Our country is in a labor shortage, and it shows up most keenly in the trade industries. I recently read an article that said that no occupation on the planet is in higher demand than HVAC technicians.
If you are working in the trade industry, this is not news to you. You might be thinking, this is an awesome time to own an HVAC company, but in reality, we are experiencing so much shortage in the industry it is hard to recruit and retain good talent.
It is expected that the need for HVAC technicians is going to grow 15% in the next 10 years and in addition to that, we are going to see a lot of the workforce retiring. So, the question is how do we find and retain the awesome HVAC technicians so that you can run, grow, and scale your business the way that you want to?
The answer is training. When it comes to looking for good people, I would love to be able to give you a website to go to for the most talented and trained technicians, but that is just not possible. Most of the workforce that is coming into the industry right now is not trained. In this article, I want to share tips for hiring and training good people for your company.
Hire for Character & Train for Skill
You can teach people skills; you cannot teach them character. Make sure that you hire people who have the character that matches your business philosophy and will work well with the rest of your team.
Embrace Going Digital
Most of the workforce that you are going to be hiring are millennials who will expect training. They are used to consuming that training on a digital platform. It is best for you to just embrace the fact that you are going to have to train these employees and build that training before you hire them.
The best part about having a training platform that is all built online is that you can build it once and use it over and over again. As your systems and processes change, the beauty of having it on a digital platform is that you will be able to make those changes and roll them out to all of your current employees and have the training ready for any new hires.
Train Beyond Technical Skills
Yes, it is important to teach them technical skills so that they know how to be great operators and do the things that you need them to do on the technical side. You also need to create training on how to run things in your operations so that they can learn customer service skills and how to operate within your processes.
Build It Before They Come
There are a lot of tools that you can utilize to help train your technicians on the technical skills of how to operate all of their machinery and work the equipment. Take the time now to build out your training modules before your first hire. This will help you onboard people with confidence and put them right into training on day one.
My absolute favorite platform for housing all the training and Standard Operating Procedures is Trainual. Click here for a behind-the-scenes tour of a complete Procedures Manual for a modern HVAC Company.
If you are looking for support in building out training for your team, especially on the process side, and getting super clear on what your internal processes look like and how to work within your systems, I would love to help. Book a discovery call with me to chat about it!