Eric Johnson (00:00)
Welcome back to Boiler Wild. My name is Eric Johnson and on this podcast, talk about boiler industry topics as well as personal development. Wild is an acronym, stands for work hard, invest in yourself, lead others and develop yourself into a person of excellence. This episode, we are going to be talking about why hands-on training is a waste of time. And hopefully you can learn something from this.
If you do learn something from this and if you do enjoy this podcast or other episodes, I want you to please share the episode and as well as rate it five stars on your podcast app, whether that's Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can find this podcast on three different platforms, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. I do not film it.
but I probably should start doing it. I've been thinking about it. It's just a little bit more editing and production on my side and I kinda enjoy just the audio only side of it, but for promotional ⁓ filming this podcast probably should happen. But at the same time, I enjoy listening to podcasts when I walk.
I enjoy listening to podcasts when I drive and a lot of people in the boiler industry and HVAC drive a lot. And if you listen to a podcast while you're driving, you're not looking at the video. And I think a lot of us are busy and there are some amazing produce podcasts out there that record their video and you can watch the video now on Spotify and like YouTube and everything.
I don't watch any of the videos of the podcast. I only listen to the audio because I'm doing something else like walking. I don't have time to sit down for an hour and a half and watch a video of two people talking or a person talking. And especially if you're driving, driving is a great time to think about ideas and think about different topics and stimulate your brain.
It also goes much faster to pass the time instead of just mindlessly listening to music. So that's kind of how I view podcasts. I also started this podcast because I don't have to edit video. hate editing video and having the perfect video set up. don't have like a amazing studio, like all the bro podcasters out there. And I just, I just don't really care about video that much, but
I probably start recording at least recording it with the guests that I have on that being said if you want to be a guest for this podcast You can DM me on LinkedIn or email me [email protected] That's B-O-I-L-E-A-R-N .com All right, let's get into it why hands-on training is a waste of time so When I say that that is with context and
hands-on training is typically done with, ⁓ say, on-the-job training. And what on-the-job training is is you typically send somebody out with somebody else that knows more than them, and that person is supposed to instruct the other person on how to do things. And this...
works sometimes, but typically it leads to being a huge waste of time and money. And with the labor shortage and labor rates, employers don't have 10 years or five years to just hope somebody learns something and then expect them to be able to go do things on their own. So what hands-on training or
on the job training typically looks like is a senior person is talking to a less senior person and the gap, the senior person is typically not trained on how to train somebody else. They just kinda point out what's important to them and they also have no really idea what the newer person knows.
So there's a huge gap in that. And typically the best technicians, the best and skilled people are typically not the best trainers. Like if you understand things in your head and you can just kind of just see how things work and solve problems and everything just kind of comes to you easier, you're gonna get frustrated when you get a newer person working with you.
and you're like, wait, this is just how it works. Why don't you see this? I don't understand how you don't know that. You just must be dumb and get frustrated. Or on the job training, it's a two-person job, so it's really not training, it's working with, but you really need two people and the employer is expecting.
the person just to learn just by doing it or working with it. And like it can happen, it does work, but it's very, very inefficient. And a lot of times there's many, many stories and lots of experiences and people that I've talked to. And this happens more in the general trades. I wouldn't say more with boilers, but you know, apprentice can get stuck on a job and they're...
in of training or work can be just doing like menial tasks or fetching tools, fetching supplies for other people. And there's no real checks and balances of, what are you learning and what are you doing?
The biggest failure with hands-on training when it's job-driven, when it's on-the-job training, is that it's on-the-job training. And the company doesn't manage or doesn't come up with the customer problem or what the customer is doing. So if you send a person out for training, they essentially are getting trained on a scenario they may or may not be ready for.
