Micro-Clean, Inc., in business in the Lehigh Valley since 1974, provides critical cleanroom, HEPA filtration, containment device and calibration independent testing services to a myriad of major pharmaceutical, biotechnology, healthcare, education, chemical manufacturers and research institutions within the mid-Atlantic and southern New England states. To accomplish these services to the highest possible quality standards, we place great emphasis on internal knowledge-based and proficiency training of our technical and support staff. This has resulted in building and keeping a highly-knowledgeable and dedicated technical workforce. This training also allows opportunities for individual advancement and personal growth to expand a person’s knowledge and experience.
As the economy took a downturn over the past three years, Micro-Clean was already prepared to work “lean” – still maintain high quality, but do it with fewer resources. Micro-Clean has been fortunate that our business model has allowed us to grow, expand and hire new personnel, when other businesses are scaling back, laying-off personnel, or shutting down.
The challenge we face in being a lean organization is: “When you are training, you are not servicing your customers and removing technical trainers from your personnel pool.” So we had to make our training sessions deliver the powerful technical message with clarity and brevity, thereby providing knowledge retention and job proficiency.
One service we provide to our customers is technical training sessions on various topics such as cleanrooms and HEPA Filters in the regulated pharmaceutical industry, Biological Safety Cabinet and containment device testing, and Laboratory Ventilation safety programs. This service helps our customers’ industrial hygiene & safety, operations and facility maintenance staff stay current and knowledgeable about our ever-changing regulations, standards and recommended testing practices in our field. These training sessions require a trainer who is technically knowledgeable and a comfortable public speaker.
One of the first places we looked at was how well our trainers were instructing our personnel and were they delivering the training objectives in a way that promotes knowledge retention. We brought in outside personnel from an institute that specialized in training public speakers, training plan development, and critiquing the actual execution of a prepared training lesson. The results were almost immediate. Trainers were preparing lively informative presentations and trainee feedback critique results showed a marked improvement from previous training sessions.
A second area Micro-Clean targeted was Customer Service interaction with the customer. This started by training the Customer Service staff on better communication techniques as well as knowledge of our technical services provided so they could better serve the customer. Preliminary findings from this training are that the customer communication has improved and customers are more aware of other services available to them that they currently may not be taking full advantage.
Our WEDnetPA program partner organization, Northampton Community College, has been a valuable source for helping us to find the best outside training sources. After our public speaking training class, later customer training sessions have resulted in new training requests from additional customers and industry organizations asking for our personnel to lecture at their seminars.
The WEDnetPA program also helped to recoup some of the costs of sending our personnel out for the above-mentioned sessions. This was invaluable in “getting the most bang for our buck”. In today’s economy, any dollar saved helped. Without this assistance, some of our training and larger company goals may have been delayed or altered in order to remain fiscally responsible to Micro-Clean and its valuable employees.
