By Mr Retail
A while ago I talked about employees and the importance of adding an in-house apprenticeship or training program. The premise was pretty simple; it is extremely hard to find good employees, so let’s follow the model used in the plumbing or electrical worlds. I have embarked on that idea in our store and wanted to give you some feedback.
As of right now, only one of our employees came to us with experience. Every other employee in our shop has gone through our informal training program. And while it took significant time and resources to make it happen, the end result has been wonderful. You can click here to get some details on how we did it.
In a nutshell, we run the program in three stages. In phase one, your staff are training the new person and are likely to move at a slightly slower pace while they are in training mode. This phase will cost you money. When the second phase hits, we are allowing the person to do some selling or installing and are hoping to break even on them from payroll and other associated expenses. When we move them to phase three, they now become a commissioned employee and make more and more money as they get more efficient with selling and/or installing. It can take 6 months to get to stage 3.
Did I have growing pains through this process? Absolutely. Did we have to let many people go? Absolutely! What did I learn through it? Before we officially hire someone, we try to have the candidate spend at least one full day shadowing an employee to give them a taste of daily life around here. When hired, the recruit is formally reviewed after one week, two weeks, and one month. By doing these things, it allows us to let the apprentice go sooner if we see they aren’t meeting our internal goals. We have also found that the shadowing weeds out some folks before they ever get offered a job.
So for us, this is likely the future for all of our departments. Was it a complete pain in the butt to implement? It was. Is it worth the effort to have employees that haven’t learned bad habits somewhere else? To have employees that don’t feel entitled? To find folks that love their jobs and care about their fellow employees? Yes.
About Mr Retail
Mr Retail offers opinions and information on car audio retailing for CEoutlook. He wishes to remain anonymous. He has owned a retail store in this country for over 20 years now. Mr Retail loves what he does and loves the 12 volt industry and is happy to share his hard won expertise.
Photo: SkillsUSA Mobile Electronics finalist
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