Ready to Start Investing in Your Employees?
Let’s Talk Career Development with AutoFix Auto Shop Coaching's Chris Cotton
As National Career Development Month, November is the perfect time to start truly investing in the future of your employees. Your auto repair shop can significantly benefit from their improved skills and knowledge by supporting their career advancement. Plus, your shop will become well known as a great place to work, making it easy to fill your bench with the top talent. Ready to get started? Here’s what you need to know about investing in your employees.
Won’t Employees Just Leave After Building Up Their Skills?
As your employees build their skill sets, gain new knowledge, and become ever more confident in their roles, they gain the leverage needed to pursue new opportunities. But that shouldn’t prevent you from investing in their future.
As long as you offer fair compensation, a great work environment, and true collaboration with your team, the majority of your employees will likely stick around. You may find that their overall job satisfaction increases as you give them more and more chances to advance their careers. Click HERE to download Production Apprentice Information, to help properly train an employee just out of high school with the goal to raise shop productivity
Even if you do lose employees from time to time, you’ll have job seekers knocking down your doors as word gets out about your commitment to investing in your team. So, take the leap of faith and employ the following tactics to make career development a top priority at your auto repair shop.
How to Help Employees Build Strong Careers in the Auto Repair Industry
If you want to help your employees thrive in the auto repair industry, it all starts with a training plan for your shop. You’ll want to address these three areas while building your plan so that you can promote career development at every turn.
On-The-Job Training
As you bring in new hires, you should give them time to get acclimated to your processes and procedures with on-the-job training. To do that effectively, you need to teach your team how to best serve as a mentor and promote the success of their fellow teammates. Then, partner each new hire with a mentor for a week or two so they can learn how to promote the success of your auto repair shop.
Conferences
The auto repair industry is always moving forward at breakneck speed, especially with electric vehicles. To keep your employees updated on all the latest changes, send them to automotive conferences, evening classes, and other continuing education courses. You can shut down your shop and make it a group affair or send a couple of people to the conferences that serve them best.
Training Rooms
All your employees need to renew their certifications regularly to stay relevant in the auto repair industry. You can help them do just that by setting up a training room with computers, headphones, and printers. Don’t forget the paper study guides for ASE certifications, state emissions exams, and the like.
In addition to having an excellent training plan, make sure to set aside time for your employees to engage in career advancement activities. Offer them paid time off for classes, for example, or put a bonus on their checks for time spent in the training room.
Go Beyond the Job with Training and Support for Your Employees
If you want to become the top auto repair shop to work for in your area, you need to think beyond job training to help improve every aspect of your employees’ lives. You can get started by thinking about offering help with:
Life Skills
As your employees put their all into helping improve the success of your auto shop, they likely don’t have much time left over for self-improvement. They may struggle with following a budget, eating healthy meals, and building solid relationships.
In your training room, you can help by offering life skills training modules, like Dave Ramsey’s courses and other personal growth products. Other options include sending your team to cooking classes, providing access to mental health counselors, and paying for continuing education courses of their choice at your local community college.
Health and Wellness
Health and wellness often go to the wayside, leaving employees feeling far too tired and down in the dumps to work hard. You can help them overcome their challenges by setting up an onsite health and wellness center at your auto repair shop.
It doesn’t need to be big either. Just dedicate one room to housing your fitness equipment, massage chair, and perhaps even a gaming system or two. And, with that, you’re well on your way to helping your employees feel their best.
If you’d like to go the extra mile in supporting your employees, pay for their monthly subscription to the Peloton app. They get access to yoga, stretching, and cycling workouts, plus opportunities to join targeted workout groups through that app. They can even join our AutoFix SOS workout group for instant collaboration with their fellow auto repair pros, plus chances to win prizes as they complete their wellness goals.
Want Help with Career Development? Call Your Auto Repair Coach
If you don’t have the funds for career development, it’s time to look at your labor rate and make meaningful changes. In the end, all it takes is wrapping your career development expenses into your labor rate to put your revenues to work for you.
Need help making that happen? Just partner with AutoFix Auto Shop Coaching with a call to 940-400-1008. As your auto repair coach, we’ll help you learn how to boost revenues best and start investing in your employees.
We also invite you to regularly tune in to the Chris Cotton Weekly Blitz for helpful tips and tricks on improving productivity, promoting collaboration, and so much more. If you’d like to share your show ideas, please feel free to send a quick message to chris@autofixsos.com, and we’ll see what we can do.
