Take Advantage of Training by Horton
Learn why training has never been so important for your employees and your customers.
Episode 330: In this episode we talk training – why it is so necessary, ways to make it accessible to employees and customers, and why some companies refuse to train their people. Our host, Jamie Irvine, starts by discussing 3 myths that some believe about training – namely that it is too expensive, not worth the time, or that it is inaccessible to their company.
Our featured guest is Thomas Kleich, Director of Sales for Fleets at Horton. He discusses the need that he saw for good training and what they have done at Horton to make easily accessible training materials available, not just for themselves and their customers, but to whoever wants it.
Links
Sponsors of this Episode
Heavy Duty Consulting Corporation: Find out how many “fault codes” your heavy-duty parts business has. Meet with us today. Visit HeavyDutyConsulting.com
Hengst Filtration: There’s a new premium filter option for fleets. If you’re responsible for a fleet, you won’t believe how much using Hengst filters will save you. But you’ve got to go to HeavyDutyPartsReport.com/Hengst to find out how much.
Diesel Laptops: Diesel Laptops is so much more than just a provider of diagnostic tools. They’re your shop efficiency solution company. Learn more about everything Diesel Laptops can do for you today by visiting DieselLaptops.com today.
HDA Truck Pride: They’re the heart of the independent parts and service channel. They have 750 parts stores and 450 service centers conveniently located across the US and Canada. Visit HeavyDutyPartsReport.com/HDATruckPride today to find a location near you.
Disclaimer: This content and description may contain affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, The Heavy Duty Parts Report may receive a commission.
Transcript of Episode
Jamie Irvine:
You are listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine, and this is the place where we have conversations that empower heavy-duty people.
Welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine. In this episode, we are going to talk about the importance of training. We’re going to interview Thomas Kleich from Horton and discuss their training programs that are going to save you time and money, and we’re going to end the discussion in this episode discussing the high cost of refusing to train your employees.
Let’s get started. At the Heavy Consulting Corporation, we provide training for our clients, and we think this is very, very important. I want you to think just for a minute about a professional athlete.
Now, a professional athlete will actually spend more time training than they do actually playing the game. Now when we think about in the business world, it’s just the opposite, isn’t it? We spend most of our time working in our day-to-day jobs, in other words, playing the game.
And most of us, especially as we get older, spend less and less time training. Now, we understand that in business you can’t train to the same level as a professional athlete does, but it doesn’t mean that training isn’t important and should never happen.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite. And there are several myths that we continuously hear when we’re talking to people in the heavy-duty parts and service industry, and I wanted to go over a couple of those with you. So the first myth that we hear quite a bit is we don’t have the time. All our employees are so busy. Now, it’s not so much that this is an inaccurate statement, but I think it just misses the whole point.
If you’re that busy and you don’t take time to train your employees, you’re not helping them become more productive. So if your employees are already overworked, providing them with training will actually help them become more productive and get more done with the limited resources they have at their disposal.
So by kind of believing this idea that we’re too busy to do training, you’re just over time making the problem so much worse. The second thing we hear quite regularly, and I guess you could put this in the category of a myth, is this idea that we can’t afford to take people off the front line to provide them with training. So what they’re basically saying is, look, we just can’t afford to send people away for training.
Now, this is a problem because again, training and productivity are so closely connected. A study published in the Review of Economics and Statistics found that on the job training had an impact on productivity and improved retention with employees at a higher degree than wage increases alone. So it may be true that you can’t necessarily afford to send someone away for training right now, travel expenses, days away from the business.
That part might be true, but the general idea that you can’t afford it completely misses the idea of on the job training. We’re going to talk a little bit more at the end of the episode about how there’s been a significant decline in on the job training and the impact that’s having.
So make sure you listen to the end for that. The third myth that we hear all the time is only large scale companies have access to the resources to properly train their people. Another thing that we often hear is, well, if you work at a dealership or you’re part of an OEM, you have access to all kinds of resources.
But if you work in the independent service channel or the aftermarket parts side of the business, you don’t have any resources. Now, that might’ve been more true in the past, but really it’s becoming less and less true today.
