Originally Posted by
XcelTech
A new guy always gets the same speech.
You are coming straight out of trade school. If I put you in front of 5 different pieces of equipment you will not be able to tell me how 4 of them work or what they should do.
I can't make money from your work right now and have to train you. So you will be my PM muscle for a few month. Your job will be to follow the instructions of the PM guys. You will do all the heavy lifting for them, you will do all the dirty work; haul the tools, clean up the equipment, clean the work trucks, run in and out with parts, or any other grunt work they ask to be done. For this I will pay to have one of my best Techs teach you about the HVAC industry, equipment, sequences of operation, how parts should work, how to troubleshoot, how to fix them, how talk to the customers, and how we want our work done.
Should you do the dirty work without complaint, learn, show progress, and gain the confidence of my PM department I will give you a raise and promote you to installation where you will learn again more about the equipment and you should be armed with your knowledge of how other bad installs made equipment difficult to do PM's or how equipment didn't work well because of a bad install.
I have two major rules that I cut in stone. If you show up late 3 times or leave early without getting approval I show you the door. If you call in more then two week in a year, I show you the door.
I understand you will make mistakes, I understand you will break things, I understand you will cost me money before you make me money. I want you to work knowing that I know this and have prepared for it. I will forgive you and not hold you responsible. It is important that you get into it and work on the parts. You need to learn how to take a piece of equipment you don't understand, get your hands on it, and start figuring it out. Confidence that you can figure out how it works is the most important skill that I cannot teach you and you can't learn it being scared.
Last I know you will make those mistakes, don't try to hide them. If you admit what you did and tell me how you did it we can fix the problem faster and you learn. There is nothing that irks me more then having to diagnose a problem someone else created and they wont tell me what happened. It takes twice as long to fix when I don't know the beginning and middle.
Then they either put in the effort and know they are ding the grunt work cause they are costing the company money or they complain, don't try to learn, wont do the work, and get canned.