Reasons Why Being a Certified Technician Is a Good Career Choice
As we are in the off season and should be recruiting for the prime season which is coming you must keep some things in focus when recruiting. If one of the points below helps you recruit one extra superstar for your company, then please use them in your recruiting scripts or recruiting ads. We all know in the industry how hard it is to hire, train and retrain good technicians. Giving someone a chance at a career should be positive and repetitive in your recruiting year-round.
- College is Not Necessary
Many high school students are not going to college. Unless they get a scholarship, families don’t have enough money to send them to college. Many join the military right out of high school. These are the students you want to target in your recruiting efforts. A HVAC career in many ways is easy to get into. They will start at the bottom but will quickly work their way up amongst their peers.
- Good Wages
When they start, they never realize that they could make enough money to support a family. Within one year in many cases, they will have an opportunity to double their pay because supervisors reward high performance and challenging work. With an HVAC career, they will find they can make a good living at something and be proud of what they are doing. The average annual salary for a HVAC technician is $72,000.
- Independence
One of the greatest aspects of being an HVAC technician is the independence you have during your workday. Whether you are an installation tech, a service tech, or a sales technician you’ll find yourself not having to be around a crowd at work. You get to go about your day and do or say pretty much what you want, how you want. Sure, you have calls or installations that you must go to, but you won’t have any supervisors looking down on you all the time like with some jobs.
- It’s a career that will always be in demand — growing at about 15% as us baby boomers start retiring
As you’ve heard already, HVAC is a career that is never going to go away. Robots and AI are far from being able to walk into a home, business or grocery store, walk around, troubleshoot the problem, get the repair part, braze copper lines together, enlarge returns, cut in supplies, install an HVAC system, and the list goes on. The fact is it takes real people with real skills to do our job. And the field is only going to grow for the next several years, meaning there will be an increase in jobs available for you to acquire.
- The Job Isn’t Very Repetitive
As an HVAC technician, your job isn’t very repetitive. Sure, you’re out there repairing systems every day, or installing equipment regularly, but the application of where you’re doing it not only changes daily but from call to call. You never know what you’re going to get into on the next call. That is challenging for some people, and HVAC isn’t for everyone. But for some of us, they thrive on it.
- Helping Others/Health/A Place to Serve
Nothing feels better than getting customers back up and running again. Whether it’s at the end of the day on an installation, or after a challenging service call. They will probably feel like a genius when they find something as simple as a dirty filter that wasn’t allowing air through a system. The best feeling, they get as HVAC technicians is when we can get an older couple, a family with children, or someone with medical conditions that really need a comfortable home cooling again. When a grocery store with a lot of food at risk of spoiling is saved by your expertise, you’re going to feel like Superman as you walk out the door with your tool bag and your head up high.
- Mechanical Aspect
The goal as an HVAC technician is to provide thermal comfort and good indoor air quality. We work with thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, and heat transfer. A lot of people find this industry confusing because air isn’t something we can see. We can feel it! But trying to explain what we just did to get someone’s system back up and running can be a challenge. Installing, servicing and maintaining equipment engineered for this is what HVAC technicians all around the world. It’s one of those trades that not everyone can just pick up in a day or two. This makes a technician’s job more secure than some other blue-collar trades. Having this knowledge and bringing people’s lives back to normal is an extremely rewarding feeling.
- Multi-Talented/Jack-of-All-Trades
You can really become a jack-of-all-trades in the HVAC field. This is especially true if you go into the installation side of the field. As installers, you must be able to read blueprints from an engineer. Not only are we setting equipment, but we’re also involved in plumbing gas lines and condensate drainage, working with high and low voltage, constructing new platforms, cutting in supply registers in rooms, enlarging returns and even cutting holes through rooftops to place new units. After replacing some of those units on the roof, we sometimes will also need to patch up the area around the curb to get it looking good again.
We’ve already discussed the other areas you’ll be good at with thermodynamics, balancing airflow, heat transfer, refrigerant flow and how to make the air quality better in a home. This is why many became an HVAC technician because it really makes you a jack-of-all-trades.
- The Challenges/Troubleshooting
If you’re up for a challenging career, you’ll find HVAC an illustrious career. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to be good in this field. But it does take a solid understanding of the fundamentals and a good deal of patience. Just when you think you have the answer to a problem, something else comes up and then you must deal with that. All the trades we just talked about — plumbing, electrical, carpentry, roofing, thermodynamics, and others — can all come into play when it comes to solving the myriad of troubleshooting issues we face in the HVAC field every day.
- You Learn Sales
Some will get the opportunity to sell to our customers. Technicians will pinpoint the problem and need to persuade the customer to spend money on the repair to get their system running again. Other times the cost to get the system running again isn’t worth it to the owner, so you end up selling them a new system. You also are out there trying to sell indoor air quality to homeowners so they can more fully enjoy their homes. Many people don’t know the air in their homes is sometimes worse than the air outside.
Selling can be a sensitive subject because some people think HVAC technicians and salespeople take selling a little too far. Our industry has a bad reputation compared to others because some companies only pay their technicians by how many parts they sell. It’s a fine line because technicians can get greedy and not care about taking people’s money just to line their pockets. You will have to remind them that integrity will pay them back 10-fold and not to get greedy.
- Seasonal
Which brings me to my next reason HVAC is such an excellent job choice. Most people don’t use their AC or heating all year. This creates what we call shoulder seasons. During these times, some companies don’t have any work for their techs. Other companies have maintenance contracts that need to be fulfilled. But, if you’re in the residential and commercial field, I’m sure you’ll feel the seasonal changes in your hours at work, which is why you’ll need to discipline yourself to save money when you’re busy during those slower times of the year. The good thing is though as you learn and become a certified tech you will find less down time in your work schedule.
- Take Home Van/ Save on Gas Money
Finally, some companies will let you take your work van home with you. This saves a lot of time and money since you don’t have to drive to work to get your van, just to be at your first call which could turn out to be right by your house! Having your own van means being able to stock the truck your way, have certain tools and other knick-knacks set up just the way you like it.
Many notice in the first year of being in the trades they build quite a bit of muscle from all the carrying, lifting, squatting, crawling and other activity on the job. It’s a physical line of work that can add some weight to your body, hopefully the right kind. If you are a physical fitness nut like me, I find this as an extra saving because my gym workout is my workday.
