From the Bloch Files
Networking: The Best-Available
Adult Education (Part I)
By Heinz Bloch, P.E., Editor
Although I have written about the following conversation before, there's another angle to it, and a very quantifiable one at that. I believe this angle is worth highlighting.
It was exactly 20 years ago, in 1999, when I had a very productive discussion with the Reliability Manager of a prominent multi-national oil company. One of the issues to which he alluded concerned the fact that many companies experiencing repeat failures of rotating equipment were staffed by members of reputable technical societies. As I wrote in the Oct. 3, 2019 installment of "The Bloch Files," the manager was really questioning the merits of encouraging membership in these organizations.
We agreed that training of adults is often useful, but that it should be deliberate and thoughtful at all times. Nothing can be more frustrating for adults than wasting the irretrievable commodity of time on useless pursuits. To that end, the manager wanted to know if technical societies were training their members effectively.
Continuing in the same vein, we discussed whether the incremental proficiency of members of technical or professional societies had been worth the monetary and time-related expenditures made by employer and employee.
Could “value added” be assessed and/or quantified? Was it plausible to claim that employees who did not attend regional technical society meetings lagged behind those who did attend? Had the “networkers” benefited everybody back at their respective plants by getting acquainted with other "value-adders," and were the findings proven correct or were they the usual untested chatter of the uninformed?
I was also asked if the “value added” had ever been methodically recorded by employees who made it a habit to attend those regional society meetings.
The manager was curious as to which of the two groups (networkers or non-networkers) would have made a more significant dent in the frequency of repeat failure incidents. He knew, of course, that value-adders had to be motivated to understand, advocate, describe, promote, and participate in targeted and truly results-oriented off-site training.
I'll be more specific about this issue in the next installment of "The Bloch Files" for The RAM Review. In that upcoming article, I'll discuss how a single networking contact saved one company over $3,000,000. Stay tuned.
heinzpbloch@gmail.com
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