Episode 362: For The Instructors

On this week’s episode of Grease The Wheels, we talk about one of the major unsung heroes of the entire industry - the men and women who teach us seemingly un-teachable lot what’s going on. Weather you are an associate professor at a small state school, to a hyper-focused product expert working for a manufacturer, the knowledge that you have and your ability to parlay that knowledge through our often dense skulls is what keeps the entire industry moving forward. Every little tip, trick, or procedure that you can impart on the next generation of technicians is going to keep them safe, keep them profitable, and keep the entire world moving forward. We thank everyone in this space from the bottom of our hearts, because you make such an incredible difference! Also, if you are looking for help when it comes to teaching Video MPI - Uncle Jimmy has you covered, just check out the second link in the description! 

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This Episode of Grease the Wheels is brought to you in partnership with Surfwrench Digital! For more on Video MPI Training Visit https://www.surfwrench.com/video-mpi-training-landing/ to learn more. Video MPI Training built in the shop, by your Uncle Jimmy. Use code “GTW” for 50% off your training access!  

Transcript

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All right, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome once again to Grease the Wheels, your automotive technician podcast coming to you from the Rock and Roll Garage. It's Grease the Wheels. This is your Uncle Jimmy behind the microphone. Hey, I want to say what I always say, but I want to mean it, like I always mean it, and say thank you to all of you out there who are doing the tough jobs, the hard jobs. Uh, every job out there that requires sweat, your hands, manual labor, uh, blue-collar shirt of some type, uh, working with tools, working with people who are tools. I want to thank you all for what you do. I really do. I appreciate it. I don't care what it is, if you're fixing it, destroying it, building it up, blowing it up, it doesn't even really matter. I just wanted to, they blew up uh a very huge building here in my uh the town I'm in this weekend. It was a beautiful building. I'm surprised they couldn't repurpose it, but they just said, yeah, fuck it, and blew it up. And uh, I appreciate the guys who did that. And uh now I appreciate the guys who are gonna have to go in with the the shovels and the bulldozers and shit and clean that shit all up. Appreciate what you do. Thank you very much for helping the planet move forward as much as possible, despite the obstacles that people like to put in your way. Thank you very much. Now, there is another group of people uh that I would like to thank uh very wholeheartedly and very sincerely. And I gotta say before I get started that I'm extremely embarrassed that I've done 360 plus episodes of this podcast and never really once ever mentioned uh some of the people who have made this possible uh through offering me uh the ability to advance my career, and that's automotive technician instructors. Instructors. I have not uh called them out, held them up for praise, uh offered them any kind of dignity, any gratefulness, but I'm going to alleviate that this particular week. And what I want to do is just say a hearty and healthy uh thank you to all the instructors who have guided not just me, because there are several and many, uh many and several being sort of the same word, but also everyone else uh that has partaken of this occupation, even if it was just for a few months or a couple of years, or maybe a few years, or maybe uh an entire career, because I know that that has happened in some cases. It's kind of rare these days just because the the way the job is, how much it pays, how hard it is, and how everyone is really trying to basically screw you without a reach round. Um, I have to thank uh a lot of instructors for putting certain information into my head. And let me tell you something, that's not an easy task, okay? And I don't want to, you know, go on too much about myself, but I I really had to work hard just to get out of high school. And not so much because I'm stupid, I am stupid, I could overcome that without too much trouble. But I got lazy and I wanted to remain pretty much ignorant of some of the shit they were trying to teach me, and then they came down and tapped me on the shoulder and said, Yeah, you got to learn this and show that you know what you're talking about and that you've learned it, or else we're not gonna let you graduate. So that uh kind of flipped a switch in me and I moved forward from there. And from there, uh from there, I did not wish once I got out of high school, I did not wish to go to college at all. I had had enough of schooling, or at least so I thought. Uh I I can remember not thinking that I knew everything. I knew that I didn't know everything, but I was okay with what I knew. And little did I know that I needed to learn a lot more. One of the things I learned was that a plan that I had, which was to involve getting a job working at a company where my father worked, I thought perhaps that he would help me with that. Uh and he didn't. He didn't. And so that was one of the things that I had to learn is that I really, really was on my own uh and uh have been since that day, since those days. Okay. And and I have not really enjoyed uh what I would call an extremely lucrative career in anything until I decided to uh what what they what I like to say is I crossed over from the dark side. I was in auto parts for a very long time, which is a sad occupation that pays very, very little in many cases, and uh is not going to allow you to enjoy any kind of