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How to Choose Energy Training Courses

Becoming an energy audit professional will position you in the job market, for the coming explosion in different energy technologies. You’ll be able to learn about different areas specializing in various types of testing equipment that should include carbon monoxide analyzers, specialized equipment for testing blower doors, and combustion gas testers.

You’ll be able to choose a course that offers professional certification from the Building Performance Institute or the Residential Energy Services Network, and you should be aware of any prerequisites before signing up for a course. Both BPI and RESNET are leading organizations for certification for home performance energy experts and certification helps in any job search or promotion.

Types of courses that a “professional organization” will offer should include the BPI Building Analyst Professional, BPI Insulation and Air Sealing Technician, BPI Envelope Professional, BPI Multifamily Building Analyst Professional, BPI Air Conditioning and Heat Pump Professional, BPI Heating Professional, RESNET HERS Rater and the NATE Certification course.

Below is a general outline of what to expect in each course, and will ensure you are making the best choice in the energy school you choose. BPI Building Analyst Professional Built around BPI standards, this course involves energy auditing, and will give you instruction on how to analyze energy efficiency, using the approach of a house as a system. This course should provide you with the necessary knowledge, that will allow you to give homeowners a comprehensive overview of their current energy consumption, and offer options that will allow the homeowner different ways to save money through energy conservation and efficiency.

BPI Insulation and Air Sealing Technician

This course should provide you with the necessary skill set to be able to insulate a home properly, and ensure it has the necessary air seal. Learning the weatherization steps, that need to be used to fully protect a home or large building structure from outside elements, is an important part of this course. Taking sunlight, wind and different types of precipitation into account, and looking at how to effectively weatherize a structure against these, will offer homeowners and building owners significant cost savings. You should receive hands on training in this type of course, in order to be certified by the Building Performance Institute.

BPI Envelope Professional

In order to take this course, most institutions will ask you to first complete the BPI Building Analyst Professional certification course, as part of your admission to this course. Students who complete this short course will have enhanced skills, that will help both you and your company to stay in front of the competition. This course usually requires 24 hours of training, and should be set in a classroom and in field training. This course specializes in residential buildings, and should focus on enhancing the pressure and thermal envelope’s boundaries, by the use of air sealing.

BPI Multifamily Building Analyst Professional

This course offers training for you to learn how to conduct energy audits for buildings that are deemed to be multifamily housing. This is an advanced course, and will teach students the fundamentals of what building science is, and then teach them how to apply those concepts to the uniqueness they’ll find in multifamily housing in residential areas. Schools offering this course should require that you have a certification from the BPI Building Analyst program and be experienced in HVAC systems. You should be able to choose either in-class courses or webinar courses. Final testing will be conducted in a classroom environment.

Air Conditioning and Heat Pump Professional

This course will ensure that as a technician you will be able to demonstrate competency, knowledge, and the skills that are needed, to ensure energy performance is at its peak in any HVAC system. Upon completion of the course, students should be able to understand the different systems inside a home, and should be able to diagnose problems, and correct them so that the homeowner can achieve peak performance in their energy systems. You should look for a course that will include health and safety, service and repair, installation, and diagnostic testing, that include heat pump configurations and air conditioning configurations. When completed you should be able understand how systems need to be designed, maintained and serviced.

BPI Heating Professional

If you’re considering this course you should ensure that the school you choose, insists that students have first taken the BPI Building Analyst Certification, and have experience with HVAC systems. This is an intensive course and you should ensure that it includes both field training and classroom instruction, with testing in both areas. You’ll want a course that covers ventilation, system sizing, installation, system diagnostics, and the science of heating systems.

RESNET HERS Rater

RESNET is the Residential Energy Services Network, that is a system for inspecting and calculating the energy performance in a residential home. Recognized nationally RESNET created the Home Energy Rating System, and when certified by them, you’ll be considered a Home Rater, who has been trained to perform home evaluations as well as calculating energy scores for the home. Energy ratings are important to residential homes, as it’s an indication of the how well the home is rated, and offers a way for homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their dwelling, thereby offering energy cost savings. When you’ve completing this course you will hold a national designation, and will be able to offer homeowners and home construction developers, professional advice on ways to improve their rankings.

You should be taught strategies that will allow you to give professional advice to architects and builders to improve a home’s energy efficiency rating. This course has no prerequisites and participants range from the average homeowner to the energy professional.

NATE Certification

This short course will allow students to become certified in NATE Core Services, NATE Gas Furnace Service, and NATE Air to Air Heat Pumps. NATE, the North American Technician Excellence is the largest organization for certification in ventilation, air conditioning, and heating. This is a governed body and is supported by the HVAC industry. The prerequisite for this course is the Core Service test and will include a specialty exam in gas furnaces or air to air heat pumps.

The above will guide you in choosing energy courses offered by schools in your area and online. You can also look at the courses offered online by Everblue, a leading name in Energy Certification courses. They offer a wide range of courses that also include new solar technology, sustainability management, green building and LEED Certification courses.

Benefits of a well designed plan

If you don’t have an effective Technician Incentive Plan in place you are missing out on one of the most powerful tools in your management arsenal to drive a high performance service department. Technician Incentive Plans, or TIPs for short, can be so powerful they can drive behavior far beyond what you might expect from an incentive plan.
And if you already have one, maybe it is time for a tune-up to make sure your TIP is driving the behavior you need to develop a profitable service department and accurately reflect your dealership’s current priorities and initiatives. Incentive plans have a shelf life and need to be kept fresh to remain effective. Just because it worked last year, or five years ago, doesn’t mean it will work this year or next.