Now, I will not disagree with you. The OEMs and the dealerships do have access to certain things that the independent service channel and aftermarket parts don’t. But there’s two distinct groups that are doing a lot to change this.
The first is buying groups. So if you’re part of a buying group, for example, HDA Truck Pride, then you have access to their online university. And inside of that, there are courses that will help you at the leadership level, the management level, and on the frontline in your parts and service business. And this is all part of your membership fee that makes you part of that buying group.
So there’s no additional cost to get access to all of this great training. On the other side of that equation is the suppliers, and we consistently see distributors, independent parts distributors underutilizing the training made available by suppliers.
And so in today’s episode, we are going to have one of those suppliers on, I interview them, Thomas Kleich from Horton, and he’s going to talk about all the investment they’ve made in their training programs and how it’s available to everyone. So before the interview, let’s just take a quick moment to hear from our sponsors. We’ll be right back.
Are you deferring maintenance because of filter cost or availability, or worse yet, are you trading down to no name filters to try to save a few bucks? Either way, you are rolling the dice. The good news, there’s a new premium filter option for fleets Hengst Filtration.
If you’re responsible for a fleet, you won’t believe how much using Hengst Filters will save you, but you’ve got to go to heavydutypartsreport.com/hengst to find out more. That’s heavydutypartsreport.com/hengst. Head there now.
At Diesel Laptops, they go way beyond diagnostic tools. They are your complete shop efficiency partner from diesel technician training to complete repair information, parts lookup tools and robust technical support. They are there to support you every step of the way. Learn more and download your free starter pack today by visiting diesellaptops.com. That’s diesellaptops.com.
HDA Truck Pride is the heart of the independent parts and service channel. They have 750 parts stores and 450 service centers conveniently located across the US and Canada. Visit heavydutypartsreport.com/hdatruckpride today to find a location near you. Again, that’s heavydutypartsreport.com/hdatruckpride and let the heart of the independent service channel take care of your commercial equipment.
We’re back from our break. Before the break, we were talking about some of the myths that seem to persist when it comes to training in the heavy duty parts and service industry.
One company that is working hard to make training available is Horton and they are our featured guest in this episode. My guest today is Tom, he’s the director of sales and he takes care of fleets at Horton.
Now Tom started his career as an auto diesel technician and he was hired at Horton originally in a technical support for customer service role, but he’s been with the company now for over 37 years. He started in 1987.
He’s progressed through a number of different roles, which include marketing, product management, OEM sales director of OEM sales, and now he’s the Director of Fleet Sales. So Tom, welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. So glad to have you here.
Thomas Kleich:
Glad to be here.
Jamie Irvine:
So Tom, when I think about Horton, I think about the fan clutches you manufacture. I think about engine cooling solutions. You now have heavy-duty electric solutions. Those are the products that come to mind when I think about Horton.
Of course, when you sell a product, there’s so much more to it than just manufacturing and selling the product. And so what I was wondering if you could do is if you could tell us of a situation that is common with your customers and what’s happening with them, and then we’ll talk about what Horton’s doing to help them with that situation.
Thomas Kleich:
So on the fleet side, the old buzzword uptime is everything, right? I mean, if that truck goes down, that’s their livelihood. That’s how the fleets make money. That’s how they deliver the goods, that’s how they, it’s a reputation.
They’re just looking for products and services and companies that basically can partner with them, support them, the product’s going to work well. If something does happen, they know that they’ve got somebody to take care of them and they can get that truck up and running as quickly as possible.
Jamie Irvine:
That makes a lot of sense, but I’d like to go a little deeper than that. So in your particular category, when things go wrong, kind of paint the picture of what happens?
Thomas Kleich:
Well, when things go wrong, the fleet managers are on the hook. The Director of Maintenances, the VP of Maintenance, fleet managers, technicians, they’re doing everything they can to get that truck up and running. And the trucks are so complex now and there’s so many different components on it. They have to know so many different things.
