In this episode, we dive into the core skills of successful building automation technicians. If you've ever found yourself wondering why do some BAS techs seem to effortlessly advance while I'm still stuck struggling, this episode is for you!
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Phil Zito 0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Phil Zito episode 324. Hey folks, Phil Zito here and welcome, again, because we had a little false start when we're recording this. So welcome to the episode in this episode we're going to be talking about the five core skills of successful bas technicians. Alright,
so let's dive into this right now, I've seen a lot of techs in my time get promoted, I've seen a lot of texts get fired. I've seen a lot of Tech's stalemate. So if you're sitting there and you're like, man, I've been doing this for a long time. And yet I see all these people around me and they're getting promoted. They're getting jobs, and maybe you even feel and maybe rightfully so that these people are incompetent. And it's like, Man, this person is not very good with installation. They're not very good with point to point check out, you have to go behind them on their work to make sure stuffs wired up, right. But yet they became a programmer. Why I mean, yes, in reality, some people do fail upwards. But there tends to be some core skills that matter when it comes to being a successful bas technician. And I don't ever see anyone talk about this. You know, so many folks, I see brag about their ability to work with all these different systems or their ability to tune a PID loop so tight that you couldn't like fit a human hair through the the difference between setpoint and process variable. But is that what really matters. And that's what we're going to explore today. So the five core skills of successful bas technicians, the first core skill of successful bas technicians, and this is probably gonna surprise you, is being able to sell yourself. Alright, now I know when you think about being a successful bas technician, the thought that pops in your head is not immediately selling yourself. But bear with me, this is super important. It is probably the single greatest factor on you having a higher salary, you getting more customer retrofit work, you getting higher positions, you need to be able to take an honest inventory of your skills, compare that inventory of your skills to others, and then communicate the value. Now what does that look like? Alright, so if you asked me, Mr. Phil Zito to go and install a fan motor right now, I could not tell you how to do that step by step. But I do have an ability, that really helps me out a ton. And it's an ability to go research, I would be able to using logic, go and figure out okay, how do we wire up a fan? What kind of how do I size the fan? How do I determine to install it. And it's that ability that I've been able to sell to others as a value. So my ability to learn how to integrate my ability to teach my ability to learn how to podcast, I've been able to sell that and create a training business. So you have to ask yourself, what can you do? Oftentimes, those folks who become designers become graphics folks become programmers, they become those roles because they convinced someone that they can do that. That's why you can see and you hear about this, and you see people poopoo on this. And in some aspects, going and complaining about this makes sense. But in other aspects, I just think people are being sore losers. So you'll see people who will be like, I got this programmer doesn't understand HVAC systems doesn't understand never was a mechanic and yet, he's a programmer why. And you can almost hear like the complaining voice I'm trying to project to you. And it's most likely because that person was able to understand a sequence, understand logic and translate that into programmatic form. And they were able to communicate that in such a way that the hiring manager or their manager was able to accept that they can do it and move them into that role. I've seen some amazing technicians who've been in the field 810 years who know how to program but no one else knows they know how to program. They'll go on job sites and the job site will be behind and they'll go and they'll clean up the code, but they don't ever tell anyone about it. You know the commissioning agents out on the job site with the technician and they're like, this sequence doesn't work, the tech makes the change, they make the programming change. And they go about their day. And no one knows. And that is why the number one skill for being a successful bas technician is to sell yourself. So how do you do it? Well, it's often very difficult to sell yourself in the moment, you often forget what you've done. It's hard to tell a story about your successes and capabilities. On the fly. I even struggle with that folks ask, you know, what makes smart buildings Academy so great. I mean, we've trained over 10,000 students now 1200 plus companies. But I've got that memorized. You know, if you asked me to go into detail of student success stories, I'd have to dig in. Remember, that's not because there aren't any. It's just because I'm not paying attention to those success stories, because I'm focused on my job. Well, the same with a lot of technicians. So what I highly recommend whether this looks like a notebook, whether this looks like a one note with this looks like a Google Doc, whatever it is, if you do something that you're particularly proud of, or that seems a little difficult, take note of it go in detail, what was the problem? So here's the framework, what was the problem? How did you solve the problem? And here's the big one, how did you solving this problem, benefit either your customer, or your company, now you start to keep a log of these. And you'll start to notice trends. Maybe you're someone who's really good at troubleshooting, maybe you are cleaning up job submittals, maybe you're going and cleaning up programming, you're going to notice a trend of what you're good at, you're going to have stories around what you're good at. And you're going to be able to communicate that to your customers, if you're trying to sell them something. And to the company you're working at, let me clear my throat here one second.
