How to Boost Acquisition With Employee Training
The article emphasizes that post-acquisition success in the HVAC industry depends on enhancing employee performance through skill-based technical training by assessing acquired skills, standardizing training for consistency, identifying and addressing problem areas early, and shifting technicians toward more profitable tasks to boost efficiency, customer satisfaction, and profitability.
Robust integrations after an acquisition can enhance investor returns and create value, while recruiting, ramping, and retaining talent can increase your revenue and decrease expenses. Your business’s success hinges on employee performance, not just at the leadership level. In the HVAC industry, technicians are essential, and every team member at every branch needs the skills to help your business grow.
Here are six ways you can increase performance with skill-based technical training after acquiring a new portfolio company:
Assess Acquired Skills
Determine the technical skills your newly acquired talent possesses and identify gaps. Drill down by region, office, branch, or individual employees. After online skills assessments, create customized training paths to pinpoint weak areas and quickly increase your teams’ skills. This also helps identify the best technicians for each job, reduce costly callbacks, and increase efficiency.
Drive Consistency
Technicians directly impact customer satisfaction, efficiency, and profitability. All technicians need a certain level of proficiency. A standardized training program with unbiased technical assessments and auditable learning paths helps every employee meet customers’ needs.
Identify Problem Areas Early
Underperforming branches, callbacks, and poor customer satisfaction often relate to technicians’ skill levels and training. Identifying problem areas—such as individual techs, offices, or regions that are struggling—allows you to implement targeted training. Understanding strengths and gaps enables you to address current challenges and get ahead of problems before they occur.
Shift Techs to More Profitable Areas
Some jobs pay more than others, and focusing on these drives profits and growth. Train techs on highly profitable activities so they can focus on projects with the highest margins and prevent missed opportunities. As profits increase, reinvest in the business and expand operations.
Hire the Right Skills as You Grow
Skill assessments let you identify the skill sets your technicians already have and prioritize the positions your company needs to stay successful and meet future demand. Assessments also allow you to document new hires’ skill sets and ramp them quickly to meet a certain standard.
Offering training widens your search and gives you more flexibility in hiring. You may not find an applicant who fits the position exactly, but you can hire for attitude and train for aptitude. Today’s workers are drawn to companies that invest in their future. As experienced Baby Boomers retire, attracting younger workers is crucial, and employees increasingly want clear pathways for growth and guidance from their employers.
Improve Technical Skills
Growing your employees’ skills helps grow your business. New skill acquisition translates directly into real dollars. Training allows you to upskill at every level and promote cross-training, ensuring you always have technicians available and aren’t left in the lurch if an employee is out sick or leaves.
Improving technical skills can also improve retention. Employees who are engaged are more likely to stay. A study by the University of Phoenix found that 65% of employees would be more likely to stay with the same company throughout their careers if their employer did more to reskill them. Even if they don’t stay for their entire career, 68% said they would be more likely to remain if there was an emphasis on upskilling and reskilling.
Take Advantage of Skill-Based Technical Training
Training should not be one-size-fits-all. Interplay Learning offers online and virtual reality training that can be customized to each employee’s needs. With their learning system, you can quickly assess technicians’ skills, determine which training is most beneficial, identify who has completed what level of training, and ramp new hires quickly.
Consistent, quality training helps improve customer service, expand operations, and drive growth faster. HVAC firms using Interplay Learning grow their business four times faster than industry peers, and 89% of customers said they train employees faster using Interplay’s training.
Interplay Learning offers scalable and effective training for essential skilled trades, helping business leaders and their teams build better companies, careers, and lives. Their immersive online and VR training platform for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, solar, hospitality, multifamily maintenance, and facilities maintenance workforces includes expert-led video courses, hands-on 3D simulations, knowledge checks, and custom learning paths to upskill advanced technicians and help new technicians be job-ready in weeks, not years.
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