And even within just a component like a fan drive, there’s multiple fan drives as you mentioned earlier, there’s pneumatics, there’s variable speed, viscous, there’s electromagnetic, there’s high voltage, there’s all kinds of technology out there. And for them to know what’s on their truck at any given time and how to repair that or get that truck back up and running, it’s very difficult for that fleet.
Jamie Irvine:
And I think you’re right, when people say uptime is everything, they don’t, we just say that quickly, but when you actually think about the situation, so okay, let’s paint the picture. We have a truck, it’s got a load. That load, it has to be delivered at a certain time. It goes out into the field and it breaks down.
If that breakdown is caused because someone chose a product that’s cheap but not high quality, or if it’s not a product that’s been matched to the vocation correctly, those are avoidable problems. And then you start to think about it like who’s affected. It starts with the driver. They’re on the side of the road, there’s danger there. They want to get home to their family every night.
They don’t want to have to be stuck there on the side of the road. There’s the mechanic that has to go and try to diagnose the problem and fix it. You mentioned the fleet directors and the maintenance and technicians that were responsible for maintaining that vehicle.
When I put out that all together, there’s so many people involved, their livelihoods are involved, their stress there. And so in order to try to alleviate that, what steps have Horton taken to try to provide your customers with everything they need to avoid those situations?
Thomas Kleich:
Well, I looked at it from a practical standpoint. So I mentioned earlier we really try to focus on our products and our customers, and it’s like, how do you do that? How do you help your customer do that? And as I started doing this job, I was doing the fleet job for about three years now, and it became apparent.
And with my technical background too, I struggle with some of these things as well. As I mentioned earlier, so many different technologies, so many different things to know. It’s like how can we make it easier for them and provide the tools that they need to keep ’em trained on the specific technology that they’re happen to be running?
I tried to come up with a simple solution. Everyone says, well, we love training. Can you come and train? Well, I’m one person. I’m one national fleet person that does the whole country in Canada.
I can’t be there, once you do go in and train, it’s great. I love the in-person training. Most technicians are hands-on visual type learners. That’s how I am. So it’s great to do, but as soon as I leave the door, there’s another tech walk and then the other door a new tech and you just can’t keep up.
So I thought to myself, how do I make this simple? How do I actually go through the different technologies and really focus on what they’re running? And I started coming up with some tools and it’s kind of like the YouTube thing. I like working on my own stuff and a lot of people use YouTube.
Some of the stuff’s good, some of it’s bad, but it’s a reference point. You go to the YouTube, you can look at that and say, okay, yeah, even YouTube stuff that I know how to do because there might be something different.
A different vehicle might be a different technique or something easier that I didn’t know. So I thought, well, why not put our videos and training videos out on YouTube? But then I said a step further, why not actually put it into a piece of literature that I can give them and laminate it and give it to technician so they can look at that very easily and say, okay, product comes in. If pneumatic got an air leak, what do I do?
It’s got friction materials, whatever, what do I do? And it steps ’em right through that. Horton’s got this piece of literature that I did laminate and it’s got QR codes on it so they can actually scan the QR code and see the video. So it takes them, it’s all there. They don’t have to go to YouTube, they just kind of look at the literature.
They can keep it in their toolbox. I’m going to scan this it’s, going to take 10 minutes, watch the video and ready to go. So I’ve tried to do more of that. And then we said, okay, what if we tie that into an LMS training so that we can actually have a system that we can send out a link to them, and that could be the VP of Maintenance, director maintenance or whatever, or their training people.
And they can send that link to the technicians and the technicians that on their own time they can take that training. And it has. So again, a 10 minute video, there’s about six or seven questions they need to answer.
They don’t need to get ’em all right because tell ’em what the answer is. And it is just really trying to train them and focus on what they’re running. And they’ll go through that and at the end of it they get a certificate and they’ll actually get that email to them and they can print that out and give it to the boss or just keep it themselves.
