Eric Johnson (00:00)
Welcome back to Boiler Wild. My name is Eric Johnson. And on this podcast, we talk about boiler industry topics, as well as personal development. Both go hand in hand and I believe both are important. I love boilers, I love personal development. I love getting better. And I hope you do too. This is episode 52, I believe. Exciting times over here at Boiler Wild. Not that I'm doing anything.
Other than this podcasting and getting rich off of podcasting, you know, like the rest of the internet will have you believe, ⁓ in case you didn't get that sarcasm. I am not getting rich off of podcasting and this podcast actually cost me money and time, but I am not here to complain because I choose to do it. And I am really enjoying doing.
the ones with guests especially, but learning to love these ones where I am by myself. Yes, no guests today by myself. And I appreciate any feedback people have sent in. Got a couple messages and comments. So if you are listening, I appreciate you. Thank you. I.
always want to deliver value and make this podcast interesting enough that people want to listen to it and to provide unique perspectives on the boiler industry and getting better and teaching and different topics like that training. I know I don't talk a lot about it. Boilearn learn the company I started and training.
essentially the next generation, but I don't want to say the next generation because the current generation of people in the boiler industry need training and the next generation needs it as well. But when all these people retire by 2033, we're to be in a world of hurt if we don't figure out this training thing and talking about it more is not going to solve the problem.
It is now gonna be 2026. is December 31st, 2025 when I'm recording this. And you're gonna be listening to this in 2026. So it is New Year's Eve today. And this is actually the second time I've recorded this podcast. Because yeah, technical difficulties on the first one. And it didn't record. So that's fun, but discipline.
fighting through it and I need to build out SOPs to make sure the podcast is recording and get check my audio output feedback before I go through an entire episode. But that is lesson learned. So still figuring out how to be a pro podcaster over here, you know, so that I can get rich and famous off of.
boiler podcast, which I'm pretty sure is impossible, but we're gonna, we're gonna try because, ⁓ you know, who doesn't love boilers, especially in 2026 now that you listen to this, boilers are still cool. Steam is still cool. Even though most of the world, especially in America doesn't know what a boiler is
The topic for today, I first want to start off with an excerpt from a great book. And this will kind of lead into my topic today, but.
I titled this podcast episode 52 stop blaming the training bogeyman. And I will get in more into that, but I want to read this excerpt from this book and get into my thoughts in discussion about.
training and holding a standard.
This is written by a former teacher for a technical school. So to give you some context, but this is kind of just starting in the middle, but it'll make sense once you listen to it long enough. My first year teaching, like most teachers first year was a trial by fire.
Many days I was lecturing to my students on some subject I had just reviewed for the first time in a long time, no more than a few days before. My lesson plans were chaotic to nonexistent. By my second and third years, however, I had developed lesson plans and was thereby able to orchestrate my lectures much more efficiently.
These lesson plans were complete enough to support live demonstrations of concepts during almost every lecture, listing all the materials, components, and equipment I would need to set up in preparation. If an extensive amount of setup was required for some demonstration, instructions would be found in lesson plans multiple days in advance in order to give me adequate time.
The result was a very smooth and polished presentation in nearly every one of my lectures. I was quite proud of the work I had done. However, I noticed a strange and wholly unintended consequence of all this preparation.
With each passing year, the students' long-term recall of concepts presented in lecture seemed to grow worse. Even my best students, who demonstrated an obvious commitment to their education by their regular study habits, outstanding attendance, and quality work, would shock me by asking me to re-explain basic concepts
We had covered in extensive detail months before. They never complained about the lectures being bad, quite to the contrary. Their assessments of my lectures was always excellent in my performance surveys. An increasingly common lament of students as they tried to do the homework was, I understand things perfectly when you lecture, but for some reason, I can't just seem to figure it out on my own. This baffled me since I had...
made my presentations as clear as I could and the students seemed engaged and attentive throughout. It was clear to me as I later worked with these students that often they were missing crucial concepts and or harbored severe misconceptions
and that there was no way things should have made sense to them during lecture given these misconceptions.
their textbooks. In fact, their textbooks were looking better and better with each passing year.
At the conclusion of my first teaching year, my students' looked as though they had been dragged through a moving vehicle. Pages wrinkled, binding worn, and marks scribbled throughout the pages. As my lectures became more polished, the textbooks appeared less and less used.
used less
One day, I overheard a student's comment that made sense of it all. I was working in my office and just outside my door were two students conversing who didn't think I could hear them talking.