And let's talk about this with like boilers. So you go out and you have a newer-ish person and you're like, all right, you're to learn how to set up a burner. And they are working with somebody else and you're working on a linkageless system, like parallel positioning. And the senior person is taking them through all this stuff. And this is how you set up a burner. This is...
fuel, air, O2, here's a question analyzer, all this stuff. And it's a great experience. But the new person doesn't understand sequence operations of a power burner and doesn't understand how water and energy move through a steam system or doesn't understand how steam systems are set up and.
or how like hydronic systems are set up, know, primary, secondary versus primary variable. And they don't understand different types of boilers and all this stuff, but they are learning parallel positioning and setting up a burner, which is great, but you just miss 10 steps. And no, no customer problem comes from, hey, we need to go out and walk an entire system and test.
the entire system and like walk you through this and ⁓ check that you're actually learning. Like it's always customer driven and the customer problem gets solved and then the apprentice or newer person is supposed to just learn from that. they can learn like a dot of knowledge.
but if they don't have a foundation to build that on, then it's worthless. I like relating back to education. Think about if you were to have a four-year degree in college and say, hey, I'm gonna become a mechanical engineer at college. And instead of taking your classes in the structured approach of...
Like 100 level classes, 200, 300, 400, 500 level classes. How typically most colleges set that up. The academic structure is pretty similar between colleges. Instead of doing that, you just randomly took classes and the colleges said, hey, you need to take all these classes by the end of year four. Just pick them as you go and the order doesn't matter. And we're not gonna tell you the order.
So you would randomly pick a class and you'd be sitting in a, I don't know, thermodynamics class or something like that. And you're like, man, like I don't understand any of this. And you skipped all the prerequisites for that. Or you're sitting in just a 400 level class and you're a first year student and you're like, ⁓ like this kind of makes sense. It's not like it's not gonna make sense, but it's.
you're skipping steps and you're gonna be lost most of the time, but you will have some learning and you will learn something from that class. Will you pass that class? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not saying that a 400 level class isn't passable if you don't take prerequisites before, but it will be significantly harder.
and you will have to try harder. But that's how on the job training works is you just randomly get.
exposed to different problems in different situations and as a newer person you're supposed to you are expected to just figure out how all those situations work together and to just over time just pick up knowledge and experience and fit those all in a puzzle in your head then that then that eventually makes you serviceable
and billable and able to work by yourself and knowledgeable and can build off that. And it leads to a very, very shaky foundation and very, very, I call it like the shotgun approach of learning. You may know stuff, but it doesn't, it's just scrambled and just like you just threw spaghetti all over the wall. Like there's knowledge there, there's tons of experience, but you're probably not learning the best things.
in the correct order. And also the other downside of on the job training is typically the employer can't control what is being taught. And a lot of older people, as an older I mean more experienced, you don't have to be old to be experienced, but typically that's how that works is a lot of older people will teach things to younger people or less experienced people.
that the employer probably doesn't want taught and they're like bad habits. And there's a meme or a joke that says of, we're not really supposed to do it this way, but this is how I do it. And once you teach the bad habit or the shortcut and the newer person sees that, they don't have the mental.
Fortitude or decisions to say yeah, that's the bad way. I'm not gonna do that they are assuming because the senior person is telling them that it is the correct way to do it and They don't really typically know any better till somebody shows them a different way of actually doing it correctly and I've seen this with Troubleshooting I have seen some very experienced people
troubleshoot by jumping out.
controls on a boiler system until the boiler runs and then that that's how they determine where the problem is or if you just go around press all the resets and You just start changing parts and until the boiler runs like you're just throwing parts at it You can solve the problem that way like there is a way to do it and that's like the the force
heavy lift troubleshooting method of push all the resets, jump out controls. And by jump out controls, mean like jump out the control. the boiler doesn't start. All right, put it back. Jump it out. Like it's not just jump everything out. boiler runs and then walk away. No, it's having jumper wires, jump it out, jump it out, jump it out. All right, now the boiler runs. All right, this thing must be bad.
⁓ yeah, let's just change it out. And that's, it's a very forced method of troubleshooting that leads to a lot of bad habits. And it is very difficult to teach somebody not to do that. Once they have learned how to do that and they will always revert back to their lowest level of training. ⁓ that's typically used in the, ⁓ the military of
You know, whenever you get into stressful situations, you always revert back to your level of training. That is the same thing that happens with troubleshooting and stressful situations in a boiler room. Now, you may be saying, well, how else do we train people?
Let me lay it out and how else you train people. have to, one, you have to understand that not everybody is the same, yet you have to put them through a program and assess where they are and get them into that program. So if you were to hire somebody that is five years experience, like every employer out there is asking for.
