Arkansas says its program to screen prospective auto-parts workers by having them assemble Lego toys is serious, not child’s play.
The program is a response to some companies’ complaints about getting unqualified employees through state agencies.
Instructors at Arkansas Northeastern College’s campus in Burdette have developed a program to prepare prospects for working in a manufacturing setting. Teams build Lego crash cars on an assembly line.
The vehicles are not complex. Each is made with 37 parts, then is launched mechanically into a wall.
If the hood flies off, the car was assembled correctly.
The key skill being taught is teamwork. And the lesson that the state may be learning is that screening workers is key to recruiting employers in the automotive industry.
In the past, Arkansas has supplied many employees for autoparts companies who “might work a few days or a week and quit,” Gov. Mike Beebe said last week.
“There was no screening being done and no education being done and no training being done on the potential applicants about what type of work it was, what was expected and what the regimen was going to be,” Beebe said.
Beebe didn’t identify the companies that have had problems. But two divisions of Toyota Mo- tor Corp. have opened auto-parts plants in eastern Arkansas since 2005 — Denso Corp. in Osceola and Hino Motors Ltd. in Marion.
The logic behind the Burdette program is to simulate, to some degree, what an assembly-line job is like, said Tom Floria, director of The Solutions Group at the Burdette campus, about 10 miles south of Blytheville.
Other training centers in Arkansas may begin using the assembly-line simulation, Floria said.
The Burdette project is part of a larger employee screening process that Arkansas implemented in April in response to manufacturers’ grievances.
Randy Zook, who retired as chief executive officer of Atlantic Envelope Co. in Atlanta in 2004, became deputy director of the state Department of Economic Development, in early April. By mid-April, he had instituted the new screening.
“If there is anything different that we’ve done it is getting pretty up close and personal [with companies ] about understanding their pre-employment processes,” Zook said. “We discovered some opportunities to help them assess people.”
The agency is using a tool called WorkKeys, made by ACT Inc., the company that produces the college entrance exam, Zook said. WorkKeys, which has been used by other states for years, assesses potential workers’ skills in math, reading for comprehension and locating information, Zook said.
“From this, you can determine someone’s readiness to do a job,” Zook said. Zook estimated the cost of implementing the WorkKeys program at $ 5, 000. The Arkansas Department of Workforce Services already had thousands of the ACT programs on its shelves, going unused, Zook said. “It’s just been a matter of planning and execution, more than anything else,” Zook said. Supplying companies with qualified employees is something that states across the country are facing, said Ashvin Vibhakar, director of the Institute for Economic Advancement at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
PROFILE CREATED “It often comes down to the education side, in terms of the ability to do simple mathematics or even read a tape measurement,” Vibhakar said. “What this system does is it creates a profile of a job. You are determining the level of skills necessary to do the job. Then you create a profile of the individual so you can match the profile against the skills needed for the job.”
Before prospects qualify for the manufacturing screening, they submit an application with the Arkansas Department of Workforce Services and then have to pass an assessment to determine their skills. Once they pass that test, the economic development agency’s centers put them through 20 hours of practical training.
At Arkansas Northeastern College, that training includes work on the Lego assembly line, Floria said. No other training center in Arkansas uses the assembly-line simulation, which was created by Floria’s staff of six instructors, including three engineers. Legos were chosen because they are lightweight and easy to handle, Floria said.
Prospects “get a very strong dose of what the manufacturing environment is,” Floria said. “They’ll have to show up at 7 o’clock [if they are hired ] and work a full day. If you talk to most companies anyplace in the United States, they want someone who can read and write and will come to work on time, and they’ll teach them the rest.”
Before they begin, the prospects are aware they’ll be working with Legos, but they don’t see the job as belittling, Floria said.
“They actually seem to have fun,” he said. Requests to talk to the prospects for this article were denied.
Members of each team work together for 30 minutes and build as many cars as they can in that time frame, Floria said. Then they are asked what they would do if this were their company and they wanted to improve the efficiency of the process, he said.
“They catch on pretty fast,” Floria said. “Typically on the next run, we have seen a 50 percent increase in productivity. One reason is they are getting familiar with the parts, but the other reason is they have shifted the workload a little bit so one person isn’t standing while another is finishing their job. They have quality checks to pay attention to. We will put a defective part in the line, on purpose, and they are to look for those.”
When the prospects finish, they have been introduced to the work environment, and they understand the pressure of production, Floria said.
“We have heard some comments come back [from employers ] that these people are more prepared than any of the people they have interviewed,” Floria said.
The testing helps the prospects as much as the manufacturers, said Robin Myers, president of Northeastern Arkansas College, which is based in Blytheville. “Once they complete the assessment and are certified into the pre-employment training, then they have demonstrated what’s considered nationally an industry norm for a skill-set level,” Myers said. “If they don’t have those skill sets, we refer them to our existing programs to work on improving those skills. But more than 80 percent of those who initiated the training have stayed with the training and completed it.” Floria said about 50 prospects have completed the screening since the school began the program in July.
IDENTITIES NOT REVEALED Officials with the Arkansas Economic Development Commission declined to identify manufacturers that have complained about the quality of workers they were getting, but officials with the agency and economic developers say companies are satisfied now with results from the new screening process.
“[Companies ] are very pleased, and I think they will be more and more pleased as time goes by,” Zook said. “I think we’ll get a greatly improved perception of the Arkansas work force within 60 to 90 days. I think the situation is improving weekly.”
Any company trying to hire many workers faces a challenge, Zook said.
“What’s happening here is we’re helping businesses do a better job of facing a tough assignment,” Zook said.
Economic development directors in Osceola and Marion declined to comment about whether Denso or Hino officials have complained about work-force problems at their Arkansas plants.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to comment on what kind of issues Hino has had with employment,” said Kay Brockwell, economic development director in Marion. “That would be much more up to Hino.”
Glenn Ellis, national manager for sales administration, marketing and dealer development at Hino’s U. S. headquarters in Michigan, did not return a call for comment, but, in the past, Hino executives in Arkansas and Michigan have insisted that the company has had no problems from the work force in the Marion area.
A call to Denso in Osceola for comment also was not returned.
If manufacturers in Arkansas were so dissatisfied with prospective workers they were getting in the past, did that have anything to do with Toyota’s decision in February to put an automobile plant in Tupelo, Miss., instead of near Marion ?
“Was that a factor ?” Beebe said to The Associated Press. “Logic and common sense tell you it could have been. It may have been. But do I have anyone from Toyota who told me that specifically ? No.”
Toyota’s official explanation for not choosing Marion was the poor air quality in the Crittenden County city and a federal lawsuit that the automaker said affected that situation.
“I’m sure Toyota’s decision was based on a number of factors, and they made the decision that they thought was the best decision for their company,” Brockwell said.
In June, Beebe instituted a “work-force Cabinet” of leaders of state agencies, said Matt De-Cample, Beebe’s spokesman.
The group is comprised of leaders of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission, the Arkansas Department of Workforce Services, the Arkansas Workforce Investment Board, the Arkansas Department of Workforce Education, the departments of Education and Higher Education, the Association of Two-Year Colleges, the Arkansas Science and Technology Authority and a staff member from the governor’s office, DeCample said.
“There are not any specific initiatives,” DeCample said of the informal committee. “The main purpose is for communication [on work-force issues ].” Information for this article was contributed by Daniel Nasaw of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.