a lifestyle that you might consider even middle class. Okay. So in light of the technician shortage, which was just getting started at really in earnest at the time that I decided to cross over from the to the it depends on how you look at it. I crossed over to the dark side or I crossed over from the dark side, I'm not sure which one. Uh it depends. It depends on your point of view, but uh I've used to say it all the time. I crossed over to the dark side and became a technician. Uh, and it was a good move for me. It was also a real late move for me. See, I've always been a late bloomer and a real late bloomer. As a matter of fact, I'm still waiting for puberty to set in so I can try some things. Uh things I heard that are fun once you go through puberty. Uh it's kind of a joke, but uh not really very, very immature is the guy behind the microphone. Yeah, he's kind of kidlike, you know, childlike. But one of the things that I needed to realize in my life, and it took me a long, long time, was that I wanted to uh I wanted to be a mechanic. I wanted to be a technician, I wanted to work on cars. Uh it I learned early on that I can't fix people, but even though they desperately need to be fixed in many cases, uh I wasn't able to do that. I wasn't able to deal with people uh very readily. Uh have too much of a temper and and not enough uh not enough patience with uh stupidity. So uh crossing over to the dark side and becoming a technician was was really something that I probably should have done maybe 10, 15, or even 20 years earlier in my life, and uh I didn't, and I waited, and then it became clear that that was the path that I should have chosen. So I was a late bloomer to this, okay? And I have a lot of lot of lot of instructors that I have had since I decided to uh attempt to become a technician that I owe a lot to, and I want to thank them. And I want to I want to send a special thank you out. Uh if I can, I would like to try to do this as anonymously as I can because that's always been my mantra here at the podcast, is that it's not about me, although the last five minutes were. Uh and some more is coming. Uh I apologize, but uh I I work as a uh technician for a specific brand, and the brand is known as BMW. Uh, I've been with them uh 20 plus years now, and I have had been to training at BMW uh training centers uh all over the country. I've been to Chicago and Cleveland, uh Cleveland I will never go back to again. I don't think that that's open anymore anyway. But I've been to uh recently Atlanta and I've been to uh Woodcliffe Lake, New Jersey for BMW training many, many, many times, and even have been to the old Montvale site before they opened the new one in Woodcliffe Lake. So uh I'm definitely familiar with BMW uh training, and I want to say that this podcast is dedicated to those individuals and especially the the individuals in Atlanta who have uh let it be known that they're fans of the podcast, and so I want to say a very hearty thank you to you guys. Uh and and and really honestly, uh without you guys, we could not get this job done because what has happened is, and then and I don't enjoy this particular part of it myself, is that early on when I became a technician, we used to have update classes every year. And it, you know, it's pretty simple, you know, update class 2003, update class 2004, and then uh some dealers out there got kind of mouthy and lippy and and complainy and whiny, and you know, the fucking dealers where they are. Uh oh we don't want our technicians at training, we want them in our shops making us money. Yeah, go fuck yourself. They're not gonna be able to make you any kind of money unless it we train them properly, but uh because they whine so loudly and and then they cry and they and they pout, the things kind of went their way. So training got to a point where it was a little bit more fewer and farther between training sessions. And so what has ended up happening over the course of the last 20 years is that some stuff doesn't get officially trained anymore. You don't get trained in some stuff anymore, okay? They'll come up with training for certain things and then let the dealers decide whether or not they want to send the technicians, and in a lot of cases, yeah, they don't because it costs them money, and of course, that's a a fucking number one uh numero uno uh no-go at all dealers who are trying to control expenses. And uh, I don't know if maybe they feel like the technicians should learn this shit on their own. Uh, some of us are just not going to do that. I I have been one of those technicians that does it, but I've worked with dozens and dozens of technicians who work flat rate and aren't going to spend even five minutes trying to get the education they need on their own for some of the systems that they're looking at, some of the systems that they're working on, and some of the systems that they're seeing on the newer models that roll in the door. Then this is bad. This is wrong. Okay. I mean, what should happen is, I believe, honestly, is that there should be an update class every year for the new models that come out and the new systems that come out and the new strategies and the new software and everything that's new and everything that's different and everything that changes every goddamn year. And I think that this is true of every brand. I don't give a shit who you're working for, if it's Hyundai or Kia or GM or Ford or Mercedes-Benz, Audi, even us at BMW. This shit is changing so fucking rapidly. And you're not giving us really our dealers are just strangling us to get as much money as they can out of us, and it's not allowing us uh a really proper training. I talk about this all the time. I know you've heard it before. If you listen to this ever, I've