Episode Description:
You’ve recruited fresh talent into your building automation business, now what? How do you take green hires and transform them into field-ready technicians who add value fast? The challenge isn't just hiring - it's training, mentoring, and setting them up for success without wasting time or resources.
In this episode of the Smart Buildings Academy Podcast, we dive into the step-by-step process of turning new recruits into confident, capable techs. You’ll explore different approaches to training, the role of mentorship, and how to strike the right balance between guidance and independence.
Key Topics Covered:
- The critical first step to assessing new hires before investing in training
- Why technical knowledge alone isn’t enough and what else they need to succeed
- How to structure a mentorship program that actually accelerates learning
- The secret to getting new hires job-ready in weeks, not years
- Common mistakes that slow down a recruit’s progress and how to avoid them
If you’re looking to scale your workforce efficiently and build a team of high-performing techs, this episode is a must-listen.
Click here to download or listen to this episode now.
Resources mentioned in this episode
- Free Technical Skill Assessments
- Smart Buildings Academy Workforce Development Program
- Smart Buildings Academy Courses
- Control Sequence Fundamentals HVAC Course
Podcast Video
Transcript
0:00
This is the smart buildings Academy podcast with Joe Hulsey Episode 483,
0:06
welcome to the smart buildings Academy podcast. This will be the follow up on my previous podcast in which I talked about why and how to find new recruits for our industry. And that podcast, I discussed the workforce shortage and the need to bring on new talent, rather than hoping to find enough experienced, skilled employees to fill the needs in our industry. So in this episode, I want to elaborate a little bit on that and talk about what to do with this new talent once we bring them on board, and how do we get them trained and ready for the field as quickly as possible? So I'll also be discussing some of the bait debates, such as whether to hold their hands or throw them straight to the wolves, formal training versus OJT, and how soon do we turn them loose on the jobs. All the information covered in this episode can be found on our website, at podcast, dot smart buildings academy.com, forward slash 483,
1:03
all right? So you have new hires, but you want to get them trained and field ready as soon as possible, right? Well, that's definitely understandable. That's the name of the game. That's going to be our end goal. But first, we really need to decide what does field ready mean? So for my purposes, when I talk about someone being field ready. What that means is that they can work independently as a technician and provide value to your organization with only the limited need of help from others. So obviously, you're gonna have different levels of technicians within your organization, and they'll have varying degrees of skills. So we'll look at this as maybe a tech level one. This is an entry level tech. We want them to be independent enough to handle the most basic service work that they'll be doing. So there are really three main areas that the new tech needs to be proficient in so that we can turn them loose. These will be installation service and soft skills. So each one of these comes with its own set of skill sets, and your company is going to need to ensure that the new hire is being trained appropriately in each area and by the appropriate person. I know, we oftentimes joke about install crews being very different than, say, a service tech or the service side, because you know, if you're doing install, if you're doing a lot of new construction, you're not really dealing with a lot of general public. You're dealing with other other workers. When you're doing service work, you're having to interact a lot with customers, and you're going to have to know how to read people and develop those soft skills a little better. Let's take a closer look at who our new hires are.
2:43
The first question is, does your new hire already understand the fundamentals of HVAC? Alright, let's take a look at two scenarios. First, we have the new hire who has some level of training, either through trade school, private organizations or some other routes that have taught this individual the fundamentals, then the second, we have a brand new off the street green hire. Maybe they're straight out of high school, or maybe they're coming from another career, and just heard that HVAC was a good career to get into. So our approach may be slightly different, depending on the background of this new hire. However, we're still going to follow the same guidelines. First, let's take a look at the new tech with no experience, but who has some type of formal training. First thing that we need to understand is that not all programs are created equal, so the quality of training and education can and will vary drastically, even within the same organizations. For example, some tech schools are funded with lots of equipment. They have instructors that really care, and instructors are really good at our jobs. Then we also have other programs that the HVAC department is little more than just a janitor's closet that has a retired plumber trying to teach HVAC, and I have seen that before, and you've got everything in between. You can have great schools with plenty of funding and bad teachers who are just trying to hang on until they can retire out. And then you have some very poorly funded schools. I have great teachers who are doing their best to make sure students are receiving a good education. Now let's look at the other side, which is going to be private training. So private training can be an outstanding option for a company when you're looking for expedited training. And there are a lot of good programs out there that provide that, and we'll explore that momentarily. But there are also a lot of programs out there that are sort of a buy a certification from us, type of organization. So once again, the quality can be all over the board,
4:51
all right. So it's important for us to understand this, because as a company or as an organization, we can't just assume that someone, even someone who.
