How to build your own training program
The four pillars of a training program (in the order that matters)
Earlier this year, a member of ours in Colorado, Bishop Plumbing, announced they were opening their own training center. A few weeks later, Jamie Vaughn at Jay’s in North Carolina announced the same thing. Two Nexstar member companies, in two very different markets, are making the same large, expensive, slightly terrifying bet at almost exactly the same time.
It is not a coincidence. The math we walked through last week (the four questions, the second-location framing) is the math more and more owners are doing for themselves, and a small but growing number of them are arriving at the same answer. They are going to build it.
Which raises the question that the rest of this letter is about. What, exactly, do you build?
This is the part where most owners want to skip ahead to the curriculum.
They want to know which textbook, which platform, which video series. SkillCat, NCCER, or the local community college.
Which is a perfectly natural thing to want to know, and also, I think, the wrong place to start because a program is not a curriculum. A curriculum is one of four things a program needs, and arguably not the most important one.
The traditional way of describing what a trade training program needs is to hand you a checklist.
Curriculum, instructor, space, tools.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
Off you go.
I think that’s the wrong picture, and I want to offer a different one.
The Four Pillars Is Not A Checklist
A program rests on four pillars.
The pillars are not equal in load-bearing weight, and they don’t all go up at the same time. They support the building in a particular order. Get the order wrong and the building leans.
The first pillar is the leader.
A training program is, before it is anything else, a person. If you cannot name the person who is going to wake up every morning thinking about this program, you do not yet have a program. You have an aspiration. The leader is the operating engine, the keeper of standards, the one who has the difficult conversations with apprentices who aren’t progressing and the celebratory ones with apprentices who are.
This person is almost always pulled from inside your organization. They are usually one of your best technicians, and that is precisely the problem. You are taking your highest-performing field talent and asking them to step out of the truck. (Last week’s letter walked through why their salary plus their lost billable production both belong in the model. This is where that math becomes a person with a name.)
I’d add one more thing, which is that the qualities of a great technician and the qualities of a great trainer overlap less than people think. A great trainer is patient in ways that field work doesn’t always reward. They explain rather than do. They take satisfaction in someone else’s success. Some of your best techs will hate this work. Some of your unexpected middle performers will turn out to be naturals.
The second pillar is the space.
Apprentices need somewhere to stand, to watch, to try things, to break things, to fix what they’ve broken. Some operators dedicate a corner of the warehouse. Some build out a proper lab with mock walls, fixtures, and rough-ins. Some partner with a local technical school for the hands-on portion and run the classroom side themselves.
There is no single right answer here, but there is a wrong one, which is to assume the space will sort itself out. (It won’t. It will, instead, end up being whatever empty corner happens to be closest to the break room, which is rarely what you want.)
The third pillar is the tools and equipment.
Closely related, but worth its own entry. Tools wear out faster in a training environment than they do in the field, because they are being handled by people who are still learning how to handle them. (This is a feature, not a bug. Better to break a fitting in the lab than in a customer’s basement.) Budget for that. Budget for the consumables. Budget for the fact that your trainer will, six months in, send you an email saying they need a piece of equipment you didn’t think of.
Some of this can be donated by manufacturers and distributors who have a vested interest in your apprentices learning on their products. It’s worth asking. The worst they can say is no.
The fourth pillar is the curriculum, the thing everyone wanted to talk about first.
The good news, here, is that you almost certainly do not need to build it from scratch. We’ve partnered our own curriculum over to SkillCat, which specializes in it and frankly does it better than we could. There are community colleges that do excellent work. There are state apprenticeship boards. Most of the heavy intellectual lifting has already been done by someone, somewhere, and your job is to choose well and adapt thoughtfully.
But, and this is the important part, what you cannot outsource is the part where the curriculum gets connected to your company’s standards. The way your technicians actually run a service call. The diagnostic flow you expect. The customer-facing language you require. That last layer (the one that makes a SkillCat-trained apprentice into a your-company technician) is the part only you can write.
What the Right Order Buys You
I’ve laid these out as a list, which slightly misrepresents how it works. They aren’t really four equal pillars holding up a roof. It’s more like a sequence: leader first, space and tools next, curriculum last. Most failed training programs I’ve seen got the order wrong. They started with curriculum (because curriculum is shoppable, and shopping feels productive), and then tried to bolt on a leader, a space, and equipment afterward, usually without enough of any of them.
Get the leader right, and a great deal of the rest gets easier. Get the leader wrong, and no curriculum in the world will save the program.
The advantage of building in the right order isn’t theoretical. It’s that the program holds together when one piece of it inevitably wobbles. Curriculum can be swapped. Tools can be replaced. Spaces can be expanded. But a program with no leader is, at best, an expensive learning project, and at worst, a slow-motion drain on the business that funded it.
There’s one more thing worth saying, which is that the operators who build these programs well almost never end up using them only for themselves. The members I mentioned at the top, Bishop and Jay’s, are not building closed systems for their own hiring. They are, almost without meaning to, becoming a kind of quiet multiplier in their communities. They will produce more talent than they personally need. They will graduate apprentices who go on to start their own companies, sometimes in a friendly partnership with the original shop. They will become, over time, a center of gravity for their local trade.
That, I think, is the part nobody plans for and everybody is surprised by. You set out to solve your hiring problem, and you end up, accidentally, building something that outlasts you.
Write the Name on Monday
Here is your move for the week, and it is a small one with disproportionate consequences.
Before you do anything else (before you call SkillCat, before you Google “lab space,” before you price out a torch kit), I want you to write a single name on a sheet of paper. The name of the person inside your company today, who you believe could lead this program.
Not the most senior tech. Not the one who’s been there longest. Not your nephew. The one whose face you can picture standing in front of three apprentices, calmly, on a Tuesday morning, explaining the same thing for the fourth time without losing patience.
If you can write that name down, you are closer to having a program than ninety percent of the operators I talk to. If you can’t, that is the problem you need to solve before you spend another dollar. The leader is not the last hire. The leader is the first decision.
Some of you are going to write a name you already half-suspected. Some of you are going to realize the person you assumed would lead it is actually wrong for the job, and the right person is someone you’d never have considered. Both outcomes are useful. (The dangerous outcome is the one where you skip this exercise and decide to “figure it out as you go,” which is how most failed programs got started.)
So, whose name did you write?
Next week, the last in this series, I want to talk about the part of all this that is most often missed entirely. Which is that none of it works (none of the financial planning, none of the leader-and-space-and-curriculum architecture) if no one wants to come to your shop in the first place.
The recruiting problem, it turns out, isn’t really a hiring problem. It’s something else.
Julian Scaden
CEO, Nexstar
