Technician training challenge

From time to time, I’ve used this space to encourage readers to think of ways to leverage both fundamental and advanced knowledge from the educational and technical training systems of the automotive and light vehicle service segment. Briefly, the rationale for this thinking proceeds along two lines:

•The medium-/heavy-vehicle career and technical education system is not as large or robust as its light-duty counterpart, which makes it less capable of meeting the entry labor needs of looming technician shortages.

• Much of the advanced vehicle technology, such as onboard diagnostics II (OBDII), has been in place in the light-duty segment for over a decade. What lessons can we learn from that experience?

Before I leave the impression that the auto guys have all the answers and the truck guys are left playing catch-up, let’s explore one of the real strengths of fleet maintenance management –– in-service training.

Generally, truck fleets have been on the cutting edge of technician training development and delivery. It is not uncommon to find in-house technical trainers, formal technician training plans, and learning management systems to support training activities in all but the smallest fleet operations. There are many reasons for this emphasis on training, but at the most elemental level, these boil down to value: fleets realize a benefit in reduced maintenance costs that outweighs the expense of providing it.

It’s also probably a fair generalization to say that the majority of fleet maintenance technical training is centered on maintenance activities. Experience is an excellent teacher and it has taught fleet managers that specific parts in specific types of service wear out in predicable patterns or intervals. That experience provides an excellent basis for training technicians in performing specific maintenance activities in a consistent, predictable manner.

Good job! Now, where do we go from here? A few weeks ago, I attended a seminar on Generation Y workers, those just beginning to enter the workforce. Two points raised in that seminar struck me as potentially applicable to these training activities.

The first point is that, typically, Gen Y individuals are self-reliant and like to figure out things out for themselves, within established boundaries. The challenge for managers of these workers is to “manage the outcome, not the process.” That strikes me as being somewhat at odds with the process-oriented, structured training we currently have in place.

The second challenge is how training is delivered. One suggestions given at the seminar: “If you want training to be effective to these Gen Y workers, make it look like a video game.” Computer-based training delivery that is highly interactive builds on the experience these individuals have used in gathering information and learning their entire lives.

So where does that take us? I don’t pretend to have those answers, but I can see the challenges we may be facing. Most of the people currently developing training are process-oriented, and comfortable with instructor-led, hands-on methods of training. That’s the way we taught; that’s the way we learned.