The Three J Programs
A high-level tour of the standardized courses Training Within Industry delivered to first-line supervisors — and how the set fits together.
This section gives a high-level tour of the standardized courses Training Within Industry delivered to first-line supervisors. The aim here is orientation, not instruction: you should come away knowing what each program was for and how the set fits together. The methods themselves are taught in the dedicated guides.
By the end of this section, you should understand:
- what the three "J" programs — Job Instruction, Job Relations, and Job Methods — each set out to do,
- where Program Development and the later Job Safety and Problem Solving courses fit,
- and how the three J's map onto the five needs of a good supervisor.
1Job Instruction (JI)
Job Instruction was the first and largest of the J programs, put into nationwide operation in 1941. It taught a supervisor how to teach a person to do a job — correctly, safely, and conscientiously. Its central conviction, dramatized in the famous opening demonstration where supervisors failed to teach a simple knot by telling and then by showing, was that neither telling nor showing is teaching: if the worker hasn't learned, the instructor hasn't taught. The course centered on breaking a job into its important steps, identifying the key points within them, and using a disciplined method to train each person to capability rather than to a one-time demonstration.
The Job Instruction guide covers this in depth.
2Job Relations (JR)
Job Relations, released nationally in 1943, addressed a different supervisory skill: how to lead people and handle problems with them. Its premise was that supervisors get new people all the time but no instruction book comes with them — and that employees tend to judge the whole plant by the treatment they receive from their immediate boss. The course gave supervisors a way to work through a people problem deliberately (get the facts, weigh and decide, take action, check results) and a set of foundations for preventing such problems in the first place, such as letting each person know how they are getting along and giving credit when due.
The Job Relations guide covers this in depth.
3Job Methods (JM)
Job Methods, begun nationally in 1942, taught supervisors how to improve the way a job is done — to produce more quality product in less time by making better use of the people, machines, and materials already on hand. Drawing on established principles of scientific management, it had supervisors break a job into its details, question every detail, and then develop an improved method by eliminating, combining, rearranging, and simplifying. It was careful to insist this was working smarter, not harder, and that supervisors should never claim credit for a worker's idea — one stolen idea will stop all others.
The Job Methods guide covers this in depth.
4Program Development and the other courses
Alongside the three J's, TWI created a fourth wartime program, Program Development. It was aimed at a plant's own training people rather than the supervisor: it showed them how to spot where training was needed and how to build and run programs — built on the J courses — to meet those needs. It was the hardest to deliver and the least widely used of the four. Two more courses came later, after the wartime service ended — Job Safety, a postwar program that began in Canada and was developed further in Britain, and Problem Solving, developed by TWI's successor organizations (the TWI Foundation, and a better-known TWI Inc. version in 1956) — but neither approached the reach of the three J's. This guide treats them only in passing; its subject is the three J programs.
5The three J's and the five needs of a good supervisor
To explain the purpose of its courses to skeptical managers, TWI argued that every good supervisor has five basic needs: knowledge of the work, knowledge of responsibilities, skill in instructing, skill in leading, and skill in improving methods. The first two — knowledge of the specific work and of a specific company's rules, policies, and relationships — were company- and industry-specific, so TWI left them alone. It addressed the other three directly. That is exactly what the three J programs are: Job Instruction develops skill in instructing, Job Relations develops skill in leading, and Job Methods develops skill in improving methods.
This guide reuses the five-needs framing from the Job Instruction guide, where it is introduced in full.
Job Instruction (skill in instructing), Job Relations (skill in leading), and Job Methods (skill in improving methods) are the three "J" programs of Training Within Industry — and three of the five needs of a good supervisor.
What to notice: the three J's reinforce one another. A supervisor who teaches well, leads well, and improves methods is meeting three of the five needs at once — and the same people skills run through all three.
Section summary
Training Within Industry delivered three standardized courses for first-line supervisors — Job Instruction (teach a job), Job Relations (lead people and handle problems), and Job Methods (improve the way a job is done) — supported by Program Development for setting up training, and joined later by the postwar Job Safety and Problem Solving courses developed by other countries and TWI's successor organizations. The three J's correspond to three of the five needs of a good supervisor: instructing, leading, and improving methods.
The next section turns from what the programs were to what they accomplished: TWI's impact in the United States — its remarkable wartime scale, the documented results, and the postwar fade at home.