talked about how sometimes I have to learn how something works before I can figure out why it doesn't. And I know that there is still stuff in the cars that I don't really know hardly anything about. And when it rolls in, there's a fucking problem. I end up having to ask somebody who might know more than me. I end up having to ask questions that don't make sense, maybe even. I have to try to look in these uh there's no other way to put this, some of these horrendous websites that they come out with the information on them. Sometimes the information is right there, and sometimes it's fucking not. It's not because they seem to like to purge some of the older stuff. And uh, I tell you what, the memory on this guy here behind the microphone, not good enough for that to be a good idea. I just had a a question on EWS3 in an older car, which is the driveway, uh, you know, the driveway protection. It's uh it's how a car keeps from getting stolen by just sticking a USB stick in a slot, okay, which some manufacturers can't figure out just yet. But uh I I couldn't find any of the training information I know exists because it's been purged. You know, I know that it's in one of my manuals, which is back in the rock and roll garage, buried under some shit. I can't really find it pretty readily, but uh it's not in uh any of their official uh in any of their official websites, any of our training websites, any of our official information websites, just not there, okay? So uh there's that as a problem. Now what I wanted to do, and and I I want to just say uh thank you right now, just a really heartfelt and sincere thank you to all the instructors I've ever had and all the instructors who endeavor to try to stick information not just in my head but in everybody else's head. And I have found since coming up through, I went to WildTech initially. Uh, I remember my very first instructor there is the one who kind of pointed to the path that I went down, stating that you know, some of the uh technicians that he had trained for Mercedes-Benz at a spot Mercedes-Benz specialty training center, some of those technicians were making six figures a year. And this intrigued me, especially at the time, because I came from a place where I was making about 30 grand a year as a parts manager, and I'm like, yeah, that sounds pretty good to me. So I I went down that path. I I I bound down that rabbit hole, as they would say, and uh looked into training to become either a BMW or a Mercedes-Benz technician, and uh wanted to take both tests, but I ended up taking the BMW test first. Uh, ended up at uh BMW STEP training. That was a six-month uh course. It was extremely intense. Uh, I I would need to say, and also I I want to say this here a heartfelt thank you to the other 11 individuals that I went through this class with because they were smart, they picked it up right away, and they caused me to have to work really hard to keep up because this stuff really doesn't come that naturally to me. I mean, I would gonna give you a long diatribe on how human beings are typically not really mechanically inclined from birth. It's something that you learn, something that you you long for and that you work on in your head. And maybe you are mechanically inclined and maybe you're not. And I'll tell you something right now. Uh, some of the first instruction I ever had after high school was as a machinist, and it took me a while to figure out that that was not my uh that was not my thing. Okay, I learned a lot and I still know a lot from those days, but man, when I went to a shop and tried to run some machines and work on work on uh lathes and uh uh other uh drilling machines and that, it was a disaster. It was a disaster for me because I'm somewhat mechanically klutzy. Okay, so even working on cars didn't seem like it was gonna be a really good idea, at least at that time for me. But then when I got some experience working on my own shit, my friend's stuff, and and everything else I had, uh, I decided that that was the path I wanted to go down. And even though I am still, honestly, somewhat mechanically klutzy, I can get a lot of shit done in a hurry, and I know what I'm up to. And it's all because of instructors, all of it, right from the beginning. I mean, in in machinist school that I went to, the machinist training I took, I had gentlemen who had lost fingers in milling machines during World War II. That's how long ago that was. The trainers were, you know, young enough to be instructors then, and also have worked in uh factories during World War II to nowadays where the guys are almost always younger than me, but they're way fucking sharper than me. They're way smarter than me, they know what they're up to, and they know how to get across the information that they need to do. And I and I want to say again a heartfelt thank you to all of you, and especially to those boys in Atlanta who like to remind everybody I work with that they listen to my podcast. So thank you very much. I gotta be honest with you, too, gentlemen. I am probably not ever gonna see you again because I am at an age now where I'm pretty sure my dealer does not want to invest in my education with even one IOTA, and so they're not gonna send me the training, and it's just not gonna happen. And so uh I have to uh bid you a fine uh congratulatory and a thank you from a afar. I'm not, it doesn't uh appear to me that I'm ever gonna get there again. So I mean it I know that federally it's a federally against the law, it's against the it's against federal law to discriminate against somebody who's old, but that's only if you can prove it. So I don't I don't suspect that uh training will come down the pike for me anytime soon. But I have done uh all of the prerequisites necessary to get