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of a well designed and executed TIP. First of all, and maybe the most important, is to reward your best technicians. Let’s face it, top technicians are in high demand and you can probably ill afford to lose one who already knows your product and your customers. Your TIP should reward top techs so that they will be “appreciated” and not be looking for jobs with your competition. If your TIP only does that one thing, it will probably be successful. But a good TIP will go far beyond that initiative.

One sign that we often see in a struggling service department is a high turnover of technicians. This affects the quality of work being performed and increases training costs and lowers technician efficiency. A good TIP will give techs a reason to stay, not just your top techs, but your mid-level techs as well. Retention will improve with an effective TIP.
When recruiting new technicians, a TIP can give you an edge that your competitors may not be able to offer. Highly qualified recruits, no matter what the experience level, are always impressed by and attracted to a company that offers an incentive for doing good work. And that is usually the type of new hire you want anyway.

For any service department to be profitable they must pay attention to and drive a high revenue recovery. That is they must be charging out a high percentage of their labor hours. A TIP can be a useful tool in driving a high revenue recovery. If an element of the TIP drives billable hours, you will find that non revenue hours will be minimized and thus your margins and profits will improve.

Another side benefit of a TIP is that it can provide an objective evaluation and measurement of your technicians. Too often when it comes time for a personnel review for techs we depend on subjective observations. Your Human Relations Manager will appreciate the objective nature of your technician review. A TIP, if consistently executed, will give you the data to evaluate technicians on the criteria that is being measured and monitored.

Training your technicians is absolutely vital in retaining techs and making sure that they are keeping up to date with the newest technology. If you don’t train them someone else might. Many TIPs make it easier to spot the areas that a particular technician might need more schooling. TIPs can provide the structure for evaluating the types of jobs that a technician usually does well at and the ones that he seems to struggle with. Those struggling areas need training and schooling and both the technician and department will reap the rewards if you invest in training for those areas. By determining your training needs based on known deficiencies you will be able to maximize the impact of your training dollars.

In short, TIP benefits are so numerous and potentially profitable that they should be considered by every management team. And a good TIP that is properly designed and consistently implemented will more than pay for itself, it will improve your service profitability. It should pay for itself many times over.

TIPs will promote Happier Technicians and Happier Technicians will result in Happier Customers. Happier Customers will drive service revenues and profits.

Elements of an effective plan

The most important element of any incentive program, especially one for technicians is to have 100% support and buy-in by all levels of dealership management, even at the very top. If there is any doubt about this support it is unlikely that the program will be long-lived and successful. There will definitely be times that the plan will be challenged and tested. It will be those times that this upper level support will ensure the TIP is kept intact and becomes an established program at your dealership.

Technician Incentive Plans can take the form and shape of virtually any element of the dealership that is important to management. They will promote and encourage any behavior you desire to focus on, or any combination of behaviors. What are your departmental weaknesses, your opportunities to improve? Is it Revenue Recovery? Gross Margin? Revenue? Training? Safety? Cleanliness? Teamwork and co-operation? Quality of work? An effective TIP can promote any of these and many more. But it won’t and shouldn’t do them all.

A TIP should be focused and not try to cover everything or it will not be effective. Pick no more than three areas to focus on; more will start to dilute the program. Keep people focused on these areas which will have the greatest impact. Remember, you can always change the program in the future to reflect other priorities as they become important.
No two TIPs are likely to be the same; they must reflect the differences and variations in each and every dealership. What works at one dealership may not be affective at all in another; in fact it could be counter-productive. And what works this year, may not be the right program next year. Personnel, management, the economy and goals all change on a regular basis.

Keep your TIP simple. If it is hard to understand, hard to explain or difficult to monitor, its chance of success is doubtful. If your mid level managers and technicians don’t have a full understanding and confident that it will be administered fairly and consistently it will not drive the behavior you desire. And if you have to run complicated programs or design spreadsheets that need massive input just to monitor your TIP, you are adding unnecessary burden to your staff. They probably are already busy and won’t see this as a benefit to them. By keeping it simple you have a greater chance of success. Try to use the existing data and programs from your business system if at all possible.

The execution of your TIP is critical to its eventual success. Fairness and consistency are a must. If a technician, in fact any employee, thinks that the data being collected is not accurate they will quickly loose interest in your program and the damage can be long lasting. Keep it as visible as you are comfortable with; open communication builds trust and confidence. You don’t want to take a chance that the results can be manipulated.
No matter how hard you try to design the program to be fair and drive good behavior there will be those who will try to “beat the system”. Consider the consequences of your TIP in advance. First of all try to anticipate these eventualities and keep them at a minimum. And secondly, be prepared to face them when they occur. Do not let the effectiveness of the whole program to be jeopardized by the few.

The best TIPs reward individuals, not groups. If you are trying to motivate and reward your best employees does it make sense to share the rewards with all equally. The argument can be made that a program can encourage team work, and if that is the goal, a portion of the reward can go to the group, but it should not be exclusive. A TIP should reward exceptional behavior and exceptional employees.

Some of the many areas you can measure and reward are: revenue recovery, re-do times, training levels, technician efficiency, customer satisfaction index, safety compliance and records, billable hours, response times, upsales and others as well. Just make sure the information you are gathering is easy to gather and is accurate.

If your business system does not support segmentation and your vendor does not support a standardized labor times, you might be able to get the necessary information from payroll and accounting to implement your TIP.

And when it is all working and you are having some successes make sure you celebrate them. Your TIP has achieved its goals and now it is time to enjoy it and be happy about the technicians who have achieved their goals. Share the good news.