Five years experience from somebody who just showed up and did what they're told is way different than five years experience of somebody who was thrown to the wolves and was able to swim and didn't sink, went home, read all the manuals, read all the books and just figured it out. They may have learned some bad habits in doing that, but they weren't able to figure out problems.
enough that they were billable and customers liked them. And they thought that they were doing the correct thing. That's not bad. Like that's kind of the attitude that most employers want. But you kind of have to train the bad habits out of them because they were never taught the proper way to do things, even though the end result can be similar. But the number one place you got to start is assessments.
and understanding that you do not listen to people that say, I'm not a good test taker, I don't do well on assessments. So if somebody can't tell you the knowledge, then they don't really know it. And there's a huge difference between...
writing a test that's hard versus writing a test to test knowledge. And you have to be very careful when writing a test or writing an assessment. It's also recommended not to use the word test because tests can have a very negative connotation from their schooling days. ⁓ you have a test next Friday on this. You need to study. You have a test.
If you call it an evaluation or an assessment, that's typically a little less pressure, but you essentially are testing them. So you're testing them on what they know. And they can say, I'm a bad test taker, but if the test is written correctly and you have a variation of questions,
it is going to show what they know or don't know. And a lot of employers assume their employees, especially service technicians, know more than what they know because they are able to solve problems. But a lot of times, there's a lot of problems are solved in the boiler room by throwing parts or guessing, yet the end result, like it's the forced troubleshooting method. You can get through something,
a lot by guessing, guess and check, guess and check, guess and check, and then you get to the end versus like if you were to have two different, boiler rooms that are exactly identical with the exact same simulation, and you would have two people go through, you could have the first person that does the guess and check troubleshooting method spend eight hours on a problem and throw five parts at it.
versus a person who does it logically and correctly and they finish troubleshooting in an hour and a half and they change one part. You don't really know the difference. An employer, theoretically like a contractor, is incentivized for their employees to spend more time on site and throw more parts at a problem because they make more money. I'm not saying that that's bad, but it's not a good thing to... ⁓
train for or to like enforce. We should always want to go for efficiency as far as people doing things correctly. But you don't really know and the customer doesn't really know
if you wouldn't compare it. like the first method of the person spending eight hours and throwing five parts at the problem and eventually solving it, that looks fine until you have the same exact problem and the person solves in an hour and a with one part change out. And now the first scenario, you're like, what were you doing the whole time? Why did you change all these parts? And a lot of times people can't.
say why they are actually changing the part. They think, they guess, and they're not actually, they don't actually know enough to prove what they're doing. They are just guessing their way through problems, and they're just force troubleshooting. And so I went to college for HVAC Engineering Technology, and in the second year I had a teacher that we had labs of boilers and furnaces and rooftop units and chillers and all that stuff.
and our lab evaluations and a lot of our lab assignments were, we had to diagnose what was wrong with a unit, but we had to explain exactly why the issue was causing, like why it was the issue and how it affects the issue and what would cause that issue and different symptoms that we would find or.
know from like the issue and I can remember one of them. It was just a simple 80 % furnace that I was doing and the furnace started up fine, went lit, gas valves opened up, started heating. But when I had started the furnace, the fan motor hummed a lot and the fan started very, very, very slowly but eventually
got up to speed and the then problem was well the capacitor is bad the the start capacitor on the fan motor and so the furnace worked correctly but i had to find and i pretty much knew because we were it was drilled into us the sequence operations of a furnace and how things work and the site and
Sounds of them that I knew almost immediately that it was a capacitor issue with the motor Because I knew the sound of motors starting but essentially I had to explain why This furnace that worked actually wasn't actually correct operation what what that would cause? What would cause that which would be you know the capacitor on the? the fan motor and this is the circulation fan motor not the
induced draft fan motor but the circulation the main the main blower motor and
go through this list with the teacher standing there staring at me, which is very high pressure, very...
worrying, to most people who are not confident, but you get confident enough doing it enough that you end up.
being confident in what you're saying and all the questions the teacher asks you are all within line of somebody who knows something and the questions you should be able to answer. I say that because I also had a classmate who spent over an hour on a furnace troubleshooting it, why it wouldn't run and...