some more training at your at your location, and I would dearly love to get it, but I don't see it as being feasible for my dealer. So maybe that'll change. I don't know. I don't suspect it will, but uh but I did want to mention uh you fine gentlemen there and and and offer you the finest thank you and uh that I can that I can serve up on this podcast, okay? Because uh I know I these guys come I'll I'll be honest with you. Some of these guys come back and they're full of piss and vinegar with the the instruction and the and the training that they've gotten from you. So I know that it's a hundred percent effective. I know that they come back and they're like, yeah, these guys are great. I learned a lot, I'm ready to rock and roll. Let's bring me the broken stuff and I'll fucking fix it. So uh thank you very much for infusing them with enthusiasm, which I know is not easy in some cases, but uh I did want to say a thank you for that as well. Okay. Now I have looked into uh what it takes to be an instructor because I don't want to just say, oh, thank you for what you do. I kind of want to give people a background on what instructors are typically all about, why they do what they do, and and where where they do it in some cases. But uh what I what I did was I I hit up Gemini and I asked Gemini a question. And here's the question I asked him. Give me some of the pros and cons of being an automotive technician instructor. Okay, and then Gemini's Gemini is great. And at the bottom, I wanted to just read this real quick here. Uh, it says here, Gemini is AI and can make mistakes. Okay, but I don't think they're wrong in this case because what it says here, and I'm just gonna I'm gonna read, I'm really not gonna paraphrase it because it's really pretty good. It says becoming an automotive technician instructor, whether at a high school, CTE program, a community college, a trade school, or a corporate manufacturer facility, such as you gentlemen, offers a major career pivot for experienced technicians. What I have found is a lot of the instructors that I've had, they were technicians. So there's a lot of experience that goes into what they're trying to feed you, what they're trying to teach you, what they're trying to show you, what they're trying to have you ingest mentally. Okay. There's a lot of a lot of background to that. And you right now, if you're a technician, you know what they're talking about. You know what I'm talking about. You know why they would do what they're doing. It's important, it's necessary, and it represents a complete 180%, 180-degree C change from what the fuck they were doing. Here's the breakdown of the primary benefits and drawbacks of stepping into the classroom. Pros. Here's some of the pros, okay, of being an instructor. And I would not want to steer anyone away from this job, but I think that it's not a job for everybody, okay? I think you, you know, some of the major, I don't want to say major so much as I want to say some of the uh useful personality traits that you might have would be that you are friendly. Yeah, you want to be friendly. You want to be able to be somebody who can communicate. Maybe somebody you may be somebody who stutters or slurs or has a list, might not be that great of an instructor, because it's obviously uh something that's going to uh detract from what you're trying to tell somebody, especially if you if you don't talk like if you talk like a cartoon character, it's gonna be it's gonna it's gonna it's gonna it's gonna be tough to understand what you're saying and then grasp it as information that you might need. Okay. Also, too, you'll have to have a lot of patience. Because let me just tell you something right now. I went to WildTech and the gentleman who owned it at the time, and I believe he owns it again now, after this, uh they had a period of time where they were owned by some corporation and they kind of ran it into the ground a little bit, and then that particular gentleman who owned it when I went there brought it back. And he was always interested in having students in his class and take classes at that school that had learning disabilities because he had a learning disability and he went to that school before he owned it, and they they helped him out. They they trained him, they put him on a solid career path, and obviously it worked out. If he can go ahead and buy the school, I mean, obviously, he was a little bit more intelligent than maybe he seemed or maybe he looked like, whatever, it doesn't even really matter. But he felt like it was important for that particular school to offer uh students who had possible learning disabilities, you know, such as uh ADHD or perhaps uh different sorts of uh uh learning disabilities. I'm I I'm not up on all of them, so I can't really list them off for you, but there's there's plenty of them out there. And in some cases, uh some students succeeded, and in other cases, some students failed mightily. Uh, I had one particular gentleman in my class who also just happened to be from my hometown who had a grocery list of different different sorts of learning disabilities, and he unfortunately did not make it through the program. It was very difficult for him to take in information and then relay to you the fact that he got it. Okay, I don't want to be cruel or uh I don't want to be mean, but it was it was it was extremely tough, and he was unable to do it, but he got the opportunity to try, and so and he did try. There was a lot of effort put in there, but it just didn't work out for him. But for me, it worked out absolutely fabulous for me. So I can't say that the program was to blame or any of the instructors, and and that's one of the things that you have to deal with when you're an instructor, is that some