Processing Industry Training: Decoding Its Strategic Opportunities

Processing industry training and why is it important? Well, processing industries are businesses that collect, distribute, and process raw materials for production of semi-finished or premium-quality end products using chemical, physical, and mechanical processes. Now, if we specifically consider the food processing sector, its employee turnover is extremely high — 50 percent, 75 percent, and even 100 percent or more of the staff changes every year. Warehouse turnover is likewise very high, and manufacturing companies have an estimated yearly turnover of 37%.

Processing industry training provides a strategic potential to drastically boost the efficiency, engagement, retention, and safety measures in processing industries. This is vital since, in this sector, a significant proportion of workers work on the assembly lines at any given time.

Processing Industry Training: An Introduction

Processing industry training equips workers with the knowledge and skills they need to operate complicated machinery safely and efficiently. The following are some examples of the training topics:

• Set your workers up for success by exposing them to their organization and outlining their tasks during onboarding.
• Ensure that your personnel understand how to run and maintain equipment properly and safely.
• Teach difficult procedures and provide opportunities for hands-on training to help staff perform at their best.
• Train your employees on the best practices and develop a team of risk prevention advocates to protect them from harm on the job.

Processing industry training includes a variety of subjects that prepare personnel for their jobs, but it is ultimately this instruction that allows an organization to innovate and expand. When companies invest in their employees’ learning and upskilling, they stay updated on their work activities, which leads to increased productivity.

What Are the Benefits of Processing Industry Training?

Safety

On-the-job training guarantees that employees understand how to properly perform the important duties of their jobs. This not only ensures the employee’s safety on the workplace, but also that of their coworkers. Interactive and immersive technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR), allow factory staff to practice handling and replacing parts without jeopardizing their safety. This guarantees that they’re ready for the work and can successfully do tasks.

Efficiency

As a direct result of staff training, organizations can expect higher worker and production efficiencies. Employees are less prone to make errors that harm their efficiency and production when they receive extensive training that qualifies them for the job. Industrial employees receive product and process training to help them accomplish processes effectively in their jobs. Processing companies can boost their productivity and better satisfy industry demands by having a more efficient staff.

Retention

In the first year, 25% of all new hires leave the company. Training, on the other hand, can help to reduce turnover by improving employee retention and work satisfaction. Employees are more willing to stay at a company that encourages them to grow through training programs. Long-term employees who support your organization’s growth benefit from training programs that begin since the first day and extend throughout their careers. Organizations will save money and have a more tenured staff with a reduced turnover rate.

How Can You Utilize Processing Industry Training as a Strategic Opportunity?

Use training as a stepping stone for success

Training is the cornerstone of any company’s success because it communicates the company’s culture, job objectives, and the skills required to do the job really well safely to employees. Employees who receive inadequate or poor training may underperform or, worse, sustain serious injuries. The highest proportion of attrition, and most musculoskeletal injuries, occur during training and the next few months of employment. These factors contribute to high onboarding expenses, after which the worker may leave regardless. For these factors, it is crucial for process industries to devote large resources to training, because there will be a substantial return on investment both in the short and long term.

Rather than losing people, suppose if you could keep them while raising your workforce’s productivity by five to ten percent – or more — and hence the plant’s output? With a large portion of your employees becoming new each year, learning has the potential to have a substantial influence on the bottom line. However, in manual labor industries, where duties are frequently repetitious and there is a significant imbalance among mentors and mentees, it might be difficult to track a particular trainee’s performance in depth and obtain ideal results.

Introduce employees to new technologies

When paired with AI, new IoT devices and computer vision (CV) solutions are offering novel insights about trainee progress. A wristwatch can digitize workers’ gestures — movements that many workers execute countless times in each shift and the CV can contextualize this precise, specific data. After then, the aggregated data is transmitted to an automated tool for assessment.

Within a few hours of the technologies being live, findings start to be supplied in the guise of easy-to-read dashboards. Trainers and, eventually, line managers, can utilize the information to educate and coach employees to achieve the best management culture and performance, possibly by imitating the most efficient workers. Even though the learner to instructor ratio is highly lopsided, training managers get the chance to train every worker in a tailored manner.

When learners take their places on the line, this technology may alert managers, allowing them to continue coaching workers in order to achieve excellent results without overloading them or injuring them. Processing industry trainers and supervisors have not had exposure to this amount of personal data before, and the implications for addressing the growing labor crisis while boosting individual employee quality and productivity are enormous.

Take process industry training up a notch with extended reality

Using several learning modes in a holistic training program, your company may improve its process industry training. For example, your company may use soundless eLearning programs to revisit safety training and allow employees to finish them at their desk. Another instance would be the use of interactive technology, including virtual reality (VR), which allows students to use a VR headset to investigate pricey pieces of equipment. This provides a distinct learning environment in which learners can take risks and learn from their failures.