They ended up saying it was a bad board, so a bad furnace board, and they were just poking around with their multimeter, and this person wasn't strong with troubleshooting or understanding sequence operations. They were just poking around with their multimeter, couldn't find power, and had skipped the number one troubleshooting step, and just guessed and said, bad board.
the board needs to be changed. I don't have any power on the outputs. Nothing's happening. And this took about an hour and this is like a lab evaluation. And the number one step of troubleshooting a piece of equipment like a furnace is.
Do you actually have power? And the screw in fuse for the furnace, the little fuse on the side that they typically put.
I forget what it's called, but it's a screw-in-fuse that can be local to the furnace was bad. the furnace didn't even have 120 volts going to it. the first step with troubleshooting is do you actually have power to the unit? And a lot of people assume they do and they skip that step. And that's where the eight steps of troubleshooting that I talk about.
That's why that's so important, but it's also having a method and following that method is so important. And where hands-on training comes, that side of it is if the senior person doesn't show the apprentice or the newer person, that the exact method of troubleshooting and the exact proper steps of sequence operation and going through all that.
the new person just learns the bad habits or they learn the skips of, you know, the senior person looks at the unit and they see a green light, they say, all right, I know I have power because I know that green light only happens when I have 120 volts. And they make 10 decisions in their mind without even realizing it. And then they start, all right, and then they start leading the apprentice.
And that apprentice didn't, they skipped those 10 steps that the senior person made without even knowing it. And a lot of times a senior person, and I can do this too, but I try to be very mindful of it. You assume knowledge and the assumption that a unit has power is a lot of ⁓ senior people can make that assumption.
because they see identifying factors and they skip that first troubleshooting step of, does the unit have power? Is the voltage correct for the unit? They skipped that and a lot of times that's fine, but I think I've told this story also before on this podcast, but I had another situation where I got out, I believe it was a school or something.
But went out and it was afternoon, like four o'clock or something. ⁓ Went out and the maintenance people had been working on the boiler all day. They couldn't get it to run. All the covers were off everything. And they're like, man, this thing doesn't run. We had a power failure or power blip through the district. We've been running around and we can't get this boiler to start.
They had tried everything. They're like, and I open up the cabinet and I look at the 7800 and there's no green light on the 7800. So I immediately knew that there was no 120 volt power to the 7800 and there was no display on it. So that little light, but there's no indicators on this older boiler. they typically, like if you're not familiar with a boiler, you wouldn't know that it doesn't have power unless.
you were checking for power and they just assumed they had power because the rest of the room had power. So, you know, typically with a power blip or like a brown out, you're going to have a fuse blow. And I found a blown fuse. We changed the fuse. Everything's good to go. But they had spent hours and hours and hours troubleshooting this boiler and they couldn't figure out that it just didn't even have power because they skipped the number one step of
troubleshooting of make sure you actually have power to the unit before you start checking for power in your control circuits. You're not gonna find power in your control circuit and a newer person is going to check a switch and say, hey, I don't have power across this switch. This switch must be the problem. It's like, well, yes, because you don't have power to the switch.
that's also a problem. You need to go upstream. Just because you don't have power on the other side of switch doesn't mean that the switch is the problem. You need to go upstream of that. But that's just different scenarios of why hands-on training is an issue and not ideal and going back to what do you do instead? So assessments, you need to build assessments that assess where people are and this...
typically looks like writing it down, but also I will say, let me introduce you, if you haven't heard of this, is Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning. And this ⁓ is a very well-known thing in the educational fields of Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom is the last name of some guy who came up with this, but it's a pyramid.
and reading from the bottom up, it's remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create. And when we are learning things as people, we start at the bottom and there's just different levels of learning here. So if you were to try to pass a history exam and you don't have to do anything else other than regurgitate multiple choice answers on a test for your history exam,
All you gotta do is the bottom is remember, remember, remember. And you just can spot the answer. You pass the test and then two days later, you don't remember anything. That is what most of the educational field is, is remember, remember, remember. You recall facts and basic concepts. Then the second level is understand, explain ideas and concepts. And a lot of training doesn't even get to that part.
