20
Hire&Rental
TAFE TRAINING
AUGUST 2022
Training key to retention Huge emphasis is placed on employee retention, since finding trained staff is near impossible, and gone are the days when a job advert was a sure-fire way of finding new staff. By John Oliver With retention a key focus for Access Service Australia, and knowing pay rises would only bring temporary relief, we sat down with staff to discuss the problem. One standout item was the request for training. Most want to better themselves and consider this a move forward within the company, their peer development, and their happiness at work through being a better technician. Looking further at the competency matrix for our technicians, we noticed no two tradespersons were alike, with each person having come through trade training with a different mix of subjects and experience. Some technicians struggle with basic concepts but excel in others. We find ourselves constantly going to the same person to solve issues, instead of cross training others, posing a problem if that person were to leave or take time off. The mechanical industry has suffered from a lack of government support, Trade Training has moved away from the traditional block release and now with a severe lack of people entering the system, we are finding new employees being pushed faster into productive roles to the detriment of training and quality. Additionally, we have previously struggled with demonstrating technician competency, and companies looking to cover off on their own responsibilities, under the WHS ACT, providing and maintaining safe machinery. Customers look to suppliers like us to ensure we are providing competent people, but we have traditionally trained new employees via mentoring or buddying with a senior person. Proving the competency of a technician when most of the specific learning is on the tools, without a system in place to accurately record it, is something we really needed to improve. Following a conversation with Angus Macdonald at Genie, we found that Terex were sending their employees for specific Hydraulic training to TAFE QLD. Our hope was to expand on this course and train our own employees,
‘The only thing worse than having trained a person and they leave, is not training them and they stay’
so we approached TAFE QLD and designed a 5-day course aimed at providing both Hydraulic and Electrical component understanding and fault finding. With blocks of training at 2 hours per subject, squeezing in 4 per day we can cover 20 subjects; placed purposely in order to overlap each other, to fill in any gaps the student may have. Test boards for electrical and hydraulic components speed up the understanding and with the help of cut down models, the practical sessions consolidate that knowledge. TAFE QLD’s Acacia Ridge campus is a multimillion dollar facility, upgraded recently in a push to attract more students and improve learning opportunities. Jason Carr, a senior TAFE lecturer in Heavy Commercial Industries, is the key to the success of this course. Tim Joyce at Monitor Lifts once told us: “The only thing worse than having trained a person and they leave, is not training them and they stay”. The course places 14 equally passionate people in an environment where they can talk openly as equals. The idea of training 14 people at time, from different and often conflicting businesses, was exciting. Letting the technician talk to peers, hopefully builds a layer of comfort in their own situation. Retention is being able to meet the needs of the employee through open conversations on how the company is meeting challenges, while listening and understanding what makes your employee come to work every day. The main hurdles to any training are cost and lost production hours. To run the course at TAFE economically, we needed to send 14 mechanically experienced people away for 5 days. In reality, we could only spare three, so we needed to cast the net and encourage other companies to contribute technicians. It was remarkably easy to get other companies to contribute staff and we started our first course in February. Now into our third course we have together trained nearly 50 people. 40 of those are from other companies, who deserve equal credit for their commitment — Coates Hire, Height4Hire, Skyreach, QLD Access, Genie, Lincoln Hire, Monitor Lifts, Flexihire, Preston Super Service, Endurequip, Hubtex, Uphire and Lift Industries. Following the success in Queensland, we are now looking to grow the model, expanding into NSW and VICTORIA.
