When Chicago, the legendary rock-and-roll band with horns, was first created in 1967, none of the founding seven members knew how successful the band would be or how long their careers would stretch.
Since then, the group has hit incredible highs – 18 platinum albums, 20 top-10 singles, 10 Grammy nominations and an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – but it has also faced some very tough lows. Only three of those original seven members are still with the band, and there were several points in the ‘80s and ‘90s where it seemed as though they would dissolve all together.
But they’re still here, still on the road and still touring after 57 years. In a recent interview with Grammy.com, founding keyboardist and songwriter Robert Lamm said one thing above all else has kept the band alive and relevant nearly six decades later.
“(Over) a career where we really never stopped, the thing that changed was the various people who have come into the band and left for one reason or another,” Lamm said. “That was something we had to learn how to do again. We've done a lot of learning over the years.”
Learning is critical to success. Whether it’s running a collision shop or writing a chart-topping song, you need to constantly have an idea of what your industry looks like and stay on the cutting edge to be competitive. As the collision repair space continues to evolve and change in unprecedented ways, making sure your team has a robust training regimen is crucial to keeping your shop at the top.
You’re Not Alone
When you think about collision repair shop training, chances are the first thing that comes to mind are courses from organizations such as I-CAR that cover in-depth repair procedures and making sure you’re repairing a car properly. While those are very important, that shouldn’t be the only training you think about.
“When shops are putting together the training plan, most of the time they're thinking about the techs in the back of the shop,” says Jason Scharton with 3M’s global marketing operations team. “They also need to think about the people in the front office that are interacting with customers.”
John Melendez, owner of JDM Collision in the Chicago suburb of Thornton, Illinois, agrees. The customers who are in your shop have most likely just been in an accident or some other situation that’s causing them to spend upward of thousands of dollars to fix their car. They’re overwhelmed and frustrated, and Melendez says it’s critical that everyone in your shop has training to deal with those customers respectfully and with empathy.
“What you want to do is build a relationship,” Melendez says. “Check with them to make sure that they and their family are OK. When you start off on the right foot and make the customer feel good about coming into your shop, they're going to assume that the rest of the repair is going to go the same way.”
In an industry that’s rapidly changing and becoming more complex than ever before, making sure that every member of your team, from the front office to the paint booth, has expertise and empathy is a great way to set yourself apart.
“Every person in your shop needs to be an expert in their field,” Melendez says. “Whether that's customer service, estimating, or working on the vehicle, they need to be an expert.”
What You’re Missing
While institutions such as I-CAR and OEMs provide great training courses, Melendez says you’re doing your team a disservice if you’re looking only to them for educational material.
A lot of individual vendors also offer a wide variety of training courses that your shop can take advantage of. Melendez says his shop uses a large array of training modules from the shop’s paint supplier, and those modules cover everything from specific paint application processes to broader topics such as inter-shop communication.
“Good vendors that stand behind their customers want to help independent shops grow,” Melendez says. “They have so many modules available to their customers, and a lot of shop owners don't take advantage of that.”
Scharton says 3M is one of those vendors, and they’ve been working over the last decade with technicians to gather feedback and make their training offerings more relevant.
“We've been doing product demonstrations that focus more on process and really go into to the correct repair process, not just how to use 3M products,” Scharton says. “We're fortunate that 3M products are used throughout the repair process, so we understand the repair process and how all those different parts connect, and we're bringing that into our training.”
Using one vendor as your primary source for educational materials and having a wide variety of other sources to fill in the gaps for your training program is a great way to cover all your bases.
“We rely on I-CAR. We stay on top of our training there, but you have to think outside the box,” Melendez says. “You need to pull together a plan from a lot of different sources to come up with a robust plan for your staff.”
Any Way You Want
Not all people are wired the same way, and not all positions in your shop are going to need the same kinds of training. And with the increasing complexity of modern vehicles, Melendez suggests breaking down the whole repair process of a vehicle into manageable chunks for each of your technicians to dig into.
“By breaking it up and holding each technician accountable for their segment, whether that's damage identification, disassembly... that makes it so much easier to identify what training modules are needed and not having your techs work through a bunch of stuff they don't need.”
He also recommends asking your technicians what interests them and making sure that people are doing jobs that suit their skills and that make them excited.
“ADAS, sensors and other tech – give that to the peoplewho want it. Kids of today are super techy. You put that kind of technology in their hand, you should see the smile on their face,” he says. “They get to do the scans, and they then also get to do the calibrations. Veteran techs are going to benefit, too, because they won't be overwhelmed.”
Scharton adds that in an age when a lot of training is shifting online to make sure that your technicians are receiving some amount of in-person training.
“Technicians, especially, are kinesthetic learners – they like to use their hands, and that's how they best learn. We've been seeing a huge shift to e-learning a lot the last few years, and while that is important, it can't be the only way that we're having our teams learn. Technicians need to be hands-on to learn, and they need to do some of that learning outside the shop.”
A good training regimen should include a combination of hands-on and e-learning that is relevant to each team member’s specific job function and helps reinforce the value of putting the customer. If you’re able to attain that, Melendez says your shop will be in great shape to keep getting stronger every day.
“When you feel good about things and your staff feels confident in what they're doing, it makes everything go so much better,” he says.