So if somebody can say.
I know a pump pumps fluid and that like they can understand and remember what the function of a pump is. That's like the bottom of Bloom's taxonomy of learning. But explain ideas and concepts is the why does a pump pump fluid? And they would have to like describe that and explain it.
and a lot of people can't do that. They just say, oh, well, you know, it just pumps fluid. But if you don't know why it pumps fluid and why it actually works, you're never gonna be able to troubleshoot why it's actually not working. You're just gonna say, oh, the pump's bad. It's not pumping fluid. Okay, well, the strainer before the pump is plugged, so the suction side of the pump has a very high pressure drop and no fluid going to it. So obviously on the output, if you have
very little input, the output is gonna be very, very little as well to none. And that doesn't mean the pump's bad, it means we have a problem upstream of the pump. ⁓ yeah, strainer is completely plugged. But then the third level of Bloom's taxonomy is apply. So you're gonna use the information in new situations. Fourth level is analyze, draw connections among ideas. Fifth level is evaluate, justify.
a stand or decision, and then six levels create, produce new or original work. And most hands-on training is just the bottom. Remember, recall facts and basic concepts. A lot of times, unless the senior person is very, very disciplined and you have a lot of time and you're not really pressed on ideas, which can be...
You're not really pressed for problem solving. A lot of times with hands-on training, when things get hard, the senior person just takes over and just does it. And then the junior person sees it and they're like, well, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I'm gonna remember that. they have no, they don't, the one, two, three, the five, the five other steps of Bloom's taxonomy, they never get to, but they only understand.
or they only have experienced the remember part, which is the very, bottom of the pyramid. So we have to get to the...
apply part essentially on all training.
And if you don't get there doing anything else above that, that's why this pyramid builds on itself. So you understand for the understand portion for the second level, it's explain ideas and concepts. And that will make people so uncomfortable because they don't actually know how to explain ideas or concepts. And that's just cause they don't understand them. And
This is where the evaluation comes in. And a lot of people try to skip to the third level of Bloom is applying the information to new situations. So if you skip over to the understand and you can't explain the why, you're gonna classify, describe, discuss, explain, identify, locate, recognize, report, select, translate. Those are the verbs that you would use.
on your evaluation. If you can't do that, doing the apply part, the person just ends up guessing. So when we are doing hands-on training or a lot of classroom training in this case, we do the remember part. So we try to make people remember information and then we skip to the third level, which is apply. You're now gonna take that information and you are going to apply it.
And then employers quickly find out that people don't actually know and they can't apply the information because they're trying to memorize it and spit it back out. But when you're actually trying to problem solve in the field for real, you can't just spit out information and say, ⁓ this is what I learned. Like, why isn't the problem solving itself? Like you have to actually apply what you know to the situation. But then there's also analyze and evaluate, which is
once again, higher levels learning, but we're skipping the understand part, which is explain ideas and concepts. And when you are doing your evaluations and somebody says, I'm not a good test taker, well, and that's a self-limiting belief that they put on themselves, but you have to write your evaluations in a way that is a very low-level reading.
level and a lot of like the average reading level of most people is like third grade so if you have a one paragraph multiple choice question and they have to read a paragraph you are now testing more the
reading comprehension of the person versus their actual knowledge. However,
eventually they need to be able to read a paragraph and answer a question because you know where that applies is a customer tells you a paragraph of information and you need to understand what is valuable, what is not valuable and draw conclusions from that and the customer can send you on a wild goose chase for the problem. Well, I think it's this and I think it's that.
But as a technician who actually understands why a steam system does what it does and how the energy flows and how a boiler works, they're just gonna dismiss that from what the customer is telling them because they know that that actually doesn't make sense. And you just dismiss it in your head as the customer is telling you and you pick up the important facts. So that is a, and that's the analyze part.