One of them said to the other, isn't this class the best? The lectures are so good, you don't even need to have to read the book. At the sound of this, my heart sunk. I began to realize what the problem was, what was needed to fix it, and how I had unwittingly created a poor learning environment despite the best of intentions. The fundamental problem is this. Students observing an expert presentation are fooled into thinking the concepts are easier to grasp
and the process is easier to execute than they actually are. The mastery and polish of the lecture actually hinders students learning by veiling the difficulty of the task.
Matters are no different watching a professional athlete or musician at work. A master makes any task look effortless. It isn't until you, the spectator, actually try to do the same thing as a participant that you realize just how challenging it is, just how much you have to learn and how much effort you must invest before you achieve a comparable level of proficiency. When students told me, for some reason,
that they just couldn't seem to solve the same problems I did during the lecture. Even though they understood it perfectly, as I lectured, they were being honest. This was not some excuse made up to cover a lack of effort. From their perspective, they truly believe they grasped the concepts while watching me work through them in front of the class and were generally mystified why it was so hard for them to perform the same problem solving task on their own.
The simple fact of the matter was that my students did not actually grasp the concepts as they watched me lecture.
If they had, the solution of similar problems after lecture should have presented little trouble for them. Lecture had generated a false sense of understanding in their minds. This made my lectures worse than useless for not only did they fail to convey the necessary knowledge and skill, but they actually created an illusion of proficiency in the minds of my students powerful enough to convince them that they did not need to explore the concepts further by reading their textbooks.
This served to hinder learning rather than foster learning. What I needed to do was to shatter this illusion if my students were to learn from me more effectively, and especially if they were to ever become independent learners. Thus began my own personal quest of educational reform.
That is an excerpt from a book that they, that teacher wrote that now hopefully kind of makes sense of what I was leading into. And I want to talk about
that same concept of thinking is what I was kind of thinking about. And I have been thinking about this topic and human learning for the last two years extensively. And I made a LinkedIn post two days ago and it said, if you can't fix a boiler problem and you didn't open the manual, you are unqualified to fix boilers and you should find a new career.
Got some messages, got a lot of comments and I, one, I do not post on LinkedIn shocking posts. You know, there's some people, the social media loves drama. That's not the point of the post, but it is spicy in other people's words. I guess it could be in a world where we just tame everything down, but that post really is rooted in the fact that people have to be.
self starters to some little point, not that they have to do everything themselves, but if you are going to be a service technician or an operator and be out in the field and you are going to fix a problem with a piece of equipment and you have to learn how to learn and you have to learn
how to be resourceful and you can't rely on, well, I just don't have enough training. I've never seen this equipment before, so I can't fix it. I don't know. I just need more training. They don't give me enough training. So first of all, yes, the whole industry in general, most people do not have enough training and most companies are not training people to a level that they need to be. For all sorts of reasons, I won't discuss that here.
But yes, most people don't have enough training. But as long as your employer provides you with a base level of training, as in like, hey, this is how we expect you to operate. These are our standards. And that's what that post was kind of getting at is these are the standards we have and you need to hold them. And the standard is that you will solve
problems or attempt to solve problems by yourself without giving up without randomly replacing parts without guessing and without calling people to help you when you haven't even tried yourself. I have talked to many managers and many of them a very common theme is they don't understand why their techs give up so quickly on a service call. They will be on site
for 10 minutes and call and say, hey, I don't know. I can't fix the problem. And they'll be like, all right, what is the voltage? ⁓ well, I haven't even pulled out my multimeter yet. Okay. What kind of equipment are you working on? And they'll state whatever the equipment, okay. Well, what does the manual say about that? well, I haven't looked that up yet.
Okay, so we are paying you to go to the site to look at a piece of equipment and to fix a problem and most problems are electrical problems or can be found electrically and you haven't taken your multimeter out of your bag and you haven't looked up the manual.
for the piece of equipment yet to see, hey, know, maybe the answers in the manual and you know, that's all depending on the situation. Hey, we're getting an issue with the pilot. Let me look up the proper pilot assembly set up so that I can make sure that the assembly is set up correctly or the gas pressure for the pilot is set up, whatever. There's manuals are full of information and
Individual component manuals are also full of information and you will note that I did not say if you can't fix a boiler problem you're worthless and you need to give up. It is if you can't fix a boiler problem and you didn't open the manual. Opening the manual once you have received the base level of training and awareness that manufacturers make manuals and most if not all of them are available online on their website.
And if you work at a great company, they should have a cloud system with all the manuals on the cloud that you can easily look up. So you're not constantly downloading manuals and trying to find manuals. It is much easier to put it on a cloud system. you could just put it on your, save all the manuals to your own cloud if your company doesn't have that. That's what I did. But.