people are gonna get it and some people are not gonna get it, and you are in no control whatsoever over what kind of students you're gonna get. And I would say in high school and maybe in a vocational school or a community college, you're probably gonna get some major league idiots, some people who shouldn't be allowed to even touch tools and or an automobile for that matter. Uh, if you're working for one of these corporate manufacturer facilities such as Toyota or Honda or Mercedes-Benz, you would think that the technicians coming in from the shops who are there for training would be of a little bit higher caliber. And I can assure you that it's mostly true, yeah. But not always. Okay. I have seen some. I'm not going to spare them. I've seen some retards at some of the dealerships that I've worked with. Fortunately for me, the dealership I work at now does not have any. Everybody there is pretty good at what they do. And I would never venture to say that they should not be trained at all, ever, for whatever reason. But as instructors, these are things that you have to deal with. And then really nobody can train you for that. I mean, especially if you spend five or even ten years as a flat rate technician, you learn to despise people who get gravy to make money and can't do anything that's difficult to do. And unfortunately for you, you have to do the difficult stuff because they can't do it. And it costs you money. It costs you money. And this is one of the reasons why somebody becomes an instructor because they can't stand the inequities of how work is passed out in a shop. And it sucks. And especially when you're flat rate, it sucks. And flat rate really honestly should probably go away, even though quite a few of you probably listening to this make a good deal of money working flat rate simply because there's just so much work and you can bang it out real quick and nobody notices that you're not doing the extra little detail things that you're supposed to do. Now moving on here, what I want to tell you this is the pros. They came up first with the pros. Uh, obviously, if you've worked for even, I would say up to five years and maybe longer than that as a flat rate technician, you have aches and pains somewhere in your physique, somewhere in your anatomy, something is pinching something, something is cracked, broken, bruised, damaged, scarred. It's it's a tough job. It is a fucking tough job. And I have seen women do it effectively, but I always wonder why the fuck would they do it? Why would anybody do it, really, honestly? But this is a real physical job being an automotive technician. Right now, my back is fucking, absolutely killing me. And I don't even know why. I mean, I have some theories, I'm not gonna put them out there right now, but uh I'm not probably not gonna put them out there at all. It's not not my place to tell you that I'm achy, uh, although I just did. But what I'm trying to say is it's a tough physical job, and being an instructor is a much less tough and physical job. And maybe even in some cases, you don't want to work as a technician anymore because you would like to be able to walk when you're 60 years old. You'd like to be able to sit down without moaning and groaning because all your bones ache. You don't want to have to limp the rest of your life because you dropped something heavy on your foot. And in some cases, you could be you could be seriously maimed, uh, lose limbs to amputation, and in some cases, uh like the two kids who were working on the Rolls-Royce that fell off the lift on them, you could end up dead. So it's a little bit, I think it I'm just guessing. But I think as an instructor in a very controlled environment where there is nobody there to scream and holler at you about getting something done quickly, you could be, it's easier to be safe. It's easier to do the right thing at all times, and you don't have to do any heavy lifting or bending or harsh, harsh physical strain on your joints just because you're trying to make a dollar. Uh, and that's what it says here. Physical relief and work-life balance, moving off the shop floor, eliminates heavy lifting, bending, and harsh physical strain on your joints. Teaching positions typically feature predictable fixed hours with no weekends or late night shop demands, along with generous holiday and summer schedules in some academic settings. So, what you're looking at is a job where you don't have to work as hard and it's not as hard on you, and sometimes you and most of the time you don't ever have to work a fucking weekend, which really makes the job look very attractive to me. You work fixed hours, you're done at five, you don't have to worry about doing a break job after five o'clock because somebody's still waiting in the waiting lounge and somebody promised them they could have a car that day. And most of the time you don't work uh weekends or you don't work late, and then the holidays, there's never any school on holidays. What the fuck are you talking about? Are you kidding me? These kids nowadays have holidays I've never even fucking heard of. When I went to school, we walked uphill both ways, but uh we didn't have some of the holidays they have, and now they have like a week off in the middle of the winter. It's like, what the fuck? That never happened to me. Jesus Christ. The only time I had a week off is when seven feet of snow suddenly made it to our area and we couldn't figure out how to get anywhere. The next thing they said here is uh stable and predictable compensation. Yeah, and this is the down, this is also a con. Stable and predictable compensation. Obviously, as a technician uh instructor, you're going to be paid a set wage, it's just probably a salary wage. Uh classroom instruction moves you away