Why We Created an Employee Development Business

In many capital goods companies, employees receive basic training when they are hired. They are shown how to do the job, told they will become faster and make fewer mistakes with experience, and then left largely on their own. Over time, employees often develop shortcuts that make the job easier for them but do not necessarily meet the job’s intended purpose. This problem is made worse by weak or unclear job descriptions across much of the dealer supply chain.

After initial onboarding, many employees receive little or no ongoing training to build the skills and knowledge needed to perform at a higher level.

That is the problem Learning Without Scars is designed to solve. Our internal purpose is to help employees discover and develop their personal and professional potential. To do that, we created a series of Skills Assessments, or CSAs, organized by job function. We divide dealership operations into five areas: parts, service, selling, marketing, and customer service. We offer six assessments for parts, six for service, four for selling and marketing, four for customer service, and two for technicians. Although we do not provide technical training for mechanics, we created brand-neutral technician assessments that measure technical knowledge across key areas. These assessments cover roughly 95% of the work hours in a dealership.

The capital goods industry is broad, covering construction equipment, automotive, agricultural equipment, material handling, mining, engines, aircraft, boats, and more. The supply chain is global and complex, as the COVID-19 pandemic made clear. Because each sector uses its own terminology, we adapt our materials to fit the language and needs of specific industries.

Over more than 30 years of training and evaluating student understanding, we have seen wide differences in performance, skills, and knowledge within the same job functions. About 35,000 students have participated in our classroom, webinar, and online programs. Their results showed major differences not only between groups but also across regions, including Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa, South America, China, India, and Russia. Those variations convinced us that the industry needs greater standardization, especially from a customer service perspective.

People often say customer loyalty no longer exists. I believe the industry contributed to that loss by failing to provide consistent, high-quality customer service. In 1980, I helped create job function descriptions for parts, service, product support, sales, and marketing with AED, the Associated Equipment Distributors. We compiled those descriptions, prerequisites, and standards in the Product Support Handbook.

I later created the Product Support Best Practices Handbook for AED. It examined the processes, methods, and systems used in product support and identified better ways to perform the work. The approach was similar to applying total quality management, which later evolved into Six Sigma and then 5S.

The wide variation in skill levels led us to develop a certification program. We began with leadership roles in each of the five departments and plan to expand certification to every job function. The program has four levels: prerequisite, basic, advanced, and master-level progression, with increasingly difficult assessments at each stage. Managers must first achieve at least 40% on the prerequisite assessment to enter the certification path.

Our goal is to work with manufacturers and associations over time to establish national standards for every operational job function in capital goods dealerships.

The Time is Now