The adoption of six sigma methodology to close learning-doing gap

Abstract

Taiwan’s economy has rapidly transformed from a traditional labor intensive sector to a technology intensive one. With the arrival of the 21st century, Taiwan entered the high-tech modern era. The over emphasized credential society, favoring those with strong education backgrounds, but not much work experience, led to the distortion of technical education’s function and a serious imbalance between talent supply at schools and talent demands in companies. A wide gap between learning in schools and performance demands in companies, thus, has been generated. This study adopts the six sigma methodology to close the learning-doing gap. The first DMAIC step, define, attempts to shorten the time for a newly employed person to be able to work alone efficiently and with confidence. In terms of measurement, this paper devises an indicator for new employees that are able to work independently and analyzes their process capacities with a fishbone diagram to address the learning-doing gap and find out why a new employee needs a long training period in order to work independently. Based on the results, a strategy and method for improvement are proposed. In the end, this paper develops a control system to ensure improvement.

Keywords:

• Technical education
• vocational training
• six sigma
• learning-doing gap
• business process management