Introduce a new shop role: the learning manager

The decision to make the commitment to grow a skilled team ready to service your customers’ needs before they arrive is not entirely painless, but like anything unfamiliar, it’s a plan that will help get great results. The first step in this commitment to training is to establish standards of performance around how your team learns new skills. Here we will discuss the first steps in creating that plan, beginning with the introduction of a new role in your organization: the learning manager.

This person could be the shop owner, a service manager or an administrator who manages human resources for the company. Whoever takes this role must be willing to be held to the same standard of performance as any other role in your organization. In a modern repair facility, the learning manager’s role is to manage the following:

• Identify and/or create all job roles in the business
• Identify and/or create the learning plan for each job role
• Evaluate each team member and ensure they are placed in the appropriate role
• Assign each team member to a career path and learning plan and hold them accountable for their learning
• Ensure the organization has the commitment of the owner for all the above

Let’s go through each of these points in detail. The first step is to make sure you clearly define job roles for everyone in the business. It is important to create job roles that fit your business model, not just who you have on your team at the time. We could spend an infinite amount of time writing a job description and job role, so we will just cover the high-level points. I encourage you to do research on creating a job role. A best practice in creating a job role is to include the following basic elements:

• Position details – general information about the job, including title and summary
• Job duties – this is the “what they do” section and conveys the scope and level of responsibility
  • Key accountabilities – 3 to 5 main areas of responsibility, i.e. “Vehicle Inspection”
  • Duty statements – 2 to 3 detail statements for each key accountability
  • Percentage of time – estimate of time spent in each key accountability area
• Performance standards – this is the “how they do the job” section and provides the details and expectations for the job. It also provides a basis for measuring performance.
• Job factors – outlines the knowledge and skills needed to be successful in the job
  • Minimum education, years of experience, and ongoing education

A well-written job role/description will illustrate the training areas needed to successfully perform the duties of the job and maintain that level of performance, especially as technologies continue to change. Another best practice is to align each job role around ASE topic areas. For example, a C-level technician might need to have knowledge and skills in suspension and steering (A4), brakes (A5) and engines (A1); a B-level technician might need to have knowledge and skills in all ASE areas (A1-A8); while an A-level technician is required to have knowledge and skill in all areas, including the advanced topics of A9, L1, L2 and L3. Using ASE topic areas aligns your job roles with those of NATEF-certified vocational programs and will serve you well as you hire new technicians in the future. Once we have the job roles defined, we will create the learning plan.

Getting through the process of creating job roles should result in some traction and clarity when it comes to building out your learning plan. For each job role, you need to identify the key skills that are critical to the role. Use the ASE topic areas for guidance. You can find the task lists for each ASE topic at www.ASE.com. This site serves as a good resource to assist you in identifying the content that is accessible to you. There are many sources of content for this effort.

Carquest Technical Institute (CTI) provides a wide range of online content and instructor-led opportunities that can fill each learning plan. There are also great online courses from the OEMs available on their websites. Keep in mind some content is great, some content is good and a lot of content is really bad. You need to spend time with each provider option you have to find the content that fits your business and team needs. Assign the appropriate content to each job role to ensure the success of that team member. Finally, you need to review your learning plans every year to make sure they meet the current needs of your business, team members and customers. This is an area that the aftermarket industry is beginning to address in a consolidated effort. Next, it’s time to assess your team.

Technician assessments are difficult. In fact, it is one area where you need to invest some time and money in creating reporting that identifies services where team members struggle. This is true for every role in the shop but most importantly the technician. First you need to have processes that ensure the vehicle is fixed right the first time. A good quality assurance (QA) process will help, but tracking data from your service management system that illustrates the success and challenges of each technician will identify areas where a technician needs help. Current technician assessment models consist of 100 or more questions focused on all vehicle systems. That sounds like a good method on the surface, but consider the number of systems on a vehicle and you quickly realize that you’re trying to assess a technician’s knowledge base on the results of about 10 questions per system. There are new practical application assessments that consist of virtual reality vehicles that can be bugged with realistic faults to challenge a technician to use their problem solving skills and knowledge to fix the problem. These systems use virtual tools and equipment that mimic the real process. They can test circuits, replace parts and fix circuits but without the need to bug a real vehicle. This scalable technology is relatively new but promising in gauging the ability of a technician to apply the knowledge they have to solving a problem.

Once the assessment is complete, it’s time to assign the learning plans to each team member. There is a good possibility that you will find you need to assign a learning plan for a job role that is beneath the existing job role for a team member. For example, you may discover via the assessment process that your B-Tech struggles with several C-Tech skills. It is okay to assign B and C-Tech level learning plans in this situation. Establishing a learning plan in your business has a starting point that will require many to go back and brush up on their knowledge in order to advance their skill set. At the end of the day, the goal is to encourage and enable your entire team. There needs to be incentives to get the results you seek, but the first step in getting buy-in from your team is to include them in the process from the beginning.

Once implemented, hold the entire team accountable to their commitment to the process. Place timelines for completion of their initial learning plan. Don’t be unreasonable in this effort by requiring them to complete 30 online courses and 50 hours of instructor led classes in the next three months. Work with the team on a realistic timeline. Gain that commitment and reward their success. The rewards don’t always need to be financial in nature. They can include recognition: certificates, dinner for their family, lunch for the team, a press release in your shop newsletter, etc. Tracking the results of their production and accuracy to show value are all ways to reward your team.

Last but certainly not least, the most important step is commitment by the owner and the team. Implementing a learning plan is hard work unless you bring the team together during the development phase. Identifying the responsible learning manager who takes ownership of building out the process based on input from the team is not an option; it is a requirement in your endeavor to be ready to service your customers before they arrive and to provide them with the best customer experience.