My personal opinion, for what it's worth.

My personal opinion, for what it's worth. Our trade needs new blood, and so does just about every other trade. No fake news there. The good news is that trade schools keep getting more popular. The problem is the schools are in the same spot we are. Public or private, they're desperate for instructors, and desperate hiring makes for bad hiring. This week I saw yet another announcement that made me shake my head. Someone who went full time in HVAC a little over a year ago is now an HVAC instructor at a big-name private trade school. I'm not naming anyone, because I don't blame him. A school offered him a job and he took it, and I'm sure he wants to do right by those students. My problem is with the school. They put him in a spot I don't think anybody is ready for that early in their career, and that isn't fair to him or to the people sitting in his classroom. Those students are paying good money. These programs are expensive, and many students cover them with federal grants and loans, so tax dollars are in the mix too. A book can teach some people the refrigeration cycle. It doesn't work for me. I know several neurodivergent techs, and if they're anything like me, book learning just doesn't stick. Books put me to sleep. An instructor who clicks through PowerPoints and assigns book work will do nothing for me except make me drop the class. My good friend Ty Branaman is a perfect example of a true instructor. Ty has a way of talking to me that keeps me engaged. If he uses PowerPoint at all, it's on top of his physical examples and his sometimes silly, funny antics. That kind of teaching comes from years of doing the work. It takes a lot of service calls to learn what to do when the book answer doesn't fix the problem, and an instructor who hasn't run those calls has nothing to fall back on but the book and the slides. Techs with that kind of experience aren't lining up to teach, and pay is the reason. Most schools, and I'd argue nearly all of them, don't pay instructors enough. There's no reason a competent instructor with a career's worth of experience shouldn't make at least journeyman wages, and then some. Instead, a good student can be out-earning the person who taught them within a few years of graduating. That's not right, and it's why the people who should be teaching stay in the field. If we want better techs coming out of these schools, the standard for who teaches has to come up, and the pay has to come up with it. Until that changes, students have to look out for themselves. We tell customers to check a contractor's license and references before they hire one. If you're looking at a trade school, or you know someone who is, do the same before you sign anything. Ask who will actually be teaching your classes, how many years they worked in the field, what kind of work they did, and what licenses and certifications they hold. Ask the school for references, meaning recent graduates and local contractors who hire their grads. Ask to sit in on a class before you enroll. A school that's proud of its instructors will be glad to answer, and it should be posting their backgrounds where students can see them. If a school won't answer, keep shopping. How many years in the field should someone have before they teach this trade? I'd like to hear your number.