Career, Business & Soft Skills

Put three good tradespeople in front of the same problem, and you may see three different kinds of enthusiasm. One wants to understand why the system behaves that way. Another wants to get the failed part out and make the repair. The third is already thinking about the layout, access, and details that will make […]

It’s Friday at 6 PM. The schedule is clear, as far as you can tell. Other guys have been getting cleared right and left, so you call in standby. Five minutes pass. Ten minutes pass. You check in again, and sure as &%$#, there it is! You get sent across town to another call that […]

I was going through a recorded service meeting with the Kalos techs, and Bert shared something that has been rattling around in my head ever since. His team went digging through their callback data looking for patterns, and after stepping back and looking at it, one showed up that nobody expected: The newer techs were […]

We’ve all probably been in this situation before (maybe in both people’s shoes at different points of our careers): A technician is on the job with their apprentice. The technician tells the apprentice where the probes go on the service ports and exactly what the superheat and subcooling are.  The apprentice’s eyes glaze over, and […]

My family tries to live as holistically as possible. We make a lot of our own food and stay away from things that are heavily processed and have a lot of additives, preservatives, and common allergens. That means we like to buy snacks from independent brands that are transparent about their recipes, and one of […]

If you are new to the trade, I’d like to welcome you. Like many skilled trades, the HVAC/R trade has many opportunities and can help you make a good living. We need those of you who are young and new to the trade, and we are grateful to have you. But as a word of […]

This is a recap of the 7th Annual HVACR Training Symposium session, with a few key themes and takeaways. If you missed the symposium but find some topics of interest in this tech tip, you can still purchase a virtual ticket at hvacrschool.com/symposium. You must be logged in to your account with a ticket to […]

First, let’s state the obvious and clear the air a bit. The photo above is SUPER CHEESY! But this story is about three bad techs who don’t know it, so a photo of three models clearly posing in clean clothes makes as good a proxy for a bad tech as anything else. First off, I’m not […]

This article detailing the three steps to deliver a trades education talk was written by David Richardson from NCI. David is an excellent educator with lots of public speaking experience under his belt, and he has shared some great tips to help people share their valuable trade knowledge. If you have any questions for him […]