For HVAC service leaders, knowledge sharing is a top — and urgent — priority. One reason? estimate 115,000 HVACR technicians will be needed by 2022 to fill jobs due to anticipated growth in the industry and the on-going retirement of baby boomers. Almost half of all technicians and installers will retire in the next decade, according to the new research. Yet only 21,000 students graduated from post-secondary HVACR programs in 2015. This gap could leave homeowners, hospitals, schools, virtually any building with heating, air conditioning, hot water or refrigeration out cold for installation, maintenance or retrofitting.
As the more experienced techs retire, organizations need to address how to close the knowledge gap between the seasoned techs and the growing young workforce. An aging workforce—and the loss of the collective knowledge of managers and technicians who have seen and fixed it all—is a main internal challenge. Executives need to capture every piece of those experienced technicians’ know-how before it’s too late. Once you’ve secured that knowledge, your service levels won’t drop if key staff leave or retire
can provide the tools necessary to create a culture of knowledge sharing in the following ways:
- Connect to technicians expertise
provides technicians with easy ways to input and access knowledge to help improve ways of working and facilitate problem solving. Critical information such as daily tasks, customer histories and billing can be accessed on demand. The goal is to ensure that the entire service team is an expert on the job at hand, removing the need to schedule a secondary visit due to lack of skills or information.
- Utilize collaborative tools
Technicians can capture knowledge with through videos, pictures or data input to use for a future task. For example, being able to capture the steps to complete a job through pictures or video and saving that information to a mobile device to ensure that other technicians can learn from that knowledge.
- Training database
Create a database that provides up-to-date recorded training videos and images, forms, trouble-shooting guides etc. for technicians to easily refer to.
Seasoned technicians have a wealth of knowledge about customers, processes and assets but that knowledge is useless if it retires along with them.
to help you capture critical knowledge before it walks out the door forever.
