ABC Life Literacy Canada

As manufacturer DME discovered, workplace education is a way of welding higher productivity to better teamwork

Below is an excerpt from “Testing Its Mettle,” an article about Diversified Metal Engineering’s workplace education program that appears in the first issue of Canadian CEO. If you would like to receive a copy of the full article for reprint in a newspaper or newsletter, please contact ABC Life Literacy Canada by e-mail at info@abclifeliteracy.ca.

Peter Toombs, President Diversified Metal Engineering

With just 60 employees to design and engineer specialized equipment for industries as diverse as brewing, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and marine shipping, Charlottetown, PEI-based Diversified Metal Engineering is a small manufacturer with an ambitious, world-scale business plan. Besides the domestic Canadian market, it is active around the world - from the U.S., Mexico and Bermuda down to Colombia and Brazil, across the Atlantic to England and Ireland and on to Palestine, Kazakhstan, China and Japan. By the nature of the business, the workforce must be flexible, specialized and knowledgeable, says DME founder and president Peter Toombs. “Your employees are your most expensive asset, and their level of performance can be highly volatile. Whatever you can do to improve their confidence level, their communications skills and their professional ability in any way, the cost of the investment is insignificant compared to the potential losses of them being in their job and not performing.”

That philosophy explains why Toombs was quick to buy in when the company’s HR manager, Shirley MacDonald, approached him with a proposal for a concerted workplace education program in 1997. The idea had come to her after DME purchased scientific calculators for shop-floor employees. They were introduced as tools to help employees make calculations necessary for their jobs, though it became apparent that the tools were useless in the hands of people who couldn’t use them. While there were some employees who could teach their colleagues easily enough, the experience started MacDonald thinking. Since the company’s products - and the markets it serves - change quite frequently (there’s an important custom-design segment of the business), it is imperative that employees be highly adaptable to the dynamic demands of the business. A continuing education program, she concluded, was key to helping them achieve this goal.