Jamie Irvine:
And one of the things that I’ve seen over the last couple years that I find personally a little concerning is I’ve seen some people basically have the attitude of like, we’re so busy in the shop, we don’t have time for training, but let’s break down the cost of a mistake with one of your products. So walk me through that. What have you seen happen when things go wrong and what did that kind of cost the customer or the fleet?
Thomas Kleich:
Well, I got a few of those examples. So not too long ago, I got a call from one of my good customers and he said, Hey Tom, I got a truck down, happened to be right around the corner from where we’re at in Roseville, Minnesota here.
And I said, hey Joe, let me go check it out again. It was a pneumatic product, had an air leak. He said, they’re telling me bot truck’s going to be down for two weeks and they have to order the part, they can’t get the part. And I said, it’s probably just a simple air cartridge or something.
So I went over there and I happened to have a part here and I told the technicians and the dealership, this is what you need to do. Half hour later that truck was on the road and Joe says, I don’t know what you did, but you’re the man.
I said, it’s something. I’m the man. It’s simple. I knew what to do. Now if you could tell that technician what to do, and that’s always mentioned, it’s not only technicians but it’s call centers too because their truck’s at a dealership, they call them and say, hey, this is what we need to do and most dealers kind go to over repair right away.
Well, we’re going to put a brand new fan drive on it and this is what it’s going to cost you.
And that’s expensive. I mean compared to just putting a simple seal kit or a cartridge in it, and those call centers are trained and know what to do, it’s like what’s happening with the product? Air leak do this. And if they had that literature and they had the training, they could actually show the dealer that then the dealer can be trained.
Then I’ve actually, for that same customer, I’ve actually called dealers and walked through it and actually save them a whole bunch of money by doing that. So that’s one example. The other example I was going to tell you is over repair.
I talked about that a little bit, but we have one on the variable speed side that’s a newer technology. Technicians are very uncomfortable with it and there’s a lot of electronics involved and things like that. ECM controls and we have a variable speed RCX product that we have.
And a lot of times what I see is wires come loose, connections come loose, and it’s got a code on a controller that we have that flashes red and green. The technician in this case replaced the fan drive, the controller, the jumper, harness everything just to say, I’m just going to do it all. Guess I know that’s going to work.
Well, it works, but then you got this big bill sitting there and a lot of times it won’t be covered under warranty because they’ll say you over repaired it. All it needed to do is fix the wire. It would’ve been good to go. So again, if they have the training, it just makes things so much simpler.
Jamie Irvine:
So you’ve taken this complex subject, you’ve broken it down into these simple one page or two page front and back, you’ve got the QR codes and the videos made. It helps these technicians to understand what to do. When you think about the impact this has on their day-to-day experience with your product, how do you think it impacts their opinion of your company?
Thomas Kleich:
Well, I think the more comfortable they are with something I know I am, if I can comfortably do it and I know when that thing comes in, I can repair it. We have one seal kit that fits every one of our pneumatic products. So you have that seal kit on the shelf. There’s no excuse why that truck wouldn’t be up and running that same day or within an hour or a couple hours at most.
So if they’re comfortable with it, they see that everybody, I think every product is probably going to have a problem at some point. And it’s just a matter of if you do have that problem, how can I fix that very quickly? And if all my techs are trained the same way, it works just beautifully and they get the truck out, they don’t have very many problems, but when you do, they know how to do it. They’re comfortable.
Jamie Irvine:
And I think that the way that impacts their opinion of your company is that they have this comfort level. They start to look to your company as like, look, this is a company that has great products. They give me excellent support. And so they might move from one fleet to another or from one dealership to another or an independent repair shop. And when they do, they’re going to say, hey, I want to use Horton.
I want to use that product and I want to use anybody else’s because I know that they’ll be there to take care of me and help me if there’s something wrong. I think that goes a long way to justifying any cost that was incurred for creating that training material. Wouldn’t you agree?
Thomas Kleich:
Yeah, for sure, for sure. That’s what maintenance managers tell me all the time is that’s what I’m on the hook for is my costs and keeping those trucks up and running. If you can help me with that. And we like to say, I like to partner with fleets and I always tell ’em, I said, every fleet needs a fan drive guy. I want to be your fan drive guy.