from the flat rate anxiety. Yeah, boy. No more flat rate. Yeah, monkey. I could live with that. It sucks. I had uh a pay period not too long ago where I got 66 hours, and then I just finished up one where I got 100. And from where I came, man, I had a hundred, hundred and ten, hundred and twenty-hour pay periods every every two weeks, and it's not happening where I'm at now, and I may have to put them in the rearview mirror because I can't really afford to not make money, especially here when I'm working in the last two or three years of my uh my career, you know. Uh, also, too, it says here classroom instruction moves you away from flat rate anxiety, seasonal slowdowns, and unpaid shop downtime. Uh, that unpaid shop downtime, that's what really kills me. Instructors generally receive a guaranteed hourly or salary pay structure, often bundled with solid public slash institutional health benefits and retirement options, such as state pension plans. Okay, so if you work for uh a school that is uh funded by your school, by uh your state or your county, their retirement packages are fucking killer. They're killer, and they're never gonna go out of business because they run off taxes. And I mean, unless everybody in that state stops working or moves away, which is happening in New York, by the way, but if everybody moves away from that state, then they've got the money. And I mean, unless that happens, it's not gonna happen. They're always gonna have the money to pay their pensions. It's not like these companies that offer you a pension and then go bankrupt to defund it. They can't do that, they're not gonna do that. So that's a definite advantage. Uh high professional impact, here's what it says here. Sharing real-world expertise to mentor the next generation of technicians is deeply rewarding. It certainly can be. Instructors play a direct role in fixing the industry skill gap and helping students launch sustainable careers. I got to agree with that 100% because uh in the 20 plus years I've been working for BMW, I had to take it upon myself to do what they call prerequisite training before I could actually go to training. They wanted me to have a clue what I was going to be learning, and they were gonna fill in any gaps I might have. And I had to do this with uh diesels because when I started with the company, we didn't have diesels. When I started with the company, we didn't have any power adders whatsoever, no superchargers, no turbos. In fact, one of my instructors said we never would, but uh he ended up being incorrect. I don't want to say it was wrong because it sounds harsh, but he was not correct. Uh, we did end up using turbos, and turbos are basically free power, so why wouldn't you, right? And so uh there was many other you know, I obviously they they instructed me on uh valvex and vanos and these sorts of things, and then we got uh different uh stability control systems and different chassis systems and different uh different forms of uh you know the suspensions, and then we got electric vehicles, and we had to be trained uh pretty heartily in that. I mean, there was a lot of instruction that went along with that. Uh most of it included uh safety, and then it was important stuff. It was very important stuff, and I possess almost all of it. I mean, we have a new vehicle now, and uh it is uh it is a killer. Though the way it's the way it's set up, it's it's a it's a good setup. It's uh it took into account a lot of different things that we had to deal with before that were not very uh uh user-friendly for us as technicians, and now they have really kind of cleared that all out. And uh now it's very uh everything that we're gonna have to mess around with is very accessible. So they did a I think they did a very good job with that. And that's uh and that's it's and one of the things I want to say, I have a little trouble articulating it, but one of the things I want to say about that is that when most companies are backing off the extraordinary and actually uh incredible predictions that they were making about their own uh investment and their own strategies and their own goals with electric vehicles, most companies had to back away from that because literally, and then this is the way I've put it over the years, everybody who wants an electric car has one. So once we uh changed administrations in the White House and the uh subsidizing of people buying electric vehicles kind of went away, sales of EVs and electric cars kind of dropped off the edge of the of the earth for all you flat earthers out there. But BMW did not go that way, not in the beginning and not now. They knew that they were gonna continue building uh internal combustion engine vehicles. They knew that. They knew there was always gonna be a market for that. They also knew that there were some areas of the country and some areas of the planet where an electric vehicle is not uh a very good choice. Uh, obviously, if you live somewhere where it's cold and real, real cold a lot, it's not a good thing. But there are a lot of places where people live because when it's cold, sometimes people just say, you know what, I'm gonna get the fuck out of here and go somewhere where it's warm. So they did keep uh a lot of different EV vehicles in production, even though the demand kind of tapered off quite a bit, and they have upped the game. They have up the game, and so the new vehicles that they have coming out uh have updated systems, the batteries are better, the electronics are better, they're more easy to uh manipulate when they don't work or if they screw up or if they need to be tested. Uh, and so they have taken a step forward when literally everybody else in the industry is taking a step backwards, which just shows that they have more