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Reap the benefits of blended learning

There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all approach to process industry training. Instead, a mixture of several learning methods that effectively satisfy goals and reinforce learning is the best way to conduct this training. Let’s take a look at a blended learning program for safety training as an example.

Learners begin by watching a kickoff video. Various representatives of the management greet the trainee and discuss how the instruction reflects the organization’s principles in this video. Learners undergo eLearning sessions that educate them on different safety training words and procedures as a follow-up to the launch film. Learners are asked to test their knowledge with multiple-choice and true/false problems before moving on to the next activity.

Learners undergo a comprehensive VR experience for safe equipment maintenance to include a hands-on component of training. When learners put on a headset, they are transported to their workplace, complete with most of the realistic sights and noises. The student actively practices operating and fixing digital recreations of sophisticated machinery in this session.

How to Develop a Processing Industry Training Program in Your Organization?

Consider the initial design phase

It’s critical to work through the first concept step before diving right into creating training. In other words, you must schedule your exercise. There are various steps in the design process, including:

• Analyzing the training requirements
• Defining and evaluating the company goals or KPIs that your training will affect.
• Performing a task analysis is one of the most important things you can do.
• Establishing learning goals
• Conducting a learner evaluation

Start the development stage

It’s now time to start building your training program once you’ve finished the design-planning phase. This means that you should make it, regardless of how you provide it: online learning, textual, videos, PowerPoint slides, instructor-led training, and so on. Make certain that the information you include in your material comes from reliable sources. You undoubtedly already know this, but you must not include material in your training simply as you read it some place on the Internet. Consider collaborating with training providers such as PlayAblo to obtain practical knowledge for process industry training and other staff training needs.

Learning objectives, once again, should serve as a reference for your training. Nothing else should be taught in your training content except the learning objectives. Keep this in mind while you create your training materials. After you’ve finished creating them, go over them again to make sure you’ve done everything correctly.

As a course designer, it’s all too easy to get caught up in your curriculum or training software and lose sight of the individuals who are expected to understand from the course and who might require to modify or enhance their job productivity once it’s over. However, all of this attention to training topic, and maybe training content, may result in training that is less effective rather than more successful.

Again, we can only retain knowledge in our working memory for a certain amount of time. It should take no more than 15 minutes. You can also resort to microlearning — i.e. chunk process industry  training materials into smaller, more organized pieces and arrange them in a coherent way.  Chunking is a smart approach to prevent overloading people with far too much material at once, which aids learning.

Determine the delivery methodology

Process industry training, like any other type of training, should be tailored to the specific learning requirements of the organization. Bear that in mind while you’re delivering any form of training. For instance, it’s critical to keep the worker’s learning needs in mind when providing face-to-face training, whether in a class or out in the field. Remember to give the students an active, interesting experience. For starters, this means avoiding protracted, one-sided speeches or talks.

It’s just as crucial for digital and remote training to be interesting and interactive as it is for face-to-face training. Online training that is passive and dull should be avoided. Practice exams, interactivity, attractive images, short and snappy audio narrative, and scored assessments are all things we’re looking for.

Many, if not all, employees in the workplace use a smart phone phone or tablet. Furthermore, many organizations provide these to employees while they are on the job.  And there’s no reason to believe this pattern will change anytime soon.  As a result, delivering training via mobile devices makes sense.

Finalize evaluation methods

You should assess process industry training to see if it was successful. If it wasn’t, you should rewrite it to improve it. This begins when you offer training — whether as a field teacher or in a classroom. Are folks perplexed? Are they a little bleary-eyed? Are they dissatisfied? That’s one level of assessment, and it’s something you should keep an eye on in real time.

Furthermore, there is a well-known four-level system for measuring training success – called Kirkpatrick Training Evaluation model. However, this is not the only evaluation approach. We also have the SMART model to assess learners. You can even choose an LMS with a comprehensive dashboard that allows you to assess trainees on a regular basis.

Document the entire training process

It’s crucial to keep track of your process industry training. There are a variety of reasons for this, including legal considerations. But the part about documenting training that interests us the most is that the information it includes can be evaluated to learn more about what makes for effective learning. For learning and performance analysis, you can resort to data mining, predictive analytics, and big data. You can use a learning management system to track and analyze your training data.

Developing excellent process industry training programs is a never-ending effort. Because once you’ve completed the processes listed above, you should use the assessment data to improve your program. Plus, there are always new things to account for at work, as well as changes. As a result, process industry training, as with everything else in the industry, becomes a continual improvement loop.

Conclusion

From typical training types to benefits, strategic opportunities, and creation of of process industry training, we’ve covered the fundamentals of this particular training category in this blog. Are you prepared to deliver extensive training to your process industry employees? Contact a member of our team to learn how a personalized training programs can help you optimize your processes and develop a well-trained workforce.

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Find out more and request a custom demo!