And I said, put me to the test, call my cell number. I give ’em my cell number, my emails say if I’m on vacation, our service manager Dale will take the calls for me and we just want to make sure that the customer service is there.
So if they do run into a snag and they can’t get it with a training and things we’ve provided, call us, we’ll help you out. And they really appreciate that. And the ones that have done that really understand the value there and they said wish more suppliers would do that for us.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah. Now you specifically are responsible for making sure fleets are taken care of, but your company as a whole still works through distribution. I’m also thinking of all those sales account managers that are calling on local customers. I’m thinking of the parts counter people either at a dealership or aftermarket distributor.
The better educated they are, the more they can help customers and all of this education just makes things go so much better when inevitably something does go wrong.
Thomas Kleich:
Yeah, correct, correct. And the other thing we really pride ourselves is on our website as well. We’ve got a great product catalog website. You can search by a full fin, see what product you need or part number or cross references from OE, part numbers or ours.
We really try to work on that and we’re updating that every day we find something and we put it in there. So the customers, dealers, they can imagine parts managers. They love that.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, exactly. So we’ve started with the worst case scenario where you have a driver who’s at risk on the side of the road broken down, and we talked about the frustration that causes for the director of fleet maintenance because his or her job is to keep this equipment rolling.
The driver is in an unsafe position, the technician might be frustrated, they just fix that truck, now they got to go out and fix it again, we go from that and a little bit of education. Walk us through how all of that changes and the feelings that people have when they use this education and they’re able to fix these problems easily.
Thomas Kleich:
I think you eliminate the frustration factor, right? They’re getting things coming at ’em all the time, and if they’re well trained, they’ve got the materials, they know what they’re doing, fan drive pain comes up and we know that one, we got that right. The tech typically will have it or they can walk ’em through, walk ’em through the dealers, here’s how what I want you to do, here’s the kit I wants you to use.
We kind of pride ourselves on commonizing our products and having one kit kind of fits everything, which makes it so much simpler for everybody can stock one thing, the availability is really good.
We’ve got 14 quick ship warehouses outside of what the OE PCs and distributor warehouses have in stock. So Horton parts are everywhere, so there’s really no excuse not to get that truck up and running and do it at a reasonably priced and a quick time.
Jamie Irvine:
And I think that that frustration level, equipment’s becoming so much more complex, as you mentioned earlier, and we are living and working in a world that is far more dynamic than it ever has been before.
There’s so much coming at people and I think when as a company, when you provide that little space of peace and calm, like you said, no, it’s a fan clutch you, we know what to do, we’re good. I don’t think that you should ever underestimate the value of that.
Every company talks about value and we always think of it through the lens of the quality of our products or the speed of our service, but giving your customers a moment of peace of mind in a day or a world or a week that is filled with these challenges, I don’t think that should be underestimated.
Thomas Kleich:
Like how I said, you focus on your products and your customers, everything else falls in place, right? You take care of those two things and customers are happy products working, everything else is good.
Jamie Irvine:
So you get to rub shoulders with all the big fleets in the US and Canada. I’m just kind of curious of what your impression is of how maybe things are changing towards attitudes, towards training, towards recruiting new people, trying to get people into the industry, making sure they have the tools to be successful.
What are you seeing shifting or changing when it comes to attitudes towards that? I talked earlier in our conversation about a concerning attitude where people kind of feel like I don’t have time for training. Have you noticing any changes across the board?
Thomas Kleich:
Yeah, I am. And they’re really, to this day they’re focusing on training, they’re seeking it out. They want to put a program together. A lot of the really big fleets have professional trainers. They actually have a coordinator that does their training. They have in-house training, so we just provide our materials to them.
They put it in their own system and then they train from there. But we have this other system we can, like we said, we can give ’em an email and a code they can get in there, they can take and I just send them what they’re actually running for product.
We have multiple videos for different products and I don’t give them everything. I just kind of focus on this is what you’re running, this is what you need to know. I’m not going to bury you with everything. And I send that, but it’s really nice because if they’ve used that system, I can actually track the progress so when the tech goes in there, they can log in and it has the location that they’re at.