5:00
Been through a formal training program is going to have the knowledge and experience or understandings of the fundamentals that we expect them to have. So having said that, they should have at least some understanding of things like electrical principles and refrigeration principles. So how are you going to determine whether or not that person has enough of that foundational knowledge to know what steps you need to take next in a word, assessments. So use some type of assessment on each new hire. If you're hiring them for the role of technician, and they tell you they've got a degree, or they've went through this training program or some other give them an assessment. It could be written assessment that tests their overall knowledge and gives you a good baseline of what they know what they don't know. I've seen a lot of companies who do practical assessments where they will have scenarios set up with relays and mock fans or lights or whatever. They'll put a problem in it, and they'll have the technician check it, give them some tools to go with their meters and whatever they need and just kind of observe the the new hire and see if they really do have a foundational understanding. But assessments are going to be critical for you to know what step to take next.
6:15
All right, now let's look at the second group. This is our completely green hire. So we said someone doesn't have to be trained formally initially, when we hire them in, we're just looking for people who are trainable, right?
6:28
So what is your role in the fundamentals? So if they do not have any formal training, then you're going to have to arrange for that training.
6:38
Their growth rate may or may not be slower than those who already have the fundamentals, but in this instructor's humble opinion, it is an essential step in developing quality technicians as quickly as possible. It seems like it's going to take a lot of time to really get these fundamentals down, but in the grand scheme of things, it's really not, in my opinion, field work does not replace intentional training. Think of it this way, a helper who you bring on and you use as a tool Toter today, a year from now, will be a great tool toner, but they're still just going to be a tool Toter, right? They have to have intentional training in order to really develop these skills. So I've been on both sides of this argument of experience versus education in my working life. And by education I mean some type of proper training, not necessarily through a formal state education system. It could be private, whatever. But when I was in the field, I was really, really hungry for the information. I really wanted to know why we had to do things a certain way, and I really wanted to grow my career. But I wasn't really given a lot of that information. I got a lot of answers like, well, that's just kind of industry standard, or that's just code. And I'm like, what industry standard Are you referring to? What code is this the cold or the Wild West? You know, we talk about Morris cold, you know, give me a little more than that, but no one could actually give me the reason or the resources for the things that they did. And now, looking back on that, I realize it's because these technicians themselves and these individuals, they didn't really know why they did what they did. They were just repeating what someone else had taught them.
8:22
So when I finally decided that I needed formal training, to me, it was like a kid in the candy store all these questions that I had had answers right there in front of me. We explained how this stuff works. Yes, we had to go back and understand fundamentals. We had to go back and talk about refrigeration cycle. We had to talk about the difference between volts, amps, ohms, and all that basic stuff. But once we got that down and we started applying it, everything that I had done started making sense, and it started falling into place, I was told, Well, this is how it works, and so this is why we do what we do. This is why we check what we check, right?
9:00
Also, hey, by the way, here's the international mechanical code, here are the ASHRAE Standards, here's magnet guideline, here's ACCA guidelines. And also be aware of these state and local code and laws that are also going to be inspected and enforced. So I got all this wealth of knowledge all of a sudden, it wasn't a guessing game. There wasn't some big mystery as to why I did what I did, and from there, I could make informed decisions, and I could really grow as a technician incredibly fast, compared with someone who's just learning from his buddy that's out there in the field just telling him whatever comes to mind while he's out there working. And if you think about it, our industry is really too complex to rely on. Well, that's just how you do it. There are some industries that are fine. I mean, if you're a brick mason or block Mason,
9:49
that is a skill set. I'm not knocking any of that, but it is not quite as technical and as regulated as ours. For us, we have to deal with electrical electrical control.
10:00
Roll wiring, all of our super heat, sub cooling, saturation temperature pressures, heat transfer, all these refrigerants and regulations and so on and so forth. The list just goes on and on. And if you think about it, HVAC is going to touch more engineering sciences than any other of the major trades out there. We hit mechanical, electrical, chemical, psychrometric, but it's hydronic, thermodynamics. And in addition to having to have a decent understanding of all these we also have to understand how they all play with each other, how changing one variable will affect something somewhere else. Which brings me to my next point, that a good technician does not necessarily make a good teacher, the same way a good technician may not make a good business owner. So they can, however, be good mentors, which is what we'll be leading into, because a technician in the field honestly does not have the time to teach all these different engineering technical information to the helper on the job, but what they can do is explain how those principles apply to the job at hand, which is going to be key in developing your future workforce.