You should have enough drive and enough awareness. And if you actually care to solve the problem, to open the manual when you don't know something, if you were to be at your house and you need to change your alternator on your car or something's happening on your car, what are you going to do? Most people without a company telling them without training, without all this other oversight,
are going to Google the question and they will probably find since cars are very common as far as car repair videos, they will probably find either a forum or a video of the problem You'll find the problem and you'll follow the repair.
and do it and you'll figure it out. You are a self-starter and you figured it out. Imagine if you needed to change a part and you called somebody else and said, hey, I don't know how to change my headlight on my car. Okay, well, I don't know really either, but it should just be some bolts and a couple of plugs on the headlight.
What is, have you searched it on YouTube yet? Is there a video? No, I haven't done that. Can you search it for me and just tell me what the video says? Like that's essentially what you're doing when you're calling somebody else. And there's some people and they're well-meaning and they say, well, you know, I'm mentoring the person
They are still. Wishy washy and you know they're not. They're not really good at what they're doing like they're still new. ⁓ So basically I lead them through. The problem and I helped them and you know tell him the answer and we get done. It's like OK, yes, that's great, but going back to that book excerpt. That is essentially what this teacher was doing instead of.
lectures being very thrown together and kind of chaotic and him having to like make stuff up on the spot and bring in examples. Everything just became this finely tuned
system where all the examples were perfect. He knew exactly what he was doing. He perfectly served up all the on a platter, all the information and all the examples and students had to rely less on finding information in the textbook and solving problems themselves
they had to then just sit in class and it seemed like a just a well oiled machine and they were fooled as he said into thinking that they were learning and that everything he was teaching them was easy because he made it seem so easy and when they had to do things on their own they found out that they didn't actually know as he stated in the book as as I read
And that is essentially what you are doing if you are only teaching people to pull the parachute cord, as I say, when they get on a service call and call for help or give up or load up the parts cannon. If you talk to technical support, and I have talked to a couple of companies with technical support, they will tell you most of the calls they get.
are very, very low level and many of them are information in the manual. And it's kind of a two prong thing. One, probably the people on the other end need way more training, but two, if you are calling technical support and you don't have the manual open in front of you and say, hey, this is the problem with the unit and this is what I've tried so far. This is what I've checked.
and I'm not getting this, this and this. And I really think that this is the problem, but I'm not sure. And I checked the manual and it didn't really explain that section well. Like, am I thinking about this correctly? That conversation is much different than calling technical support and you getting them miraculously somehow immediately. So you get on the phone with somebody that hopefully can help you.
and they say, all right, what's the problem with the unit? Like what's going on? And you kind of explain it and they're like, all right, like let's open the manual to page 37. And then you go, ⁓ I don't have the manual. What does that say? And they're like, well, you know, the steps to fix that are on page 37. I can send you the manual. Did you have a problem finding it? No, no, I just didn't look it up.
So you call technical support without looking up the manual to try to find information that most equipment is broken down for a very simple repair. It's not, there's newer people in the industry love to believe that there's just magic going on and that there's unexplainable problems with equipment and...
It's just magically breaking or the stars align and there's just no way, no way that they could ever figure it out because it's, it's just broken. Well, what's actually broken. There's always a reason, you know, like when people say, well, my engine blew up. No engine literally just blows up. What actually happened? Did a piston come through the block? Like
there's an actual diagnostic for everything. You can't just say, well, the motor doesn't work. Okay. Why does the motor not work? What is not actually happening? There's totally different way to think about it. But if you can't have enough drive to be a self-starter and to attempt
to solve a problem by yourself by opening the manual. You don't actually wanna fix the problem. You just wanna masquerade as a service technician or an operator. You don't actually wanna fix the problem. You don't actually care to fix the problem and you just wanna put the problem on somebody else and you want somebody to tell you how to fix the problem. I've seen it all the time. There are...
Plenty of people who are uncomfortable with not knowing and this seems to be a general theme in society. I'm not sure what it is.
everybody has a seemingly pretty easy life in America compared to the history of humans. And if you've never experienced doing something hard and hard is on a scale, but doing something hard and you've never experienced fixing a problem in the unknown and somebody has always been there to tell you what to do.
and you've always had a phone call to somebody to get you out of a situation or, tell me what to do this. You are not going to succeed as a service technician because you're constantly going to be calling somebody and you're not actually going to be trying yourself. And this goes back to the whole like teach a man to fish thing. If you get on site and you give up,
without opening the manual, you don't actually want to fish and learn how to fish. You just want the fish, but you have to learn how to fish. You have to learn how to troubleshoot. And in the training process, hopefully they, whoever is training you is teaching you. And I understand there's a whole lack of training, but you can't constantly just train, blame the training bogeyman. I don't have enough training. I don't have training on this.