But when you are writing your evaluation, you can say, hey, tell me the sequence of operations of a typical power burner, Scotch Marine boiler setup. And if they can't do that, anything more beyond that is a waste of time. If somebody can't draw out the water cycle of like how energy flows through a steam system, anything else is a waste of time because they're not actually understanding
What a steam trap is for, why a boiler actually makes steam, how heat is transferred, what types of heat there are, the different core concepts that they're trying to remember, but they can't actually understand. Teaching and trying to apply above that is a complete waste of time. And that's where hands-on training comes in is the applied.
function. Also, if you have zero classroom training or like set up and you just do all hands on training, on the job training and you don't have a very, very disciplined senior person training the person, the person is starting at the third level of Bloom's taxonomy.
and they are just seeing the apply. And a lot of this ends up being going back to the core of telling ain't training. The senior person can tell somebody, I closed this valve because of this. And the person thinks they're learning, but they only learned in this specific situation, they closed this valve, but they don't understand why and they don't understand what the valve's for. And it's...
just a piece of information. A lot of times people will fool themselves into thinking that, I've heard the information and now I remember it. But a week later, you're like, wait, what did we talk about? And this happens most often in some training classes. And I say training very lightly. It's more information presentations. How many people have you seen in a training class? Sit down.
and they have a binder and they have paper in front of them and I've seen it so many times. They have a paper in front of them and the instructor talks for two hours and you may see three words on the paper for notes.
So the person is either fooling themselves into thinking that they're learning and because the instructor makes everything seem so easy or they're so lost they don't know what to notes on or a combination of both. Somebody cannot talk for two hours on a new subject and you have zero notes or very few notes and you just expect, yeah, I'm gonna remember that. Everything just seems so easy until
The next day, your employer says, hey, what'd you learn? And you're like, uh, I don't really remember. They talked about this, they talked about that. I don't know, let me go back to my notes. And for a full day of training, you have not even a page of notes. You're like, oh, well, maybe I didn't remember all that stuff. It's because if somebody could just tell you information and you remembered it.
then I could just show you a bunch of videos and you would remember them and in-person teaching would be obsolete. That's not how humans learn though. But we have to test for the understanding and you have to test for understanding and comprehension. And if a person cannot explain ideas to you,
they do not understand them and any more of the application or analyze and evaluate any higher on the Bloom's taxonomy, any higher on that and it is a waste of time. And that's where hands-on training fails is the senior person will not make the junior person explain ideas and concepts and they will not drill them on that. And that's where a structured training program comes from. So we are now evaluating and you're gonna evaluate based on
some factual knowledge, but a lot of the evaluation needs to be the second, the understand, explain ideas and concepts. Just spitting out facts of like, what is a fire tube boiler? Like that's great, but I've never had a customer say, hey, we don't understand what a fire tube boiler is. Can you come fix it? That doesn't solve any problems.
Knowing what a fire tube boiler is and remembering that fact is just a base level, level of knowledge, but you have to understand the why of how a fire tube boiler works and explain how it works in order to then troubleshoot it. If you're just like, oh yeah, water on the outside of the tubes, fire on the inside of the tubes. That doesn't solve anything, that's just a fact.
And if you test for that and you just, and they just say, oh, water on the outside of the tubes, fire on the inside of the tubes. That's great. That's something you should test at a very low level, but that doesn't mean they actually understand. All right. Explain why a boiler manufacturer would build a three pass boiler versus a four pass boiler versus a one pass boiler. Why do passes?
affect the boiler operation? do the number of passes in a fire tube boiler change the burner performance? What happens if I plug the second pass of the boiler? What happens when my stack temperature is high in the boiler? What could cause high stack temperature in the boiler? These are all things to explain and you're actually checking understanding of just the facts. And we...
We don't do that enough as an industry. just, hey, yep, they understand but understand is they just know what a fire tube boiler, they know the facts, yep, go apply it. And if they can't explain it to you, they're not gonna be able to explain it to your customer. And that's why hands-on training is mostly a waste of time because we skip over the understand function and we're not actually testing for that.
