Tailor-Made Training

“A lot of people may have been a supervisor or lead, but they’re not used to the whole mentoring or coaching role,” Anderson says. “One of the things that, historically, vocational education does is that we train people to train other people in certain skill sets.”

Saint Paul College finds teachers with the appropriate specialties for each training. “We bring in instructors—whether they’re instructors that work for the college or maybe we hire people with particular expertise that are out in the industry,” Anderson explains. For example, the college may bring in an expert on the chemical makeup of finishes to show employees how to reformulate a finish so it will be less harmful to the environment.

Saint Paul College professors will teach courses on energy conservation and reducing scrap, followed by training to identify and quantify waste in the manufacturing process. College staff and representatives from equipment manufacturers will introduce new technologies as new machines are installed. Medallion supervisors and managers will be involved in organizational systems analysis training over the course of the grant.

Training will take up to three years to complete and is expected to gain momentum as the need for knowledge increases. “It’s kind of like a bell curve,” Sommers says. “You start out slow, and you get to a peak where you’re really rolling with these things, and then it kind of tapers off. If there’s intense training going on, it might be every day for a while.”

The program has just gotten underway, but Sommers is already starting to see some changes. “We want to assist Medallion in reducing turnover rates, and make it a preferred workplace in an escalating war for talent in Carver and McLeod counties,” she says.

Medical Manufacturing Goes Virtual
Enpath Medical, Inc., Pixel Farm Interactive, and Normandale Community College

Pixel Farm Interactive, an interactive communication and learning development firm in Minneapolis, had worked with Normandale Community College’s customized training in the past. So when the firm needed help designing a training program for cardiovascular medical device manufacturer Enpath Medical, Inc., in Minneapolis, Pixel Farm turned to Normandale, which is located in Bloomington.

Enpath’s engineers, equipment operators, and other manufacturing employees need to know how to measure the length, width, weight, volume, and pressure capacity of components used in cardiac rhythm management accessories. The problem is that written procedures for measurement processes are frequently modified, and Enpath’s contract clients require their own procedures and documentation, making it difficult for employees to keep up with documentation changes. And information gaps could cause potentially dangerous errors.

Enpath wanted to teach employees the importance of accurate measurement, says Ann Wagner, program director at Normandale Community College. The company also wanted employees to be able to demonstrate their measuring skills.

Pixel Farm had already done  a preliminary training needs analysis for Enpath to determine what topics and learning methods would help them train their workers more readily. They found that Enpath procedure documents needed to be updated more quickly to reflect changes, and decided that employees could use interactive video-based training to help them improve their measurement skills. “Once Pixel Farm and Enpath saw the scope of training that needed to be done, they contacted us to see if we could partner with them to create solutions,” Wagner says.