disciplines.

The curriculum goes beyond the subject matter traditionally taught for each craft and covers more than just essential subjects. For example, both operators and maintenance mechanics learn to read and understand control logic and electrical schematics—a skill that is typically taught only to instrumentation and control (I&C) technicians. What’s more, maintenance personnel attend the same courses on plant systems as do operators, who also receive training on predictive and preventive maintenance.

Training for tomorrow. Savvy power producers are concerned with training not just existing employees, but future ones, too. Just as firms in other U.S. industries have already done, power companies are becoming substitute teachers in what many believe is the country’s faltering education system. They are teaming up with schools to provide gifts of equipment, paid work-study programs, literacy volunteers, teacher training, and more.

As an example, a 2,600-MW coal-fired plant in the Midwest launched a training program for college engineering students a few years ago. The participants included 15 students from 12 different universities. The plant’s owner, a utility, anticipates the need to put younger engineers into its training pipeline—especially recent graduates with computer modeling and I&C skills.

Managers of the plant reported both short- and long-term benefits of the education project. The students assisted in performance testing of the newly retrofitted plant by comparing efficiencies before and after installation of a new flue gas desulfurization system. In the process, the 15 high-caliber students gained an appreciation for the power industry in general and—the plant managers hope—for their utility in particular. The program also paid dividends in community relations, an area for which more and more plant managers are taking responsibility.

Results-oriented training. By most accounts, power producers give only lip service to training. They boast in annual reports and conference papers of their employee education programs while in reality funding them with miniscule budgets. As one training specialist says: “The relationship between their talk of education and the money they spend on it could be described as inverse-cubed.”

Part of the problem is the inability to calculate returns on investment—what has been called the “snake pit” of training. Measurable results are difficult to quantify, and even when they can be quantified, benefits might not appear for years. Many training packages try to justify their worth with blanket statements, like, “If your operator avoids just one unplanned shutdown, you will have paid for this training course.” However, few money managers take such statements at face value.

According to a recent survey of Fortune 500 mid- and upper-level managers, trainers themselves may be partially to blame for management’s lack of support for training. Managers who responded to the survey said that training professionals often exhibit:

• Insufficient business acumen. Many training practitioners do not understand how a utility operates, its survival requirements, or the day-to-day challenges managers face.
• Insufficient results. Many trainers fail to teach the real-life skills that their students are there to learn. Instead, they lecture on and on in abstract, academic jargon—probably because they’re most comfortable doing so.
• Insufficient loyalty. Many trainers portray management as an adversary. In the warm, cozy classroom, they allow the discussion to turn into “gripe sessions.” Many trainers, according to the survey, also use the classroom to push personal agendas or social beliefs, rather than sticking to the specifics listed in the curriculum.

Can I go? Can I go? Here’s another example of the best training intentions going awry. When an operator working at a large independent plant complained that he didn’t know how to use the company’s new office software—a conventional suite of word-processing and spreadsheet applications—the plant manager arranged to have him attend a class at a nearby community college. Soon, other operators began requesting the same class, so the manager had no choice but to enroll them, too. In short order, the plant manager found that he had spent nearly $30,000 of his O&M budget and lost 120 man-days of work on software training for his 60 employees.

The problem here was that the plant manager was training “by the seat of his pants.” He had no training plan or training budget, and was simply responding to a perceived need from a few vocal operators.

To get the most bang for your training buck, start with a “needs assessment” to determine what kind of training the staff truly requires. There are plenty of training companies that will be happy to help you with this step—if you’ve got a massive staff and an equally large budget. But you can also do it in-house, with the help of veteran crafts people and supervisors.

Remember: Your veterans can help not only with the training plan but also with both technical and nontechnical training. Consider buying a video camera and a VCR to make in-house training tapes. The rookies will enjoy watching their coworkers on screen, and the veterans will like showing off their knowledge. As the old saw goes, nobody learns more than the teacher.

By far the largest component of training expenses is the productivity lost when workers attend classes. Many say this figure can be three times as high as the fee paid to the training provider. A first step in justifying training costs after the first delivery of instruction is to credibly answer some specific questions:

• How much faster did personnel get up to speed on the new equipment after training?
• How much of an incremental efficiency or revenue gain or revenue did the training produce?
• How many human errors were eliminated by using an advanced training course, as opposed to traditional classroom instruction?
• At what rate did performance deteriorate after the training program ended, or between the main course and a refresher course?

Other lessons learned by power plant training specialists include the following:

• It’s difficult to keep O&M people engaged in the classroom for long periods of time. They’re used to physical labor, and are quickly bored by the chairs and the chalk.
• Trainees should only be in the classroom a few days at a time, and then spend at least an equal amount of time back on the job, applying what they’ve learned.

Measuring performance gains. For more insight into training, let’s look at how we measure the results of other aspects of power plant operation. Industry veterans know that the best bid specifications for plant equipment are written in terms of expected results, with the method of achieving those results left up to the supplier. This approach unleashes the bidders’ creativity, increases the competitiveness of the bidding process, and ultimately provides a standard for measuring supplier performance. So what happens if we apply this same results-oriented approach to the training section of a solicitation?

In bid specifications, training is typically defined in terms of the number of days of instruction to be supplied to a designated number of personnel. This quantity-based definition is analogous to specifying a pump by the pound! Instead, training should be defined by performance objectives. After all, few companies really want training; what they want is the improved employee performance it leads to. If improved performance is what you want, then improved performance is what you should ask for in your bid specifications.

Unfortunately, as with most aspects of management, that’s easier said than done. Defining the performance gains expected of training programs requires using precise language that cannot be easily misinterpreted. In your requests for training proposals, try using action verbs—such as install, repair, or maintain—rather than abstract verbs like “know” or “understand.” And try to avoid some of the following pitfalls when writing training specifications:

• Don’t specify the length of instruction. Some experienced trainers tell horror stories about being asked to teach in one week a skill that requires a college semester. Conversely, others explain how they have stretched out a one-hour training class to a full week with war stories and song-and-dance routines, just to meet the customer’s bid specification. Although effective training takes time, the length of time it takes does not reflect its effectiveness.
• Don’t specify a laundry list of topics. Often, companies that see the error in specifying the length of instruction switch to preparing extensive lists of topics to be “covered.” Of course, how and to what degree a topic is covered can vary—from a brief mention of it while students are filing into the room to an in-depth, academic discourse, if the instructor happened to have done his doctoral thesis on the subject. Specifying topics typically produces training programs that fill the students’ heads with “nice-to-know” facts but produce little improvement in employee performance.
• Don’t specify media or techniques. Most training experts agree that there is no “best” media or technique, and that a combination of different methods is often the most effective and least costly. Yet many specification writers call for the use of one training media, typically whatever is in vogue.

—From the editors of POWER