Excuse me. So you go in, you're able to communicate these things. And you're able to use data to communicate them. That is the one single greatest thing. Because yes, you can be that one unicorn technician who goes and just happens to have the right person at the right time, see you do the right thing, and then offer you a roll. But and this is this is something to focus in on as well, because you will see a lot of folks saying this right now. And it's somewhat true. But it's also somewhat false. That if you are alive and breathing, you can get a job and bas. And everyone is hiring anyone with any experience in any skills. Yes, that is true. So you most likely right now, if you've been doing this for a while, could go find another job, or could find another position. But how much will you earn, your salary is going to be kept on the ability to communicate your value. And if you're trying to go maybe become like a Facebook data center tech, or, you know, so you're going after those, you know, large, six figure jobs, you need to be able to sell your value. And how do you sell your value, you have a record of your value. So that's number one, right? The ability to sell yourself. Number two, I've already hinted at it. And if you're paying attention, you've already heard it. And it is the ability to research. So I was talking with our workforce development students this morning. And we're going through Module 13, of Bas 101, which is our H fac sequencing course. And we're talking through it and we were going and just explaining how everything works like what are the nuances of integration sequences, because they got through the H back sequences. Now we're talking about integration. I was talking about one of the problems I used to have when I was a lead service tech as leading a service team. And a problem I've heard from a lot of our customers is their tax who have done 30 To 40 to 50 integrations on like a York or a train or a carrier rooftop unit, still call them every time struggling to do the integration. Now at first glance, you may say well, they're incompetent. But as I started to discuss this with the students, I remembered a post I saw on the controls and building automation Facebook group. And it was this guy asking about a York rooftop unit and he was trying to control the fan speed. And folks were giving him some pointers and he's like, no matter what I do, I can't get this to work. Well, that's where the ability to research comes in. In my experience, integration interfacing, programming, sequencing, installing almost anything you need to do. You can Google it and find an answer to it within 10 to 15 minutes, almost anything. So how could research have benefited this person? While this person could have first researched and understood through talking to the customer, and the sequence? Why am I having to bring in these points? And that'll bring us to, you know, skill number three, which is asking good questions, which we'll talk about in just a second. But he could have figured that out. And then, once he understood the why, he further could have went and researched a York BACnet points list. And once he had that BACnet points list, he could have researched, read and write, which points are read which points are right, I can't tell you how many times I've met folks who map in read only points and bash their head against a wall as to why they can't command this point. I mean, it's a controller or it's a piece of equipment with an embedded controller on it. All you have is a set point and an enable point. And yet you're trying to control fan speed, you're trying to control valve position. And you can't do any of these things. Because all of that is inside the embedded controller. So you need to be cognizant and have the ability to research. Which brings us to number three asking good questions. Now, I asked a lot of questions when I was growing up in the field. Some people think a new tech should be quiet. Some people think you shouldn't make a lot of noise. You shouldn't ask questions. It shows that you're incompetent, it shows that you don't know what you're doing. Well, I disagree with that wholly. I'm constantly asking questions. I'm constantly admitting where I don't know things. And the successful bas technicians that I've run into ask a lot of questions. Because the stupidest thing you could do, and I've been guilty of this, right, I've been really, really guilty of going and being like, I know something, when I don't know something, just because I've been too embarrassed, I actually got called out on it. One of our electrical subs back when I was working service, said to our salesperson, that guy doesn't know shit about electricity. Because I was saying stuff, I was using the wrong terms. Because I was trying to sound like I knew what I was talking about. Because I was too embarrassed to ask a question. I was too embarrassed to look stupid. So therefore I made myself look stupid. By acting like I knew what I was talking about, you kind of see the the stupidity of that choice, you know, by either continuing to be quiet, or talking which I have a bad tendency to do not so much anymore as I've gotten older. But when I was younger, and very arrogant, very egotistical. And I had like this inferiority complex, I would have to prove myself. I would go and date stuff is facts rather than ask questions. I've learned though, watching a lot of the best technicians, they ask a lot of questions, they don't assume they know the answer. Now, at this point, you're probably shocked that nothing I've said, is technical. Because the reality is the stuff we know. And this pisses a lot of the old guard off. Stuff we know is not that complex. And it really irks me when I go on LinkedIn or Facebook. And I see these like, older dudes, and I'm an older dude now who are making the younger folks or the inexperienced folks think that our field is so gosh darn technical, that there's no way they could ever learn how to do it. And that I don't know why folks do that. But the reality is, there's only a couple concepts in the electrical side in the H fac side and the BAS side, and then it all comes down to processes. Which brings me to number four, the core skills of successful bas technicians, and that is processes. If you are relying on knowledge and not processes, you are doing things the hard way.
