Many companies are having difficulty holding on to frontline workers as factors like low pay, inadequate job training, and big workloads have made these roles undesirable. Telamon, a telecommunications services company headquartered in Carmel, Indiana, with locations in 12 states, plus India and Europe, experienced this with its telecommunications equipment installers.

The problem for Telamon was two-fold, Kat Gerig, its VP of HR, told HR Brew: Not only was the company having difficulty recruiting experienced talent, but it also had too many senior-level workers completing junior-level tasks. As a result, it launched its Academy Installer Program in 2021, a multi-year training curriculum structured to promote apprentices into senior roles.

Not the right mix. At Telamon, the telecommunications installers are assigned a level depending on their experience. Level one employees are entry-level, essentially trainees, while level four installers are capable of handling high-level, potentially dangerous tasks, like testing and rebooting live equipment and supervising junior workers.

While a training program for these roles had been discussed for years, nothing had come to fruition. As a result, Telamon had been hiring senior technicians to handle responsibilities junior employees should’ve been overseeing. In 2020, one year before the program launched, 82% of its technicians were level four employees.

Keep reading here.—PM

If you want to improve work performance, stop working (just for a moment) and start reflecting.

That’s according to Marie-Hélène Pelletier, a leadership psychologist, executive coach, and author of The Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Your Work Performance and Mental Health. In her book, Pelletier outlines how employees at every level can be more productive by aligning their work with their personal values. She shared insights from her book with HR Brew.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What can HR pros learn from your book?

What I do in the book is I provide [HR professionals] a way to build their custom, strategic resilience plan, because there are generic actions, we all know about them, but they’re very hard to implement in a very full schedule, and what’s missing is that strategic aspect that really takes into account each individual context.

Keep reading here.—MC

Some problems are best solved backward. No, we’re not talking about those math riddles you had to solve in middle school. We’re talking about supply, demand, and the supply chain pipeline.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that hiring in logistics, including anyone who would analyze or organize a supply chain, will grow by 19% in the 10 years between 2023 and 2033, which the agency notes is “much faster than average.” (The average growth rate is 4%.) The problem: Where, or how, are organizations going to find the next wave of eager, skilled supply chain professionals?

One school, Old Dominion University, located in Norfolk, Virginia, just a stone’s throw from the largest Navy base in the world and the Port of Virginia, has seemingly cracked the code.

Keep reading on CFO Brew.—NP