County Services News

Using Private Sector "Quality" Principles to Improve Job Training Programs

During the 1980s, a "quality revolution" swept through the private sector. Total quality management concepts were adopted by many private firms to make them more entrepreneurial, more efficient and more responsive to customer needs.

In the 1990s, a similar revolution has swept through some parts of the public sector. For the past five years, NACo's employment and training program has helped foster a national movement to instill the concepts of total quality management - such as continuous quality improvement - into publicly funded job training programs.

This movement has emphasized that employment and training programs should view the citizens they serve as "customers." And like private firms, public agencies should collect customer satisfaction surveys, measure response time for services and strive to achieve ever higher levels of customer satisfaction.

To promote quality in county workforce development programs, NACo has joined hands with a relatively new entity, called the Enterprise. Created by the Labor Department a few years ago, the Enterprise is a network of local workforce development organizations, which emphasizes high quality, customer-driven services and using successful management techniques adapted from the private sector.

To become an Enterprise member, a county or city job training organization must meet three standards in delivering job training services to dislocated workers.

First, it must achieve a rating of 75 percent on a standard customer satisfaction survey administered by an independent research firm. Second, it must have a superior performance record, having placed at least 80 percent of its customers in jobs. Third, it must demonstrate a commitment to continuous improvement through responses to questions in critical quality management practices.

Currently, about 160 county and city workforce development organizations have qualified to become members of the Enterprise.

To help other local job training programs achieve the high performance ratings that will enable them to join as well, NACo's affiliate, the National Association of County Training and Employment Professionals (NACTEP), has formed a strategic alliance with the Enterprise.

Through this alliance, NACTEP and the Enterprise work together - through training sessions, at conferences and through their newsletters and other written communications - to increase the visibility among local workforce development organizations of the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Principles.

These principles are the seven criteria for the Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award. The Baldrige Award is the national award process for private sector companies invested in becoming quality-based organizations.

The Baldrige principles have been used by thousands of large and small companies wishing to improve their processes, bottom line results and customer satisfaction. For example, Federal Express boasts that it used the Baldrige principles to reduce its cost per package by more than 40 percent. Wainwright Industries reports that it has cut production time from 8.75 days to 15 minutes.

Although originally aimed at the private sector, the Baldrige criteria offer a set of organizing principles that can help any entity develop quality practices and processes. For workforce development organizations, the seven Baldrige criteria are:

• leadership - how it creates and sustains a customer focus, strong vision and clear values and expectations;
• strategic planning - how workforce development organizations can translate their vision and strategic plans into action plans for everyone in the organization;
• customer market and focus - how a job training organization learns about the requirements of its customers (job seekers and employers), builds customer relationships and determines customer satisfaction;
• information and analysis - how the organization manages data and information to support customer-driven performance excellence;
• human resource development and management - how the organization develops and uses the full potential of its workforce in pursuit of performance goals;
• process management - how the organization continually improves the design and delivery of services, support for its service delivery staff, and the provision of services by its "suppliers" (such as training institutions); and
• business or performance results - how the organization improves in the five key areas of customer satisfaction, financial results, human resource results, supplier performance and organization-specific results.

Enterprise members are proof that the use of the Baldrige Principles can pay off in the public sector as well as the private sector.

Utilizing Baldrige Principles, 67 percent of Enterprise members have increased their entered employment rates. On average, Enterprise members have also increased customer satisfaction from 72.5 percent to 76 percent and reduced the cost per job placement by $782.

(County Services News was written by Cynthia Kenny, senior research associate.)