11:12
Now this training for a completely green hire. It can come in a lot of many different forms. So I mentioned that earlier, probably if you have a new hire, you're going to lean towards the private sector more so than the formal educational training, mostly because of time constraints. If you're looking at a tech school, one of my biggest hurdles was the fact that I was trying to take a technical skill and I was trying to fit it into an academic calendar so people weren't progressing based off of what they knew, or, you know, how much they had learned or proved that they could do. Courses were stretched out over a semester, and it took so many semesters for them to complete things, and that really kind of bogged the whole process down. In my opinion, I understand that it takes time for people to really understand and comprehend things, but you can cut that time down drastically, if you will just get them in the field working while they are being trained. So some type of private trainings do it all up front, and others may be spread out over time. It's just based on whatever works best for your organization. So some will have the expedited programs that cover all the basics and all the foundational knowledge that people need within a very short time frame, generally, weeks. And in this type of setup, it's usually best if that person is working with a company such as yours and working with that company. So in other words, they're only spending so much time in class or learning the rest of the time they're in the field doing so this provides theory mixed with real world application. And the other format that you run into commonly will be short term classes that focus on very specific areas. For instance, maybe you take a two or three day class that's just on electrical fundamentals. So this is perfectly fine, too. Again, as long as they're working in the field to help reinforce what they're learning in that strategy, you're spreading out their fundamentals over time, rather than trying to knock a lot of it out up front. And then, as they learn more, they can take slightly more advanced classes. So once they've had several fundamentals, they may be able to work into something specialized, more like heat pump operation or chiller plant troubleshooting.
13:28
So whichever case you go, we want to get to a point that we have established our new hires have a basic understanding of the fundamentals, and we can start the mentoring process once again. This does not take as long as it sounds. This can happen in a matter of weeks. I firmly believe you can teach fundamentals in a matter of weeks, as long as you have a structured, organized program for developing and teaching these theories. Now that we've established our new hires have this basic understanding of fundamentals, we can start our mentoring process.
14:02
And so when I talk about a mentor process, basically a mentor is just going to be a senior or experienced tech who's working alongside a new hire. One of the first questions that I always get is, How long should a new hire be working under a mentor? Well, the engineers answer is, it depends, right? My answer is, as long as it takes, but we want to put emphasis on letting the new hire work independently as often as is reasonable. So we don't want to throw them out there immediately, on their own, right, out of school, without any type of mentorship, and just expect them to go handle this stuff. But we don't want to baby them and hold their hand the whole time, either we want them to be with a mentor learning and then as soon as that mentor feels free to turn them loose, even on the same job with them, you know, have them do things with their own hands, more so than just watching and maybe asking questions, the more they.
15:00
Develop, the more independently they're going to be able to work. So as we go further along, you'll start seeing the separation from where it's mostly them just helping the mentor, and to a point where it's going to be the mentor sending them to do the stuff on their own.
15:17
I do suggest that it's a good idea to have them work under the mentor over the course of a year. Now, this doesn't mean every day for a year. It can be off and on throughout the year again, as soon as you feel like they're good enough on their basics to start sending them out on some service calls or maintenance. Let them do that. Let them have their independence. Let them grow independently and become comfortable. However, the reason I say it's good to keep them with a mentor over the course of a year is because we see different types of equipment and operation. We see different issues as the seasons change. So they need to do a full one year cycle with a mentor just so that they can see kind of pretty much everything that they'll be working on.
15:59
Now a mentor can be anyone in the company. It doesn't necessarily have to be an assigned mentor for each new hire, although that's a pretty good idea as well.
16:09
So the mentor must be aware of their responsibilities, and you as a manager, as an organization, are going to need to sit down and talk with your technicians about being a mentor, about being a an effective mentor or a good mentor, the first thing you're going to get is probably a little bit of resistance, because this technician now feels like one day, maybe have to babysit someone or they've got added responsibilities onto their plate. So why be a mentor? Right? Where's the upside to this? All right. Well, taking on a mentor role is not only going to help the company and the new tech, but it's also going to have benefits for the mentor as well, and including more productivity and a lighter workload for that mentor, because now the technician is not on their own, now they have someone to help them. And as initially, it may feel like a lot of responsibility, but the more and more they start working together, the more independent that new hire is going to become, and the mentor is going to realize pretty quickly what a benefit it is to have someone else with them. You know, you talk about a lot of workload, how many of these individuals are stressed out? Are having to work a lot of overtime hours, probably missing their kids, softball or baseball or volleyball games or beauty pageants or whatever, because there's just so much work that needs to be done. As they develop new technicians, they're passing the load. They're spreading that workload out some so that the whole weight is not on them. And I think anyone can genuinely appreciate a less stressful, more time with their family, kind of job, unless you just don't like your family. And I actually have ran across people like that before, too, but that's never been me. I would much rather be with my family than on top of a roof somewhere in the pouring rain.