Because there, no matter how much training you get, just as the students in the lecture, no matter how much training you get, it seems all easy till you have to do it yourself. And that's really where you really start to learn and apply the concepts. And if you constantly call somebody and they walk you through the problem, you are now teaching yourself and they are teaching you to
and you may not even know it, that you're teaching yourself to call somebody when things get hard and your brain will be wired. Hey, I don't know this problem. I haven't seen this problem. I don't know this piece of equipment. ⁓ I should call this person because the last time I called them, they got me out of this situation.
just like this one is. So I'm gonna call them instead of sitting down and actually thinking about it. If you can't be uncomfortable and think about a problem that you don't know, you're not qualified to be a service technician or really any job that requires you to be.
working alone and a self-starter, you might as well just go find a team to work on doing something else, but you're not going to make it and no amount of training will help you because
There is never a mountain peak that you will reach with training, where you have memorized all the information, where you have seen all the concepts and seen all the equipment and understand every single scenario and everything makes sense. And now you never have to reference or learn anything new and all problems just come to you easy and you are just...
NFL player playing Pee-wee football that that is never gonna happen There's new equipment constantly coming out. You're gonna forget things. You're gonna see older equipment that was made before you were born You're gonna see unique problems on equipment. You thought you knew and if you give up before trying and doing the basic tasks of Open the manual
you don't actually want to solve the problem. And any more training is not going to help you because you can't memorize the manual to every single piece of equipment that you work on. And if you can't get in your mind that you need to be resourceful and be a self-starter,
and actually take what companies give you in the training process, many, training processes, especially for manufacturers. They will say, hey, here's a thumb drive with all of our manuals, which is great. And, you know, some bulletins and great, all that stuff is online. They'll say, hey, this is online.
and your company will also have, here's resources, all this stuff. They are giving you resources and if you don't use those or even attempt to use those, you don't actually want it and that training gap is gonna be too big for any company to overcome. The good news is, the good news is you can decide to be different. It takes very, very little effort and no skill to open a manual.
to search a manufacturer's website. You can do that with very low skill. And if you grew up with a phone,
You can do that easier than people who think about people who had to fix equipment for the internet. I couldn't even imagine. If you didn't have a manual on you in your vehicle or it wasn't at the site, you just had to make something up. You just didn't know or you had to call somebody and who knows? Email was barely a thing, but.
You have to learn how to do things yourself. You can't always expect other people to serve up information to you at the perfect moment and to supply you and get you out of situations just like that teacher was talking about. The students learned that, we don't have to read the textbook. We can just sit and lecture and he will teach us everything and it'll just be perfect. And he just teaches us.
⁓ everything and the demonstrations are perfect and everything seems so easy. Yeah, we got this. Now they did that unintentionally. It's not like the students didn't know anything different, but that was the result. And that's the same result if companies have technicians that can't look up manuals and the companies don't enforce and train. I do understand there is a...
base level of training. And I also understand that, you know, there's not information manuals for every single situation. Sometimes manuals are lacking. Yes. But I would venture to guess that 80 plus percent of problems can be solved from a basic level of troubleshooting process. And most of the information is probably in the manual. That is my experience. When I was a service technician,
And that is my experience from talking to other people and talking to managers.
about frustrations, they send their employees a training and everything seems perfect and they seem like they're learning and then they come back and they're just like, well, I don't know. I thought I learned this. I don't know. We did it all in class and then I don't know. And there's multiple things going on here. But if you don't know and you don't open the manual or you don't reference it and you don't actually sit in the discomfort of, hey, I don't know this.
but I'm gonna figure it out. If you cannot do that, you need to find a new career. The good news is though, you can decide at any point and now would be a great time in 2026 to decide that because the number of people who do that and say, hey, I don't know, but I will figure it out is becoming fewer and fewer every year it seems.
Outside of the trades even. That just seems to be a normal trend in society. think the schooling system has failed kids. Most, I think this is rooted in the schooling system of just.
Kids are not taught to critically think and reason and it's more just Memorize and regurgitate and forget. Memorize, regurgitate and forget and.
