Turning experience into a system of learning
Building an apprenticeship community at Horner Industrial Group
A complex learning challenge
Founded in 1949, Horner Industrial has a rich legacy as a premier industrial rotating equipment organization. Experience had long been one of Horner's greatest assets, but that knowledge had become very difficult to share with new generations. New hires were assigned into a role based on their prior experience, without a clear pathway to progress. Senior technicians hadn't bought into mentoring, as it wasn't clear how they could train newcomers without sacrificing production.
Access to learning in practice was a significant challenge for new employees. Whether a new hire succeeded depended largely on their social ability to navigate the workplace. Regional Workforce Centers and Industry Advocacy groups offered off the shelf solutions that weren't built for Horner's environment: they assumed high-volume, repeatable manufacturing, while Horner's reality is constant variation, critical thinking, and front-line judgment — where every motor that comes through the door is a different customer use case.
Ambition to grow the legacy
Before engaging Intangled Learning, Horner had socialized an apprenticeship program for 15 years. Their work — high-skill manufacturing with day-to-day variation that places a premium on front-line judgment — doesn't fit a standardized curriculum. Pieces of the puzzle were tried over the years: an Electricity 101 class here, a Motor Bearings class there. None of it added up to a system.
What they knew was that their greatest asset was the experience-based knowledge held by their motor winding, machining, and mechanical technicians. Their ambition was to turn that tacit knowledge into a real learning system - one compelling enough that trade schools, high schools, and technical colleges would actively promote Horner to their students, and a 20- or 30-year-old considering the profession would look at Horner and think, "that's something I want to try."
The transformation
Intangled Learning shared at the beginning that it’s approach would be unique. Contrasted with conventional approaches, Intangled Learning would not:
- Try to become an expert in what Horner does
- Pre-design general competencies based on assumptions about what people need to know
- Spend excessive time codifying knowledge that should remain tacit
Horner required a more sophisticated approach that better described its knowledge assets, accounted for its cultural and historical legacy, and protected the integrity of active production.
Phase 1- Align on what learning is
Phase 1 aligned senior technicians and leadership around a shared concept of learning: that learning in practice is a complex social activity, not a mechanical process. That shared concept was tested by giving two initial mentors the agency to engage with two initial apprentices in the natural flow of the work. Narratives from work were generated, concretely demonstrating and building confidence that newcomers could gain access to authentic learning opportunities.
Phase 2- Form the Mentor Council
Phase 2 brought together five senior technicians and the operations manager to form a Practice Ownership Group - what the group itself came to call the “Mentor Council”. The council negotiated its own shared understanding of what learning in practice actually looks like at Horner, with Intangled facilitating those conversations and introducing key concepts and language when needed, while letting the outcome emerge from the group's own interaction. The goal of this stage was sustainability through shared ownership by the senior leaders of practice.
Phase 3- Launch the apprentices
Phase 3 launched six apprentices into the structure that emerged through the council's negotiations: a pre-apprenticeship pathway followed by an initial apprenticeship cycle through Horner's three major technical divisions, and a 90-day competency review cycle. Intangled's contributions throughout were theoretical and technical guidance, plus an online platform to support the program.
Outcomes
In 12 months, with minimal disruption to work, Horner gained:
- Increased production driven by improved employee retention and added personnel with direction. While Year 1 saw some decline in efficiency as expected, efficiency gains are expected as the program matures.
- 6 apprentices in a practice-based research structure, facilitated by Intangled’s platform.
- A codified Mentor Council of 5 mentors plus Operations leadership, governing the program by consensus through routine meetings every 30 days.
- A practice-based research strategy now generating a continuous narrative record of organizational knowledge.
What's next
With the foundation laid at Horner's headquarters facility, the program is expected to enable the facility to eventually grow from two production shifts to three, further increasing productivity. The next stage of the partnership is growth in two directions: expanding to other Horner sites across the Midwest, creating a network of practice that shares knowledge across locations and gives leadership visibility into the organization's knowledge assets; and credentialing that knowledge by aligning Horner's standards with industry bodies like the Electro-Mechanical Authority - elevating the prestige of the program and the profession.
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