17:56
Another benefit, though, is that it allows a mentor room for growth in a company. That's another reason a tech might want to become a mentor. Think about it. You can't be promoted. You can't move up in your career if there's no one to replace you. Right? Everyone wants to feel important. Maybe they're afraid of training someone else because they feel like they won't have a job security anymore. Because now there's lots of people who can do what they do. Well, guess what? If there's no one else that can do what you do, you have no room to grow. You're stuck there because they can't move you, and then have a vacant spot there, especially on a job that's important as a technician. So you know, these are the kind of things that you want to go over with your text. When you're talking about mentoring, it's going to free them up. It's going to free their time up some. It also opens up opportunities for them to grow within their career. It really is a win win situation, even though at first it may seem like it's just more responsibility.
18:52
All right, now we'll go over some tips for your mentors. These are some of the things I like to tell them, remember,
18:59
you have years of experience they do not. So oftentimes, I see so many technicians sell themselves short, right? We forget how much we really know. I've already went over all these different sciences that we have to understand to do what we do, and it's easy for us to forget that someone new does not have that deep understanding. They do not have the years of experience that we do. So we have to have patience and we have to slow down, sometimes, not expect so much from them, and also explain to them what it is we're doing and why we're doing it. Which brings me to the next point, a good mentor needs to talk through their thought process out loud that younger technician doesn't know why you check this one thing, and then all of a sudden, you just left and went to check something completely different. But if you talk about your process out loud, it helps them to understand why you're doing what you're doing, and it helps them to develop that process for troubleshooting. Do.
20:00
Yeah.
20:01
Another tip for a mentor is to ask prompting questions to that new hire or that young tech. You want to ask them their opinion on something. You want them to be critically thinking from day one. You want to challenge what they know. You want to get a feel for what they know. But you also want them to be thinking in the same process that you are. How does this system work? What should I be checking and why? And it's okay to ask them that, what would you what do you think we should check? What do you think would all cause this? You know, ask those kind of prompting questions to get them to open up and to get them to be more comfortable thinking about it. Because another thing that happens a lot is these young techs, they rely on the senior techs to do all the thinking, because they just, you know, they have faith in them, and they're there to learn from them. Well, we need to flip the script on them. We need to make them do the critical thinking, and then we can kind of help guide their thought process, give them some confidence that they're the ones who can solve the problem. All right, next, I put this on here because I'm big on fundamentals. The fundamentals are fundamentals for a reason. So it's very common for a new technician to be overwhelmed when they see big equipment with a lot of different relays or this complicated schematics. But fundamentals are fundamentals. We're really just trying to move heat at the end of the day. So understanding how all this ties into the basics is going to help them get a better picture of what you're doing and why you're doing and feel a little less overwhelmed.
21:30
And again, as I said before, have them work independently on issues as often as possible, so as soon as they start getting their feet wet and they start understanding these fundamentals a little better and how to apply them. Turn them loose. Have them go over here and check something while you're checking something else. They don't need to stand over your shoulders watching you all the time. Let them get involved as much as possible. Now, having said that, those were tips for the mentors, now let's talk about tips for the new hires. So as a mentor, I've created this general troubleshooting guideline of some things that you might want to express to a new hire to help them develop their own processes.
22:12
All right. Number one,
22:15
when you get to a job site, the first thing you want to do is gather relevant information before you start diving in with your tools. So one of the first steps should always be to ask the building owner or operator questions about the issue. Some good questions, is this a new problem? Has any work been done, or have any changes been made recently to this or any other system? Does the problem occur at particular times or under any certain circumstances, gather all this general information first, then decide what you think you need to check.
22:48
Second, have a logical process of checkpoints based on the failure or complaint.
22:56
All right, so we don't want to just start checking things at random, which is another common thing that new techs do. They're not really sure, so they just start grabbing their meter and checking different issues. So sometimes it's best to start at the beginning. Do I have power leaving my panel or disconnect?
23:15
And a lot of times it's actually best to start at the end, wherever the failure is. Why is my motor not running? Does it have power? If it does not, where am I losing it? And then there are some situations where you can split the problem up in the middle. In this example, maybe you have a split system. You go to your outdoor unit, it's not running. Well, why don't you check to see if you've got a control signal calling for it from your thermostat wire, right? You've just split the circuit in half if you've got power there telling it, you know, maybe you've got power on on the Y, which you'll be bringing on your contactor, but nothing's running all right.