than a modicum of intelligence about what's going to happen in the future, okay? Because electric cars are not the answer, they're an answer to what's going on in the future. It's a valid answer, it's just not a complete answer, that's all, and that's that's all I've ever said about it. Uh, there's a lot of uh problems, obviously, with EVs. I don't want to go into it too far, but there's a lot of problems with getting the uh rare earth materials to build the batteries. Uh, there's a lot of problems with recycling them. They haven't really fixed that problem yet. That's still uh all up in the air, and nobody really talks about that. There's also a great expense at times if you need to replace a battery. Haven't really seen that yet. So uh I don't know how big of a problem that is. I suspect it's not a very big problem. I mean, if you got a car that needs a battery and you've used it all up, that car might be junk by now anyway. So it might not be worth replacing the battery in it, to be honest with you. But these are all things that that particular company has considered, and in their training for us, they have let us know that there's new things coming and that we have to learn them, and they have trusted these instructors to put all of that information into our heads and then to send us off to our various dealers. And they have done a fantastic job in that particular manner. I've done a lot of electric car training with them, and it has always been top-notch, and I would recommend it to anybody who wants to learn that stuff. Now, not just anybody can go to this training, obviously, but you could certainly start working at a at a BMW dealer and and move through the ranks and and pick up all the information you need and go to school and let them let them uh uh fill you up with the knowledge you need to be better at what you do, and they're excellent at it. They are they are just professional automotive instructors who do a fantastic job and bring a lot of the uh a lot of the intensity of of having been a technician with them. Okay. Uh high professional impact, yeah. Sharing real world expertise to mentor the next generation of technicians is deeply rewarding. Absolutely. Instructors play a direct role in fixing the industry skill gap and helping students launch sustainable careers. And see, that's the difference. The sustainable career is the difference between somebody who works for two years and somebody who has a career, does it for the rest of their lives. Honestly, uh, for brand training for any real brand, you have to kind of as a service manager or as a foreman possibly or even a team leader, you have to sort out who is going to take advantage of this the most, who is gonna who is gonna benefit the most from this. If you've got some kids who sit around and look at their phones all day long and work on a car just as quickly as they possibly can so they can get back to doing fucking nothing and looking at their phone, this might not be a good candidate to send a training. I mean, obviously they can't concentrate on what the fuck their job is all about, right? They have trouble with that. But if you've got somebody who's going at it all day long with tools and and getting the job done and doing the things he needs to do to make the cars good again for the customers, for you know, whether it's maintenance or whether it's repairs, this is the kind of person you want to send to school. And this is the kind of person that when they get there, the instructors are happy to see them, they're happy to help them out, they're happy to train them, they're happy to test them at the end to see if they retained everything. And so it's it's gonna be really it's really up to uh it's up to the personnel in the dealerships and in the shops when they are training someone who is in the professional world to really sort out those that are gonna make it and those that aren't. And occasionally, I'm sure that some people get sent to training for no good reason whatsoever, and it's obvious that it's a mistake and that they wish they weren't fucking there. I'm sure that that's happened. I I would imagine the stories uh there's there's hundreds of stories out there. I know that there was uh just a just a little side note. I know that uh the training I used to go to in New Jersey, there was a hotel that was up the road. Nobody wants me to tell this story, but I'm gonna go at it anyway. Uh there was a hotel up the road that a lot of us used to stay at when we went to training there, and I'm sure that there's a lot of people who still stay there, and they had a spy had a specific night of the week. It was Thursday night, and they had uh a lot of people congregate there in their lounge, and they had quite the uh quite the party. And there was times, and I'm not gonna I don't want to be too risque about this, but uh some of the things got out of hand and uh some things happened, and sometimes uh technicians didn't make it to school on Friday because of things that happened on Thursday night. So there's things that can happen even when you're even when you're completely invested in training and you go there for four days and then on the fifth day you're MIA. That's a problem. We had an instant, and this was a long time ago now, but uh we had a uh gentleman we sent to training uh for a week at the New Jersey school, and he was there uh Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but then on Friday he drove home and skips the rest of the class. My opinion was I was told that this was not true, but I believe it was true, there was going to be a test on Friday. And I know that a lot of us, uh myself included, a lot of us lock up when we have to take a test. It's not a good thing. We're not the kind of people who are good at taking