The course of inspectorship training is made up of two units: one dealing with the business and accounting side of inspection and the other with the technical instruction which is given through participation in the actual work of inspection at the arsenal, observation of the manufacturing processes, and direct group instruction.
The first unit is given at Washington and usually requires from four or five days to a week for its completion. The second unit is given at the Rock Island arsenal and covers eleven days as a minimum. Only the most experienced men, however, complete it in this length of time. The men enter the school at irregular intervals in groups of four or five at a time. The number in training at any one time varies from thirty-five to fifty.
The men are moved from department to department on a fixed schedule. When a man completes his training he is assigned to a plant in accordance with his qualifications as indicated by his previous experience and his record at the school. Further plans for training the inspector after he has been assigned to the field have been proposed but have not yet been put into effect. Many of the candidates for this training are instructors in vocational training.[3]
The opportunity for promotion of skilled workers was never so great as at present, and the opportunity for schools to train them will never be greater than at present. The schools may well organize intensive short courses in practical training, as well as other courses designed to advance qualified workers to positions of directive work in the factories.
While the part-time plan offers excellent opportunities for advancing selected workers in order that they may acquire certain technical knowledge, it is doubtful whether much of this work during this emergency period can be done in the public or private industrial and trade schools. We all know that certain industrial concerns have established part-time schools in their plants. These classes in the works are especially adapted, in the present emergency, for training selected workers to become specialists and foremen. If the school is near the plant, so that industrial workers can attend for part-time day instruction for a period of six or eight hours a week without loss of time or without interfering with production, it may be possible to develop some part-time courses in the schools, but, generally speaking, it would be better for the instructors in these schools to go directly to the plants themselves and give this part-time instruction there. In another chapter mention will be made of a feasible part-time system and the necessity for some such system, but it refers only to boys and girls between fourteen and sixteen years old who belong primarily in school and not primarily at work. It is assumed that the group of which we have been thinking is the older group of workmen who wish to become foremen.