It’s got the city and state, obviously their name, and when they take the test, they’ll see that and I can track that the date when they took it, whether they got the certificate or not. Everybody will get the certificate if they just finished the course, they don’t have to pass. Like I said, if they get the question wrong, it’ll actually give them the right answer.
So it’s not like it’s a hard test, it’s just something that I want to make it easy and then I want to make it more accessible. So if they do take the test, it’s not one and done, they can go back to it and they say, I want to see that again.
Or they can use that literature with a quick QR codes and look at that as well and say, so I need a refresher. Haven’t worked on a fan drive for a couple months. Want to try it again before I get into this, I’m just going to take 10 minutes. It’ll make it so much easier.
Jamie Irvine:
Being a leader in the heavy duty parts industry is not just about making the best product, it’s also about following all of the best practices. And one of the things I see that Horton is doing with this initiative is you’re making all of this content on demand.
I often talk to my clients about how you need to make your video content as accessible and as it would be like on Netflix, you could bring up Netflix and you have all of these different videos you can choose from for a company. They need to do that, and that’s what you guys are doing. You’re making it available. They can pick and choose what they need to watch when they need to watch it. It’s readily available.
Like you said, you’ve even done the QR code so they can just their mobile device, open it right then and there. I just think that that is one of the additional ways that Horton continues to be one of the leaders in the industry and is really putting forth not just a quality product, but following those best practices.
Thomas Kleich:
Very much. And I want everybody to see it. I’ve given it, I dunno if you’re familiar with Diesel Laptops. See, they approached me when I was at TMC. Hey, can we have your videos? Absolutely. I mean, I think the more we can get that information out, the more people know that the more comfortable they are, the better they’re trained and everything’s going to fall in place.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, Diesel Laptops are actually a sponsor of this show and a longtime client of our consulting business, the Heavy Duty Consulting Corporation. So thank you Tom so much for taking some time to talk to us about this. You’ve been listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. My name is Jamie Irvine and I’ve been speaking to Tom Kleich, Director of Sales for Fleets at Horton.
To learn more and to see all of the great products that they have to get access to this material, just head over to their website, hortonww.com, everything is there. Tom, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it.
Thomas Kleich:
Thanks, Jamie. Appreciate it.
Jamie Irvine:
I hope you enjoyed my interview with Thomas Kleich from Horton and I hope that you take advantage of the training that they have created to help you help your customers. It’s so important, and if you’re an end user, you want to make sure that you have taken advantage of this training as well so that your people understand how to get the most out of the Horton products. It’s time for our next segment, That’s Not Heavy Duty.
In this edition of That’s Not Heavy Duty. I want to talk about the refusal to train people. The reality is the trucking industry is the backbone of society. Without the trucking industry, the way that people live and people’s actual lives do hang in the balance.
So what we do in heavy-duty really matters. Therefore, if you are dedicated to making this industry a better place, if your company works inside of the trucking industry, perhaps at the manufacturing level, maybe you’re at the distribution level of parts or maybe you’re in the parts and service side of the business.
In any case, we all play our part in making the trucking industry strong, and so we should have a true dedication to helping heavy-duty people who work for us be in a position where they can thrive. Therefore, we would never refuse to train them. We would get creative and find ways to get the information our people need to do their jobs better.
Now, I want to share with you an article that was published a few years ago, all the way back in 2018, but I really think the situation has gotten worse since then.
So everything I’m about to share with you is actually, I think the importance of it is amplified. So there was an article entitled Young Workers No Longer Get the On the Job Training they need, so they’re finding it elsewhere. This was originally published on entrepreneur.com, and we will share a link to this in our show notes so you can read the entire article.
Now, according to Peter Capelli, the director of the Wharton School Center for Human Resources, companies want workers they don’t have to educate, and his research has found that employers don’t train young workers like they used to. So let’s review the numbers. In 1979, as per Capelli’s research, the average young worker received 2.5 weeks of training per year.