23:51
If you have power on Y, you don't need to go backwards towards the equipment to check anything, right? You know that your problem is isolated to that outdoor equipment, because you've got it going to it, it's just not doing its thing inside. However, if you don't even have that signal going to that outdoor unit, there's no point in getting your tools out and starting to tear it apart and checking all your different pressure switches or whatever to see where you're losing it, because you're not even getting it there, you're splitting the system in half, and that's helping guide your process. So that's where it comes back to having that logical process based on the failure or complaint,
24:28
another thing that a new hire needs to know, understand the sequence of operation. All right, if you don't know how something is supposed to work, there's no way for you to go there and troubleshoot it and see if it's doing what it's supposed to do. So whether this is a complex, complex sequence, such as a chiller or a bowler plant operation, or it could just be a single piece of equipment, like, how is a gas furnace? What's its sequence of operation? Or this rooftop unit, you know, what steps is it going through to do what it needs to?
25:00
Do you've got to understand what has to happen and in what order, in order to appropriately troubleshoot that.
25:08
Another good point to explain to new technician is identify any other systems that this one may be dependent on or tied to. So sometimes problems in one system may show up as problems, as an A related system, five, this is a very big one. Look for error codes or alarms. I see this all the time. One of the first things that people want to do if equipments not working is kill power to it, right? Well, if you kill power a lot of times, you clear these error codes. So most equipment will at least have some type of flashing LED lights. Some actually have display screens that you can toggle through. Or if you're lucky enough, you'll have a BAS system that has all the alarm datas and all the different trends of what was going on when this equipment went into alarm. And that can save you a whole lot of guesswork, because you get the big overall picture, and it's going to tell you exactly what the failure was.
26:04
Six is going to be use reliable and accurate tools for measurement. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to troubleshoot when you can't trust the readings that you're getting. You hope they're right, but if you don't really know, you're really just guessing. Again, kind of goes back to that giggle, G, I, G, O, if you've ever heard of that, garbage in equals garbage out. How can you have a good diagnosis of a problem if you don't even know if the information you're getting to diagnose that is correct?
26:34
All right. Number seven, use your experience to find common prop common problems, but don't put on expectation blinders. So what you've had a lot of time out in the field, sometimes you start seeing patterns with certain equipment that may have failures in them. But this can help you jump right to the source. You're like, well, I know this thing. All these are notorious for having bad blower motors, right? These ECM motors are always going bad. That's gotta be my problem. But don't go out there and then just start changing out the motor. Actually verify that first, because sometimes we can go down a rabbit hole trying to chase a problem that doesn't even exist. It may not be our blower motor, it may be the control board or, you know, something else, not even sending the signal to that motor. And lastly, view and collect all measurements you feel are relevant to the issue. Now that's important. I didn't say collect all measurements. I'm saying collect all measurements you feel are relevant to the issue. And what I mean by that is, sometimes things are inconvenient, sometimes you don't want to go to that dusty, dark attic or mezzanine or wherever to try to collect a measurement. You just want to assume that it's okay there. And that oftentimes leads us to poor decision making. So if you're going to be troubleshooting, you need to make sure you understand the system as a whole, what's going to impact everything else, and then make decisions about what all information you really need to accurately diagnose it, not leave half of it in the dark, and then just guess at a problem based off the few things that were easy for you to measure. And so the last step is just to turn them loose and let the baby birds fly. You've given them all the guidance you can you've ensured that they have strong foundations. When they get into particularly tight or tricky situations, they'll call you, and you'll be able to actually walk them through the problem, because they'll understand the language that you're speaking, and they'll know, okay, that makes total sense. Let me check that, and we'll see what happens from there. So that concludes my lesson and my advice on how to go about developing these new hires as quickly as possible. Even though it sounded like a lot, I literally believe this stuff can all take place within weeks or even months. Obviously, I said a year off and on, but that's just to get them exposed to all the different equipment and the different seasonal environments. So hopefully
29:06
you'll be able to take on a new tech, and you'll be able to turn them out and make them profitable for you in a matter of weeks or months, rather than years and years. So that's all I have for you. Thank you for listening to the smart building Academy podcast, we hope you learned from this episode. If you found this episode of valuable, please leave us a five star review on Apple podcast or Spotify. If you're watching this on YouTube, please like comment and subscribe, and if you're watching this on LinkedIn, then please feel free to share this with your network as always, this will be available on our website, at podcast, dot smart buildings academy.com,
29:45
forward slash 483,
29:48
again, I'm Joe Hulsey. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.
