Individual Skill Burndown

Burndown of individual skills, such as using a circular saw, framing a house, welding, etc. These should be broken down into chunks appropriate for insertion into the Integrated Skill Burndown

Each skill involves

1. the skill per se - techniques, insights, tricks of how to be a tool ninja for this area. First is basic proficiency, and later come higher skills,
2. equipment use - understanding choices of equipment, tools, and jigs involves in the endeavor.
3. tool maintenance - without it, an integrated operation stalls as equipment breaks. Attaining lifetime design capacity from tools via repair, upgrade, and maintenance assures the lifetime design aspect.
4. tool design - because building improved tools is key to continuing increase of efficiency
5. Meets spec - this is the quality control - features of quality that are sought in successful performance. A spec is defined for the job to pass - as opposed to rework. Data collection for time includes not the execution time only, but execution time including any rework necessary.
6. data collection - how to document important features of performance by understanding the critical elements to show in pictures and videos.

The most important aspect of data collection is doing it. The simplest way we have found is taking a picture at the beginning and end of the Individual Skill execution. This provides the critical ingredient of time (from time stamp at beginning and end), as well as the actual product and its qualities.

The data collection graph consists of time to perform task on thy y axis - which should typically be minutes. The X axis is the date - in other words, as the apprentice practices this skill, what time improvement is observed with successive builds?

Each student is required to complete 12 data points over 4 years for each task. For the data collection requirement to not be onerous - the simple method of start-end picture-taking works well. Pictures can be stored online, and the graph can be drawn up at any later time when a person has time to review data.