Like many assembly line workers for Motorola Corp. in the early ’80s, Vickie Terrill thought her high school education would be sufficient. It helped the Wauconda mother secure a low-skill job assembling radios and telephones, a job she has held with the Schaumburg-based electronics giant for 15 years.
By the mid-1980s, however, Motorola was making some changes. Management informed Terrill and her colleagues their future would look nothing like their past. Executives told Terrill she would have to interpret information, make group decisions on products, inspect for quality control and solve problems on the spot. Computer screens, robots, complex operational manuals and bar charts would be part of her new lexicon, she was told. The ability to calculate math problems, read quickly and write well would be included in her new job description.
“A lot of workers felt threatened,” Terrill said. But for her, the choice was clear: Get more training or run the risk of becoming expendable. “There are so many people out there who want jobs,” she said. “Motorola could hire anytime, anywhere.”
It is a harsh new reality that millions of American workers face in jobs that previously have required little if any special skill. And it’s a reality that corporations across the country and in the northwest suburbs are trying to deal with by retraining their labor forces, even helping them learn basic math and language skills.
“I think there’s a concern that students coming out of the school system do not come with all the skills they need to start a job today,” said Laura G. Davis, president of the Northwest Suburban Association of Commerce and Industry in Schaumburg. “Therefore, (companies) have had to conduct retraining programs.”
Executives and education experts urge closer cooperation between companies and school districts to close the skills gap. In fact, some northwest suburban high schools already have formed relationships with the private sector, Davis said.
Arlington Heights High School District 214 and Schaumburg Township High School District 211 are among the schools that, in partnership with several businesses, have formed the Tech/Prep program, which offers specific job training and an internship. Said Davis, “I think these kinds of programs will continue to be looked at and will be an interest to students and employers.”
Elgin and Harper Community Colleges offer adult retraining programs for unemployed people and for companies seeking to improve their employees’ basic skills.
For the work force, the lesson for the ’90s is “lifelong learning,” said Sheila Quirk, director of corporate services for Harper Community College in Palatine. “If you’re not busy changing, you’re busy dying. For companies to stay in business, they are going to continue to change, which requires their employees to grow and learn new skills.”
In Motorola’s case, the electronics maker was repositioning itself for the future, trying to remain competitive in a global marketplace. To do so, it was asking employees who once did the muscle work to read, write and compute.
Motorola, like other small and big northwest suburban manufacturing companies, felt its survival depended on cutting costs, becoming more efficient and upgrading plant technology. For the hourly worker, it means more training, more skills and more stress.
“An awful lot of industries are downsizing, and the (remaining) workers are doing the jobs of four and five people,” said Larry Mikulecky, professor of education at Indiana University in Bloomington and a specialist in workplace literacy. “The workers let go must retrain for high-performance jobs. If you don’t change, you are unlikely to make a living in developed nations. There just aren’t that many McDonald’s.”
But a recent federal report on adult education raises doubts about America’s ability to retrain its blue-collar work force. The problem, according to the report, begins with the lack of a decent basic education. The Department of Education report, which tested more than 26,000 Americans in a representative sampling over four years, found that nearly half of America’s 191 million adult citizens cannot write a simple letter or calculate a basic math problem.
The implications are grim, if not frightening, academic and business leaders say.
A low-skill worker who cannot read or who is not retrained will be lucky to be flipping hamburgers at retirement, they say. For a high-tech manufacturing company like Motorola, if it cannot recruit highly skilled workers, it will move elsewhere or go out of business, according to Mikulecky.
The findings of the federal study also suggest that America’s public schools and community colleges have a long way to go to meet these new demands. According to some education experts, reform is still far off. Even the newest school curriculums have little connection with the kind of reality-based math required for many work tasks today, admitted Roy Pea, dean of the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University in Evanston.
“There have to be ways found to move into the classroom the kinds of situations and tasks in which people need to read and handle arithmetic in the everyday work world,” he added. “Much current instruction is based on abstract principles with little chance to see connections in the real world.”
In the real world, Motorola executives realized they would need to retrain their workers from the ground up if they hoped to make the company’s new Libertyville plant a success. It was inside that sprawling, campus-like setting of eight separate factories where the future of the cellular phone division would be decided. Motorola’s Libertyville plant would be the key player in the company’s effort to remain the worldwide leader in the manufacture of cellular phones, according to David Pinsky, Motorola spokesman.
The stakes were high. The plant brought 4,000 high-paying jobs to the area when the 1.2-million-square-foot factory opened in 1992. And with the opening of the plant came a new hourly worker retooled and retrained. But first came the basics.
To find out where everyone stood, management in 1985 tested all 21,000 hourly workers in math and English. Half of the hourly workers scored below the 9th-grade level in both subjects.
“We were shocked,” said Jim Frasier, manager of educational research at Motorola University, the firm’s training and educational arm. “We set targets that would make our employees read at the 9th-grade (level) and compute at the 8th-grade (level) by the end of 1991.”
One of those retrained workers is Myriam Nielsen, 52, who has been with the company for 20 years. Although the Hoffman Estates resident has remained a line worker, the definition of her job is a far cry from when she first started. In the old days, she said, she never knew what she was assembling.
But all that has changed. Now, as an assembly-line worker making the company’s flip phones, she is responsible for hourly yield reports that determine the number of phones to be shipped. She tests the phones for defects and logs the information on computers. She must make written reports, train new employees and be able to learn several different line positions so she can fill in anywhere.
“When (the new factory) first opened, we were a little scared,” she recalled. “We didn’t know what to make of it.” But soon she found the work to be more stimulating. “The old was very boring, very stressful and uninteresting,” Nielson said. “The new is involved, it’s educative, you have a sense of self-respect, and it feels that you are part of a big company that recognizes you for your efforts.”
None of this comes without a cost. Motorola spent $8 million over eight years to raise the basic academic level of its hourly employees. But the payoff, Frasier said, is that nearly all of the workers who scored low have graduated from the company-sponsored basic courses. And Motorola remains the worldwide leader in cellular phones.
Even so, companies shouldn’t have to shell out money for basic academic retraining, Frasier said. For the moment, Motorola sees no alternative until schools and society graduate better-educated workers, he said.
“People have got to be able to read to the 9th-grade level and compute to pre-algebra level in order to hold down a job in this decade,” Frasier said. “If they can’t, we can’t build a product that will satisfy our customers and we’re out of business.”