And once again, I've seen it all the time. People push back on, I'm not a good test taker. Okay, great. Let's just have a one-on-one conversation or you can make it a group effort, the group effort is not a good, it's a good starting point to make people more comfortable. But when you evaluate, has to be one-on-one because
A group of people, the smartest or the strongest person in the group will always cover for the weak person. And that happens with like group projects. you've probably, if you're young enough to remember like high school or college group projects and you're the, you know, this was me. I was always the person. remember my first history class in my sophomore year of high school. I was paired up with two other kids.
and
These kids were kind of goof-offs and didn't really care about their grade and I really wanted an A. And this is like the first semester of my sophomore year or something and I love history class and these kids just didn't really care. And I did the entire group project myself and we were the only group to get an A and these other two kids were like, ⁓ great, yeah. And.
Like I told them exactly what to say because we had to present and do all this stuff and I made all the slides for them, did all this stuff. And then the teacher after class was like, oh, it's very apparent that you did all the work for your group. So good job doing the project by yourself. I'm like, oh, you know, I tried to cover for them and say, oh yeah, they helped and all that stuff. But I wanted the A and I wasn't going to rely on my group partners who were uncooperative and didn't want to do the work.
to drag me down. And that's how group projects, like if you say, hey, you three or four, go over there and work on this trainer and understand the trainer for this parallel positioning system. The smartest person will cover for the weakest person. The weakest person will either not wanna admit that they don't know or they'll...
like not ask questions or they'll just sit and watch and think that the person showing them that they're learning by just seeing. And I said this multiple times before, think of like math class, the teacher is doing problems on the board and you're like, yeah, like that makes sense, uh-huh, uh-huh. And then they write out a problem on the board and they turn around and they call your name and they're like, all right, come up to the board. And you're like, ⁓ deer in the headlights.
What am I doing? You don't even know the first step. It's because you're actually getting to apply. You're the third step of Bloom's taxonomy. You have to apply it, but you didn't actually understand the second part, the second line of the pyramid. You had no understanding of actually how to solve the problem. You were just thinking that you can remember how to solve it. And you'll see this also with... ⁓
in a classroom type scenario where students want to see problems over and over and over again, like, hey, tell us about this situation, tell us about that situation. And they wanna see like the same thing over and over and over again with different variables. they're ending up, they are memorizing the variables and memorizing what happens and how to solve things in situations instead of actually understanding it.
If you just have to keep giving different types of problems with the same situation around them, but just with different variables, and they can't explain the why and actually solve it or talk through it, and you have to talk through it with them, and then they're like, all right, give us another one. All right, give us another one. And there's no building upon that. They're not actually learning. They're just...
You're just going through different situations and they're trying to remember every single one. And this, I've seen this so many times with newer people that they think they can just memorize all the information. Once they see all the boiler rooms, then they'll know all the boiler rooms. Well, unfortunately, two boilers that are identical will run differently when they are installed side by side and no boiler room is the same, even though typically every boiler room is the same.
in the way that it works. Like the core foundational topics are the same through every single boiler system, but the variables change. And if you don't understand and can explain the ideas and concepts of why a boiler system works, why a steam system works, why the energy flows through a steam system and how the water flows, if you don't understand that, then you're gonna not know how to apply those concepts.
and you're gonna be lost. And that's where people get lost from hands-on training is they don't have the understanding and they can't apply it. you have to build as an employer, you have to build assessments that actually assess people and they should be uncomfortable. The person should be uncomfortable with the assessment if they don't know.
Like if you're asking questions and the person talks in circles or mumbles, stutters, I don't know, they don't actually know, which is totally fine. That's what we're trying to find as an employer. It is absolutely 100 % okay to not know. but now that we know that you don't know, we are now going to train you to know which is a win for the employer because now we can say,
hey, this person doesn't know this, we're gonna implement this training class or this program or this person with this and have this goal of, hey, we need to learn, this person needs to learn this next thing and then we're gonna reevaluate in the next month or so and you just go back and forth with that. Not knowing is not a problem. It's not knowing what your employees don't know. That's the problem because you don't know where how to train and if you don't know what they don't know,
You're just guessing and wasting money with on the job training and sending them to classes because if you don't know what they don't know, how do you know that the class is good for them? If you're sending a person to a class and they call it boiler 101, that may be fine. They can call it boiler 101, but that doesn't mean the person's ready for that actual class. Just because they say it's a beginner class doesn't mean it's beginner.