No, most schools don't want to hold kids back. So it's all pass the problem on to the next grade, pass the problem on to the next grade. Well, they do that till 12th grade. The person ends up graduating, but they didn't actually learn any information. They just existed kind of at school. And it's totally possible. It's very easy to pass school.
without like really learning critical thinking and sitting in thought and like that is a skill I do believe. And then you go to college and it's kind of kind of can be the same thing. And now you get 24 or 25 and then you're like, ⁓ I don't know what else to do. I'm going to go into HVAC and be a boiler technician or something, whatever.
then you go out or you walk into a boiler room and you're like looking at the boiler and you're like, wow, they didn't teach me this. I went to a training class, but not the one for this one. Well, I don't know. I'm just gonna call this person.
Well, you need to learn to be comfortable with not knowing and you need to open up the manual. A base level of training is required and yes, I believe most if not all people are under trained. However, there's also no amount of perfect training because training is something you do not something you did. like there's no, while you can...
train people up and have like a full competency program. There's never a point where you're like, yep, you checked the box. You are trained and you're good. And you just know everything now on this equipment. Like people forget stuff and the equipment changes and stuff is unique. And you constantly have to keep her fresh. Otherwise, you know, like a CPA would be like, I don't need any training.
I learned all that in college. Great. I just know financials and company books for the rest of my life. Like, why do I need to learn anything else? Like there's, they're constantly learning and your world is ever expanding of what you don't know. And you're learning what you don't know so that you can learn it. And then you're also forgetting stuff because if you don't work on a piece of equipment for two years and then you see it.
You're like, ⁓ I kinda know this, but I don't. But good thing I can reference the manual because I know it's in the manual. And you look in the manual and then you start remembering and everything's good. You fixed the problem. And I don't remember if I said this, but I also wanna make sure that I do. What I am describing is much different if you are newer and you're like, whoa.
I need to call other people because I didn't get the proper training. Okay.
What you need to do, if you are like, I have no idea, they didn't give me training, but I'm really trying out here. If you are relying, that's totally fine. That's a training issue.
However, you walk on site, you understand what the equipment is, you actually put some thought into it and you don't just immediately give up. Just have some belief in yourself. However, once you feel like you've given it a half hour and you're like, man, I don't think I'm getting anywhere.
you can call somebody. However, in that half hour, if you believe you're not getting anywhere, you will have opened up the manual, you have, and will have tried or checked a couple things. So that when the expert on the other side of the phone says, hey, what's going on? And you describe it, you can now say, I did this and I did this. And I'm looking at the manual and on page 40, it says this.
So I did that and that didn't work. So what would you think about this? And that is a much different conversation than calling somebody and saying, I don't know, it doesn't work. Well, what's going on? Well, I don't know. Well, what have you tried? I haven't really tried anything. I just pushed the reset button and it didn't start. Okay. Do you want me to open the manual for you? And...
read about this section because that seems to be the problem. Have you done that yet? No, I haven't done that. Okay, well, I am gonna open the manual to try to help you and read it. So it seems like you could just open the manual and read it yourself. There's no reason for me to read it to you through the phone. Like see how dumb that sounds? Like I said, the good news is it takes...
very little effort and no skill to look up information. However, it does take some effort to sit down and be resourceful and to sit in the unknown and actually think and critically reason. And it's not always the training bogeyman of I don't have that training and they didn't provide this training and I don't have training on that equipment.
and I can't get training because we're not the factory rep and they won't send me to this class. They won't send that. There's no amount of training where you will understand and know everything. So stop pretending that training is actually the issue when you're not actually trying. So hopefully that was not a rant. I try not to rant too much on here. I want this podcast be informational, but hopefully that just gives some insight into my
level of thought and thinking behind people actually trying and having standards for themselves and company actually having standards of, this is how we're going to fix things. This is how we do things. And if you're a manager and you're like, Hey, I haven't done that. We don't have that. You should, I can help you with that if you need it, but you need to don't assume people know how you want to do things. But once they know how you want things done,
enforce it and if they don't do it, retrain and if they don't still don't want to do it, get rid of them because keeping him on any longer. it's a warm body. We need people. We're desperate for people. Yeah. Well, you bring down the whole standards of the organization and you end up with tons of callbacks and the people who know stuff end up being burdened because they constantly receive phone calls from the people who don't know and they feel like people
who do know stuff feel like they're constantly solving the same problems for the people who call themselves service techs or whatever, yet they don't seemingly ever make any progress because they're afraid of actually sitting down and trying to figure something out for themselves.
Hopefully you find this one valuable. If you have any comments, questions, feedback, you can email me, eric.johnson, J-O-H-N-S-O-N, at boilearn.com, or you can DM me on LinkedIn. Both of those work for me.
Please rate this podcast five stars. appreciate everybody who's rated five stars on Apple and Spotify. Thank you. Thank you for listening. I appreciate every single one of you and stay wild.