So that’s equivalent to about a hundred hours of training a year. If you work a 40 hour work week. By 1995, training time fell to just 11 hours. More recent data than that has been hard to find according to Capelli, but the Wharton professor says that by 2011, only a fifth of employees reported receiving on the job training from their employers over the past five years.
Now, what’s going on here is something that’s often called the tragedy of the commons. Society as a whole is definitely better off if it’s workers are properly trained, especially workers who, workers in our industry who arguably are the backbone of society.
Now, that’s not a quote from the article, that’s my thoughts. So let’s put this in context. Trained workers mean that they become more productive. So the more trained a worker is, the more they have the knowledge and the expertise and the skills to do the job that they’re hired to do, the more productive they become.
This will mean that the companies that employ those more productive people become more productive themselves and they contribute a greater overall economic output.
However, individual companies are better off if they leave the cost of that training to their competitors. So more companies these days, according to Capelli, seem to want a free ride. So in other words, they’re saying, yes, we want trained employees, but we don’t want to carry the cost, so we’ll let the competitors do that and then we’ll hire those people away from them. But of course, that doesn’t work if everybody adopts that kind of a strategy.
Now, the consequences for young professionals have really been tragic, and it’s been costly to everyone. Traditional jobs aren’t providing them with new skills and therefore aren’t setting them up for success in their careers.
Obviously, if that’s what’s happening, then young workers are less loyal to their employers and we create this terrible feedback loop where employers say they can’t get good employees. Employees say they can’t find good employers, and around and around we go. So unsurprisingly, young workers aren’t happy with their employers, so they’re leaving constantly.
We hear this all the time in heavy-duty, disengaged from their jobs, unlike any other generation before them, these young workers, younger millennials and the oldest Gen Zs are seeking new skills and they’re job hopping in 2015, according to a Gallup study, millennials changed jobs three times more often than the older generations.
The Gallup study estimated that turnover cost the US economy, wait for it 30.5 billion with a B per year.
It’s a major problem, folks. Now, if you’re on the employee side of the equation, there are some reasons for hope, and that’s really because new technologies are enabling people to get access to better quality information at a faster rate all the time.
Really, when you think about it, millennials have gotten the message. Their entire generation has this concept of being an entrepreneur in the older generations. Being an entrepreneur meant that you were without a job.
Now, being an entrepreneur is the desired outcome for many, many young professionals, and they are really, really turning up the heat on traditional employers because they are increasingly choosing to go their own way and they are becoming their own bosses. They’re training themselves, and this is having a real negative impact on traditional employers. I think we’ve definitely seen this in heavy-duty.
A lot of young people over the last 10, 15 years or so have opted away from traditional jobs like going into the trucking industry and have decided instead to try to focus on different ways of making money.
And so I think of even my 11-year-old nephew who has many men in his life, in his family who are all in blue collar trades, and yet, what does he want to do?
He wants to monetize a YouTube channel and be a content creator, not follow in the footsteps of his dad and some of his uncles. He’s more following in my footsteps, I would say, and it’s understandable, right? If companies aren’t going to invest in you, you’re going to find your own pathway. If you have to finance your own pathway, you might as well be your own boss.
So it does make sense why people have gone in that direction, so what are we going to do about it? At the end of the day, if you want to be a heavy-duty person and you want to contribute to our great industry, which is the backbone of society, and you are an employer, you’re going to have to step up and you’re going to have to train your people.
Now, the good news is, is that like in the case of our guest this week, Horton, you absolutely have access to great training materials that you can provide to your employees, and you should take advantage of those. In addition to that, you need to increase on the job training that you’re doing at every level of your company.
This is a way to differentiate yourself from the competitors in your marketplace who aren’t taking those steps. This is something that it is an investment, but it’s an investment that pays dividends in a huge way if you stick with it.
That’s how you be a heavy-duty person by giving back to the industry and stepping up and providing that training that our young people so desperately need. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I am your host, Jamie Irvine, and as always, I want to encourage you to continue to Be Heavy Duty.
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