If a person doesn't understand basic physics or what even metal is or has ever seen a boiler room before or doesn't understand how water boils, they're gonna be pretty lost in a boiler 101 class. And I say that, you you may say, well, most people know that stuff. Correct. They do. However, if you send somebody to pipe fitting 101 and they just assume
you understand how to a tape measure, that would be an incorrect assumption for new people these days because a lot of people, as crazy as it seems, don't know how to read a tape measure. And I've seen it myself. I worked with somebody who didn't know how to read tape measure. I assumed they did. And then every person after that that I trained that was new, I said, hey, do you know how to read tape measure? And some people said, yes, what do you think I am, an idiot?
I say no, I just assume no level of knowledge now because I assumed somebody else knew how to read a tape measure. And when I gave them a measurement, they said, it's five lines. What is that? I'm like five lines, 23 in five lines. That's not a measurement. So you can't assume knowledge, but you have to assess where people are. If you don't know where they are and you don't know what they don't know.
How can you train for them to know? You're just guessing and guessing is not a valid business tactic or a valid way to actually build a skilled workforce because guessing leads to a lot of guessing and that guessing ends up running through your entire workforce and pops out on the customer side and your people will guess for your customers because they can't actually explain to you.
If you bring somebody in a room as high pressure as it may seem, and it's probably not best to like bring somebody in and have them talk to like direct boss and maybe their direct boss is the best person, but there should be a comfortability with it. Like you have to be sensitive to the situation, but if a service technician or an operator can't explain to somebody within their own company,
why something is that's like a low level concept. They're not gonna be able to explain it to the customer and they're not gonna be able to apply those concepts at a customer site and they will just be guessing. And that is why hands-on training is mostly a waste of time. And you as an employer should be building assessments and building a program of knowledge checks and actually understanding where your workforce is.
and then getting them trained up from there. A lot of people skip the assessment part and think, well, if we just send everybody to training classes, then they'll be trained. And they will quickly find out if you haven't already that somebody attending a training class does not actually lead to training. You have to build an internal structure that actually builds them up. So then you'll say, well, Eric, we have to do hands-on training.
hands-on training is great. Once the person can remember some basic facts and understand and explain to you the basic facts and basic concepts, and then they go out and apply those concepts in the field. If they can't do the first two levels of remember and understand the application part that.
Most employers skip to because that is easiest builds a very, very shaky foundation for people. And then we wonder why people don't grow. And a service technician with 10 years experience can't actually troubleshoot a boiler properly because they were never taught how to properly troubleshoot a boiler with a system and clear, clear steps. So that is what I have for episode 48 of the boiler wild podcast. If you have any comments about this podcast,
please DM me on LinkedIn or email me [email protected] I would appreciate any comments, positive or negative. I always love feedback and talking with people or if this resonated with you or you just wanna shoot some ideas. I love talking to people on the phone. I love meeting and hearing people's ⁓ ways of life and what they did different.
experiences, hey, this is how I learned. It's, always interesting to me. ⁓ just talking to people and getting different experiences. And if you're fine being recorded, some of those, ⁓ phone conversations would make awesome podcasts because we are not alone in this situation. Most mechanical contractors, most boiler service contractors, operators, service technicians, we all have the same kind of problems and
Thinking that you're isolated and you're the only one with your problems is a very short-sighted, narrow way of thinking. Other people have your problems as well. if we talk about them and, you know, this, hey, we already fixed this problem over here. sharing it with the rest of the industry or giving other people ideas is a strong, powerful way to collab. There is enough work for everybody, all the good employers.
No one employer can service the entirety of equipment in America. That would just be ridiculous. So why does one employer have to hold ideas to themselves and say, hey, this is what we did, this is what works, and we're never gonna share it with anybody because we're afraid of losing business. That's not actually a reality. And it actually happens to be that the more you give away, the more that comes back to you. But anyways, I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you wanna learn more,
Look up Bloom's taxonomy and there's all these graphics, but that's like a hierarchy of learning. And it's just like, once again, it's a framework, but you start at the bottom and you work up. And if you skip any of those steps, then you're really skipping steps as far as people cognitive and how they think. So thank you.
Please rate this podcast five stars and I'll catch you on the next episode. Stay wild.
