The BAS Service Technician is one of the most challenging roles due to the diversity of skills and tasks required.
So how do you become a service technician and why would you want to?
In this episode we discuss:
- The three types of service roles
- How to gain the skills required of a service technician
- How to get a job as a BAS service technician
Click here to download or listen to this episode now.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Transcript
Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito episode 303. Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome to episode 303 of the smart buildings Academy podcast. In this episode, we are going to be talking about the BAS service tech roles. So for the past couple weeks, we have been talking about establishing a career in building automation. And we've been talking about the different roles and building automation. Now granted, and I've gotten some feedback on this, these roles are primarily focused on the contractor side of things. There are roles on the owner side, there are roles on the engineering side as well. So I do want you to be cognizant of that. And maybe in some future episodes, we are going to be covering that. But being that a good 80% of our customer base is contractors and system integrators, we're going to be focusing on the roles that primarily exist within those types of organizations. As always, anything we discuss can be found at podcasts, smart buildings, academy.com, forward slash 303. Once again, that is podcast that smart buildings academy.com forward slash 303. Alright, so let's dive in the BAS service tech, this was actually my second role in building automation, I started off as this kind of Omni bas role, because I was working for a small contractor. And they had me doing design programming technician work, etc. And then I moved from that into a service role and very quickly ended up leading the service team. And I think it was because of a couple things I did from a training and learning and development perspective that enabled me to step into that. And I'll talk about that later on in the episode. But what is a service tech? Well, a service tech can be typically one of three things, you can be a service technician who does planned service work, that means that you show up at a customer's site, you have an allocated amount of time with specific tasks that you will be doing. Now, I will say that, in my experience, this is becoming a less and less common thing, not to say it's not common, but it's just becoming less common. There's less that you have to do to maintain a building automation system. If it's installed, right, these days versus in the past, there was much more you had to do the electronics were much more sensitive. They were not things that you would be like, Okay, well, if it goes bad, we'll just replace it. No electronics were very expensive and sensitive in the past nowadays. It's like, oh, well, if that controller goes bad, we'll just replace it, you know, we'll go and replace whatever part has been bad. And if it sounds like I just stopped and started I did. And the reason I'm going to point this out is because this is the life of the next kind of service tech, which is the service technician, you kind of most commonly think of the person who gets a call from dispatch, and they've got to be able to go and fix an issue. So this type of person is someone who can take a distraction, and be like, totally focused on one thing. And then like, Oh, crap, I got a service call, I got to switch gears and I got to go and think about something else. Like literally, I was recording this podcast, and then I started getting emails and slack pop ups. And that distracted me. And I had to go and close those down, and then just restart recording the podcast. But I'm able to do that because my mind is able to switch gears, and you have to have that kind of mind. So what I tend to find is that focus on the construction side of things, they tend to do very well with linear tasks. This isn't a strength or weakness, I guess it is in some ways, but it doesn't make them better or worse. I see some folks who are like, well, construction is for people who aren't smart enough to do service. And I disagree with that. There's plenty of complex construction work, just saying. But what I do tend to find is that folks who want to follow a linear, okay, we're going to do this, this, this and this, they tend to work very well and construction. Folks who are more ADHD like myself and who constantly are like squirrel squirrel, they tend to do very well in service because oftentimes what will happen, especially traditional service, you will end up okay, I'm going to work on three different things. today. I'm going to do two hour service call here three hour service call there, and maybe another three hour service call somewhere else and they may be completely different things. Additionally, service in my experience gives you the greatest variety of experience which is is critical to growing in a building automation career. Now I know that I often in our courses, and our podcasts will say that you can bypass experience with education, which is definitely true, you definitely can bypass the baseline required experience with education. But if you want to step into the higher roles, the roles that are more obtuse and complex, like I'm just about to cover in a second retrofit or major systems integration, then having a depth of experience with a variety of systems types is going to help not because you need to get the knowledge, I want to be clear on this. It's not the experience of getting the knowledge of the systems that you're gaining here, it's getting the knowledge of being able to digest information from multiple disparate sources and piece that together, I want to give you some examples, because that sounds kind of like pie in the sky. But you know, most people with a couple weeks of education can understand how VAV box system works, how an ag works, how pressure works, how flow works, how chiller stage up and down, you know, if you have focused education on those topics, you can learn that. Now what becomes a little more difficult to learn is okay, I've got a train system and Allerton system and ALC system, how do I go and I digest their tech pubs and understand their capabilities and points of integration? How do I understand their points of retrofit? At what point can I pull out the system? At what point can I plug things in? How do I go and digest lighting systems like Lutron? Or some other lighting system? How do I digest a AV system? How do I take in that information that is experiential, there is a process to it. And we do teach that in our system integration class. But there's also a very experiential portion to that as well, which is why I find a lot of people struggling to do system integration. I know I'm segwaying here, but I will bring this back to a point. That's why I find a lot of people struggling with system integration, because they need the experiential learning in order to go and execute system integration. But the only way to get the experiential learning is to execute the system integration. So it's kind of like a chicken in the egg. And that very well is the experience with service, you often need a diverse skill set with service to be a service technician. But in order to get that diverse skill set, you often have to do service work. So how can you bypass that? How can you at least get yourself up to a level of understanding so that you can execute service work? We'll talk about that, as I mentioned at the end of the episode. Alright, and the third and final type of service work is known as retrofit. And this personally is my favorite work. It's like all the fun of construction with none of the BS, if done, right, right. If you do it right, then yeah, that's true. If not done right, then you're kind of Sol. But what I find really exciting about retrofit work is I can go and meet with a customer problem, solve, identify their problem, identify their use case and be like, alright, this is your problem. Let's go and fix this problem.
