ABSTRACT
How people learn skills and how development of skills may be expressed in terms of a learning curve are the subjects of Sections 2.1 and 2.2. These topics are introduced generally and qualitatively, including by analogy with the behavior of linear systems as described by control engineers. How learning curves may be used both by workers and companies to assess workers’ skills and to support workers’ development and by companies to evaluate both their workers’ and their own technical competence is the topic of Section 2.3. Some industry field studies are reported in Section 2.4. How to define and measure manufacturing skills in particular is the subject of Section 2.5.