If I look back at every time I screwed up, you know when I decided to download a optimized chilled water program on a Friday to upgrade a program and it's spraying water at UNC Dallas on to students as they walk by or I wiped out the native American hospital south of Seattle, I wiped out their lawn database. As I look back at all these things that I've done the mistakes I've made there because I did not follow a process. Granted, in my defense each time I screwed up, I created a process afterwards. But that's the thing. And this is what I hammer to companies that do business with us is you need to have processes. If your technicians cannot point to a process for how to mount a VMA, controller, Vav, modular actuator controller on a VAV box and commissioned that vav controller if they cannot point to a process, a written process on how to do it, then your company is stupid. And I know that strong, and I know that like pisses some folks off. But that's dumb. What is the most common thing we touch in building automation? It's vav boxes. Do they change? Have vav boxes really changed significantly? In the past 20 years? Not really, except for shifting from pneumatics to DDC. So why would you not have a standard process for your electrical subs and for your technicians? It just does not make sense. And then for backups, why would you not have a standard backup process? Why would you not have a standard process for deploying servers maybe with a virtual machine image to speed it up? Why would you not have a standard process for mapping and controllers for addressing and setting up controllers? Heck, why would you not have standard processes and operating procedures for doing point to point commissioning for creating your submittals for doing takeoffs? The list goes on and on? And how do you approach this? Because this could feel frickin overwhelming? You're like, okay, Phil, I buy in that we need to do processes. I agree with you. Where do I begin? Because the way you make it sound, you
should have a process for everything. Yes, in my opinion, you should have a process for everything. But not every process is equal. Yo, so where do you start? Well, you start quite simply by looking at the stuff you do the most. So if you think about what do you do the most? What do you go and do the most on a day to day basis. And this is why it's important to not only track your success, but also just track what you do in general. So if you find yourself primarily doing vav boxes, exhaust fans or rooftop units, and you find yourself doing point to point functional test, you find yourself mapping those in and you find yourself creating graphics for them. Then guess what, you've just identified six processes, potentially even more, that you can go and document. And the good news is, once you've documented a process, all that's left to do is use the process, see what doesn't work and improve on the process until you know you reach a point of diminishing returns. When it starts to take you longer to improve the process than it does the return you're getting for the improvement, then you've met a point of diminishing returns because that's something folks often ask me is when can I stop improving the process? When it starts to take you longer to improve the process, then the return you get that's when you know you've got a pretty good process. So you know, if you're like, Man, my VAV box process, I can spend another day working on it tweaking adding documentation and images and videos and all this jazz. And that might save me five minutes on 10 vav boxes, it's probably not going to pay off, right? It's probably not a worthwhile investment. That being said, if you have no process, right, you have no process and you're like, Alright, I need to start from nothing. Well, that's good, because anything you do is most likely going to increase your efficiency. Picture it this way. And it still boggles my mind that companies have not done this. If we had more time as a training organization. This is something I would create and sell. And my sales team, once again is probably going to kill me for sharing ideas because they tell me not to share ideas. But I think this would sell like hotcakes going and creating standard processes for building operators that they can buy as a package. And you have like a QR code and they scan it and there's the standard process with a video that guides them through how to do that. I think you could sell the crap out of that to an owner operator. Because you are reducing their time you're reducing their dependence on contractors. And you're making it like stupid simple like okay, I take my Phone, I scan the QR code link pops up on an internal server that we've got. And it literally has, oh, my airflow is not coming out of my VAV box. These are the things I checked with videos like, this is the tubing. This is how you check the positive and the negative on the tubing etc. You I feel like that would sell like hotcakes. You know, that's the problem of owning a business, right is you have more successful ideas than you can execute. Okay, so that was you know, number four, I believe, right. And number five, I think we're at number four, someone in chat. If you're listening, let me know if we're at number four, I'm pretty sure we just finished number four. So number five, of the most of the skills for successful bas technicians, that I find to be very, very valuable, is quite simply the ability to know and try to guess what I'm going to say, what do you think I'm going to say here? If you think I'm going to say h fac Nope. If you think I'm going to say bas? Nope. If you think I'm going to say electrical Nope. It's the ability to understand technology. Now, this is not to be confused with it. I want to be very clear on that. So it's having a technical acumen. So in a way, it does mean H fac, it does mean electrical. It does mean bas. And it does mean it. But there's just this technical bent. And I