Phil Zito 8:24
Let's go and figure out why you're having this problem. And then let's create a solution. And I'm not under some GC, I'm not under some engineer, I'm oftentimes reading the sequence like even though you technically shouldn't be doing that, because you're not a PE, and there's liability. But let's be real, a lot of the time in retrofit, you rewrite sequences, and you don't get things stamped. Not saying that's good, that actually is not good. But it is the truth that a lot of people do that. So the retrofit work, to me is really fun, because you get to like make things the way the customer wants. And you get to be creative. And it draws on so many different talents, right? It tells them project management technician, designer, programmer work.
Phil Zito 9:07
It's super duper fun. So service is like a mixed bag of so many things like you can have the very predictable plan service agreements, like I just show up, I do the same thing. I know you you know me, the only one you want to work on your system. Hey, we're all gravy. That's cool. Then you got the service tech who's like running and gun and like oh my gosh, service calls service calls service call Ooh, is that a retrofit opportunity? Let me hand that off service call service call service call, boom, boom, boom, right? Very high paced, very intense, very stressful, a lot of fun. And then you got retrofit, which is kind of middle of the road, right? You get that that service intensity, but across a longer period of time because you're doing these less predictable things. But they're within the structure of a construction project, which I mean, we went through how construction projects worked, I think Starting in oh my goodness, what was I deleted the episode Son of a biscuit. There was an episode. But I don't have it on my Excel sheet unfortunately, it's somewhere in here Oh 685 Episode 684 685 is where we started our construction series. So if you want to refer like step by step, it's like 12 episodes long. And it goes through every step of construction. But the thing is, is that with that retrofit service tech, you get to have all the fun of service in the unpredictable nature of it, but you also get to have like a framed structure of construction. Okay, so how do you step into these roles, because naturally like, service, they cost more, the technicians get paid more, the companies bill out more. And I get a lot of people who are like, your was it the customer or the BAS contractor is, you know, 60 bucks an hour when they're doing construction, and we're talking burden, right. But when I want them to do service, they're 100 bucks an hour. Well, that's not exactly true. Because oftentimes, the BAS contractor is under the mechanical, who's under the general. So the mechanical puts markup on the BAS contractor and the general puts markup on the BAS contractor. So I think if we compare apples to apples, you'll tend to find that even in a construction environment, the rate at which a BAS contractor, his billing out is very similar to their service, not exactly one for one, but close probably like 80% of what they bill out for service. Okay, so let's talk about how we learn our skills. So first things first, we have to make sure that we are solid on the fundamentals of electrical, H fac, Bas, and it. Now I've beaten these topics to death in previous episodes, so I'm not going to dive deep into each one. But just suffice to say that you don't have to have mastery of them. But you have to have a solid understanding. If you can't look at a circuit and tell what's going on. If you can't look at an H fac system and figure out what's going on. If you can't look at a BAS and identify the parts and pieces and understand by looking at the programming what is trying to be achieved, then you're probably not ready for a service roll. Now the good news is you can learn most of that via education and bypass the OJT portion of that. What you really can't do, and this takes a little more work is understanding the connections. So okay, we've got low pressure on a secondary loop. What are the connections to that, you know, I talk often about the time when I was doing a secondary loop at a church. And this went across a parking lot and someone had bumped into one of the balancing valves in the central plant. And that was starving the secondary loop. And we were trying to figure out why there was this pressure drop. And it was only because of the sound when we walked into the central utility plant that was able to be recognized. They were like, oh, that sounds like a deadheading pump. So we're going to go and deal with that deadheading pump and address that issue. Okay, so just be cognizant that not always, but sometimes it's going to be experiential. The good news is, is that with the solid foundations, you can still go and step into like a junior service tech role. Now, once you're in that junior service tech role, it's up to you to aggressively seek out every opportunity you can to stretch yourself. There's a lot of people who will just take what's handed to them. Personally, the reason why I was able to move into a leadership role besides for the military experience, which gave me a heads up on leadership was that I was taking on all the really difficult service calls that people just couldn't figure out. And I was doing a lot of self study in the after hours going and trying to figure out how do I work with these various systems learning these various systems, I actually would go and read the entire programming manual Lyle, like all 900 pages of it, so that I understood how it worked. And with that knowledge, I was able to go and rapidly move up through the service role. So like I said, getting it is a matter of skills, and then it's the same process I've talked about before, right? Reach out to the operations manager, the service manager, explain your passion, explain what you've done to learn. Tell them how you're going to contribute. Give examples of the work and studying you've done and get them to place you in a role. If you do that once again. And I've had many people feedback to me that they've done this and it's worked. You will stand out above other candidates who are not putting in the self study and are instead you know, watching Netflix or playing video games at night. Rather than putting in the work you put in the work. demonstrate that you're putting in the work and you proactively communicate to the people who actually manage the employees and you will get hired. Alright, so like I said, everything's available at podcasts at smart buildings Academy, Ford slash 303. Let's get this podcast that smart buildings Academy four slash 303. And if you're interested in a service role or a technician role, I definitely encourage you to check out our training programs. They are used by pretty much all of the large OEMs and most of the large system integrators and contractors in the United States to train their employees. And I would encourage you to use that exact same training to skill yourself up and to be able to move into the role of your choosing.
Phil Zito 15:43
Thanks a ton. And as always, if you have any questions, hit us up. I'd love to hear from you. Thanks, Todd. Take care
