In the essential skilled trades, your technicians are your revenue generators. They are the economic engineers of your business, and you need them to achieve your growth goals and objectives. An investment in them is an investment in your business and its long-term success.
With industry trends constantly shifting and the labor shortage continuing to affect recruiting efforts, it’s only natural to ask yourself whether or not your business and your workforce is ready for growth. Here are five things you can do to accelerate the growth of your company and your team:
Invest in Employees’ Careers
A business is built on the shoulders of its people, and it thrives and fails because of the people within it. Employees need to feel appreciated, engaged and supported, and investing in continual learning boosts your reputation as an employer who cares. Plus, investing in your people is an investment in your business, contributing to long-term growth.
Upskilling employees will increase their productivity. When prepared with the right skills and knowledge, employees are more efficient, improving customer service and increasing profitability. Efficient and competent employees require less supervision, which allows management to focus on more significant initiatives and opportunities for improvement.
Use Training as a Tool to Recruit, Ramp and Retain Top Talent
There is a shortage of workers in the U.S. The latest data shows there are more than 10 million job openings in the U.S. but only 5.7 million unemployed workers. That shortage is especially felt in the skilled trades, meaning you have to do more to attract top talent.
Investing in employee training and development is a great tool to retain, ramp and retain talent. Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, said, “Train people well enough so they can leave and treat them well enough so they don’t want to.”
Offering training also lets you widen your search and gives you more flexibility in who you hire. You may not be able to find an applicant who fits the position exactly, but you can always hire for attitude and train for aptitude.
Once employees are on board, you can use training to help them reach their full potential, giving them the skills they need to be successful. You can cross-train them, boosting their confidence and ensuring your customers’ needs are always met.
Training also boosts employee satisfaction and improves retention, easing pressure on hiring, increasing institutional knowledge within the organization and improving performance. One of the top reasons employees leave their jobs is because they don’t see opportunities for advancement, and 94% of employees are more likely to stay with employers who invest in their career progression. A robust training program fosters internal mobility, giving you more opportunities to promote from within. When you create a clear training path and opportunities to move up, your team members are more likely to stay, and you establish a strong talent pipeline to meet your needs as your business grows.
As part of Interplay Learning’s robust SkillMill training platform, you get valuable insights into employee skill sets, areas of improvement, and progress over time for potential promotion opportunities. You can also set accountability checkpoints to ensure due dates are met and utilize data and performance on courses to administer tailored help to underperforming team members. When you improve technicians, you get a return on your investment faster.
Enable Your Employees To Transition to More Profitable Work
Some jobs pay more than others, and ensuring techs are trained on highly profitable activities allows them to focus on the work that brings in the best margins. As profits increase, you can re-invest that money in the business and expand your operations.
With Interplay’s technical training solution, you can quickly identify who has been trained, what they’ve been taught and who needs training. Consistent, quality training helps you improve customer service, expand operations and drive growth faster.
Bake Certifications and Safety Into Your Training Strategy
Certifications and safety training protect your employees and company and are essential in the growth and success of new hires and long-time employees. They can also serve as a valuable marketing tool by showing existing and potential customers you are credible and safe.
By emphasizing safety and ensuring all employees comply with industry safety standards and best practices, you reduce the risk of incidents, decrease costs, increase productivity, and improve recruitment and retention. Focusing on safety and certifications can help reduce on-site incidents, which can inhibit a company’s growth and success. Plus, government agencies can implement fines and prosecute employers when safety standard violations occur. Certifications can even create direct cost savings. Some manufacturers, such as Carrier, provide discount pricing if a certain number of techs are NATE certified.
By baking safety into training, you give technicians the opportunity to grow their technical and professional skills in a safe environment. Safety can also help you attract and retain technicians. Workplace safety is among the top criteria employees consider when evaluating a new job offer.
There are several approaches you can take to safety. Some companies may want everyone to undergo standardized safety training once a quarter. Others might be on a NATE initiative to get all techs certified or seek a clear path for new techs to obtain EPA certification.
Rolling out safety and certification training can sometimes be a grueling, long-term process, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. By making it part of ongoing training and education that you can customize and scale as needed, you create a seamless way to reach employees and scale as you grow. Interplay Learning makes it easy to create certification and safety paths that you can assign and track.
Understand Your Problem Areas
Underperforming branches, callbacks and re-work, and poor customer satisfaction can all be related to your workers’ skills. Are you seeing that some locations perform well while others are less profitable? If so, it may be because the location doesn’t have technicians who can handle more work or because call backs are eating into profitability. You may think you’re sending a tech to a job thinking tech has the proper knowledge and skills, but after he arrives, you realize he doesn’t.
Skill assessments, such as those offered by Interplay Learning, let you identify the skill sets your technicians already have and train them to fill in the gaps or expand their capabilities so that you can send the right people to the right jobs. Understanding and addressing your problem areas can reduce current challenges and prevent future issues.
With focused training in underperforming areas, you eliminate the high cost of re-work, high turnover and skill gaps. Interplay Learning offers a team tab review so you can review scores or attempts of courses, which can be broken down per person, region or sector for more customized learning.
Draw on Our Expertise
With 300+ hours of expert-led training and hands-on simulations in HVAC, plumbing, facilities maintenance, electrical and more, Interplay Learning’s training platform is a one-stop shop for efficient skilled trades training. With Interplay, you’ll gain access to the resources you need to build, upskill, and cross-train a competent facilities maintenance team in weeks, not years.
