Ground-Zero Training

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State programs. When Tabra needed to train its production employees in English as a second language, the company was able to get two grants from the state of California to cover the cost of an outside instructor. Human-resources manager Joyce Shearer found out about the state program through the local literacy council, and she reports the funding was not that complicated to obtain.

The good news is that many states have some type of funding available for training; when ASTD last surveyed the states, in 1989, 46 had some training funding or tax credit available. The bad news is that the state programs can be housed in one of many state departments, from education to economic development to labor. One suggestion: Plott of the ASTD recommends that the place to start looking is your state's economic-development authority or department. His reasoning: its mission is business assistance. As a result, even if a training incentive is run through another department, the economic-development staff may be able to direct you to it.

Federal programs. You can expect an increased emphasis on training under the Clinton administration; one campaign proposal included a requirement that companies spend 1.5% of payroll on training -- or pay the money into a government training fund. What's not clear is whether there would be a small-business exemption to such a requirement, according to Todd McCracken, legislative coordinator for National Small Business United.

In the meantime, there is a federal program called the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA). Its subsidies are, however, targeted very narrowly to "economically disadvantaged" employees, such as low-income people or displaced workers. If much of your employee population fits that description and you do a lot of training of new employees, it's worth looking into; for example, Unitech in northern Idaho and Cooperative Home Care in the Bronx both use JTPA funds.

Be warned, however: there are plenty of problems dealing with JTPA, and amendments Congress passed last fall may soon make it even tougher to work with. Surpin, who works directly with the program, describes the paperwork as "somewhat of a bookkeeping nightmare" -- and the cash flow in reimbursement as "terrible." Unitech avoids that problem: it uses the Panhandle Area Council, a local economic-development group that works with many of the area's unemployed, as a referral source for candidates for entry-level jobs. The council takes care of the JTPA eligibility requirements and paperwork; in addition, Unitech saves some time interviewing, because the council screens out unlikely candidates.

6. Now I've got a lot of information. but I still don't know one crucial thing: where am I supposed to start?
Unfortunately, there's no one good answer to that question. The system to deliver training in this country is highly fragmented -- and highly inconsistent in quality. It could be that in your location, you have one of the best community colleges and the worst state training incentives around -- or it could be just the reverse. While academics and policy types are busy lamenting this confusion, as a small-business person, you're pretty much on your own.

The fact is, many of the companies interviewed for this story made some false starts before they developed the training programs that work well for them. What matters more than where they started was the fact that they did start -- somewhere, anywhere. As the training programs developed companies sometimes switched providers as they better understood their needs -- or found better resources.

A typical example is Tabra, whose training program started with private English-as-a-second-language (ESL) tutoring for two key production employees. But human-resources manager Shearer wasn't satisfied with that approach, which was expensive. So she decided to get training from the local literacy council to be a tutor herself. Eventually, through the council, she found out about California's training funds, which enabled Tabra to offer full-fledged ESL classes. In the end Shearer's experiences with the private tutoring helped her design Tabra's ESL classes: by that time she had already learned that the key to making the program effective was to focus strictly on work-related English.

You also don't need a lot of resources up front to launch a training program. Instead, it's more common for a company to start small, as Tabra did, and gradually expand the training it offers. What seems to happen is that as managers get more experience with training and its results their commitment begins to escalate.

Probably the most dramatic example of that phenomenon is the Plumley Cos. When Mike Plumley started out by hiring the local vocational school to teach his employees statistical process control, about a decade ago, he had no idea his company would someday be offering in-house classes in everything from basic Japanese to rubber technology. But he found that the more he trained his people, the better his company did, and that was enough for him. It's a simple equation, really, and Plumley puts it simply. "The more we've been able to improve education, the better we've been able to manage our business."

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