I don't know really how to develop that in someone. And that's kind of you know, someone's sitting there saying, Hey, why are you running a training organization and saying that at the same time, but there's people who are they either have that natural ability to think from a technical perspective, or they don't. Now, don't get me wrong. There are people who with enough hard work, and I've seen this happen, can learn H fat can learn it can learn electrical can learn Bas, but we've also seen that person who it just comes natural to them. So I'm going to tell you what I think develops that. And what I think works to create that, because I've seen that in my daughter's I've seen that in myself. I've seen that in other technicians. And here's what I think it comes from. I think it comes from a natural curiosity as to how things work. Combined with an ability to see patterns. And let me explain what that means. So if I were to go and look at a chilled water system, right, and you were to ask me to do load calcs on a chilled water system, I don't have those things memorized. But I could go and you know, figure that out with searching. And a reason I would be able to figure that out is one I have a curiosity. So I asked myself specific questions like, well, if I need to get water to this chilled water coil in this air handler to go and show the air. How is that going to happen? Right? How does that how does that happen? What what needs to happen to make water move? And this may seem very simplistic to you. But okay, if water moves in life by wind or some sort of power, waves, etc with gravity? Well, we know something makes water move. And I would say to myself, what makes water move and I would go and search it. And I'd be like all pumps make water move. Okay, well, why do we have pumps and you see the logic pattern that I would just kind of start to explore. Now that's a very simplistic pattern. But being able to understand these patterns, like okay, if a pump makes water move, and I need to get water to a coil in order to chill, and I'm not chilling the air I'm not cooling the air and the fan is on in the unit then what's possibly going wrong? Well, if I know the waters removing the heat, then it's got something to do with the water. And so is that just natural curiosity? So how do you develop that? By questioning by creating a mindset let me take another sip of water real quick.
Creating a mindset of curiosity of you know when your car breaks down? Yeah, you could take it to the mechanic or you could try to research and figure out why it doesn't work your internet slow at home, why could that be? Maybe you go and you run an Internet Speed Test and you figure out like what's going on, try to be curious about any technical thing. And that Curiosity will carry over into your professional life. I've seen that time and time again, people who are curious, tend to pick up technical concepts faster. And if you're literally looking to check the box, and just kind of go on your merry way, then don't expect to pick things up fast expect to struggle, unless you're just naturally gifted. Alright, so those are the five core skills. There obviously, are many more things that make someone a successful bas technician. But these are the five that I've seen in my experience that a lot of people don't talk about. And you know, I just want to say, Thank you, Chris, I see you in the chat. Thank you so much, all of you for engaging and continuing to be here. I do apologize about the technology snafu at the beginning of this. But you know, it is what it is. So I believe in our next session, we're going to be actually looking a little bit deeper into the skills associated with being a technician. I'm actually going to pull that up right here, because I want to cover it with you right now. So that you make sure to attend on Friday, which I will have the technology. Yeah. So on Friday, I'm going to do something that if you've been following this podcast for any amount of time, you've heard me mentioned the Pareto Principle. You've heard me talk about what are the 20% of things that you can do that result in or that cover kind of 80%. So that's what we're going to be looking at on Friday, we're going to be going into what do you actually need to know, in order to succeed in Bas, so we're going to explore the H fac side of things. We're going to explore the BAS we're going to explore the electrical, we're going to explore the I T and we're gonna explore the integration. So we're going to be looking at all of these. And we're going to be talking through kind of what do you need to do in order to go and be successful and really like the things that if you could only focus on a handful of things to grow your career, what would they be from a technical perspective. So today was a soft skill and mindset perspective, which quite honestly, I think is more important. And Friday, we're gonna dive into the technical skills. So thank you so much for being here. I appreciate all of you. And I look forward to talking to you and seeing you. You could check out everything that we're about at podcast that smart buildings academy.com forward slash 324. Once again, that's podcast dot smart buildings academy.com, forward slash 324. You'll find transcripts, you will find over 300 plus podcast episodes, you will find guides, you know, we're talking like guides that take an hour to read very in depth guides about programming integration, HVAC, you'll see webinars, you'll see live or recorded free mini courses. It's all there for you. So definitely go check that out. We're really invested in your success, whether you end up being our student or not. So thanks so much for being here. And I look forward to seeing you all on Friday. Take care