tests. We could probably fix the space shuttle with a chewing gum and a and a and a pair of pliers, but we can't tell you how to do it, and we can't read a sentence that says this is how you do it, which is just not something we can do. And so testing really uh is kind of a problem for some people, okay? Uh technicians are people who are kinematic, who learn with their hands, learn by doing, learn by seeing, but reading, yeah, not so much. So when you say that you're going to give them a test, they lock up, they freeze, and then they try to think of ways to get out of it. And one of the ways you could get out of it is just by skipping that whole goddamn day altogether. And then our uh our uh technical service engineer had to actually drive out to our place, which is about a seven-hour drive, and administer the test to this guy, and he failed it three times before they finally gave up and said, Whatever, you pass. So this is something else that uh technicians have to deal with is the fact that uh a lot of times the technicians do not want to take tests and will do will wiggle and squirm as much as possible to get out of them. And it's not their fault. They need to they need to know that the training was was uh absorbed, quite frankly. I mean, I know they need to know. They can't they can't just show you something and then have you go, yeah, I got it, and then send you on your way. Uh that's a good way, uh, especially with uh electric cars. That's a good way to find out later some guy got killed because he didn't understand what the fuck he was doing, even though he thought he did. And believe me, there's a lot of that going on out there too. Here's another one of the pros. This is the last one. It says continued industry connection. Teaching keeps you engaged with the automotive field, diagnostic theory, and emerging technologies such as EV platforms and advanced driver assistance systems, ADAS, without needing to buy thousands of dollars in updated personal hand tools. Yeah, you're gonna stay in touch with the business, and you probably won't have to buy any tools, and you're gonna have to, you're honestly gonna have to stay really, really, really in touch with the industry because you're gonna be teaching it. So uh, and and these are good reasons to want to do that job. And and I know a lot of technicians who became instructors did enjoy uh being instructors, and uh, I'm sure there's things about it they didn't they didn't enjoy. And here's some of the cons to that job as per Gemini. Obviously, it says, and number one, potential pay ceiling, effective, effective. Let me just read this again. Okay, let me try this potential pay ceiling, highly efficient flat-rate master technicians or shop for men often make significantly more in a busy bay or in a busy shop than the starting salary for an entry to mid-level teaching or instructing position. Yes. Instructors a lot of times take a pay cut from what they were doing, but they also take a pain cut, which means they don't have to go home and and soak in a bathtub full of ice, or you know, they don't have to take uh Sam's Club bottles of aspirin everywhere with them everywhere they go. You know, it's just a it's just a little bit easier physically, and sometimes it's worth it. It's worth it just to get away from that the physical beating that the job lays out for you sometimes, okay? Uh administrative and bureaucratic overhead. Well, yeah, can't avoid this. Teaching requires managing lesson plans, grading, tracking attendance, maintaining ASC accreditation standards, and dealing with institutional policy or politics or administrative compliance. Obviously, you're gonna have a boss, they have goals, they want you to achieve these goals, they have goals for you. These are things that we all have to deal with, we all have to deal with management. But I would think that in the uh in the training uh industry, in the uh technician training industry, that the uh overhead, the people who are uh overseeing what you do, they're probably technicians too, or at least were at one time. And so they can understand what you're up against, and then maybe they're on your side, maybe they're not, and maybe they're not technicians, maybe they're more people who just were administrators and that's all they ever were, and they feel like they want it one way, and it doesn't work that way sometimes. Um, but you're gonna find that in any business where management is at times unreasonable and unmanageable, and and you're unable to deal with them. That's gonna happen in every job, really. Next up here it says student engagement and classroom management. Well, here's where uh age and experience kind of play a factor, okay? It says dealing with varying levels of student motivation, disciplinary issues, attendance problems, and differing foundational learning abilities can lead to a different type of mental fatigue and stress compared to wrenching. Well, yeah, I would say that that that's definitely a thing, okay? If you come in and you want to be an instructor and you want to be good at it, and I'm assuming that if you're gonna do this, you're gonna want to dive in headfirst and wholeheartedly try to be the best act, the best instructor you can possibly be. You're gonna run into students who don't give a shit, you're gonna run into students who give you shit, and you're gonna run into people who don't show up. You're gonna run into people who just can't learn. You're gonna run into these people. It's gonna happen. I would say that if you're an automotive instructor in a high school, you're gonna run into a lot of this. If you're an automotive instructor at a community college or perhaps a uh uh a training center that that's just uh, you know, it's it's just standalone, like a UTI or a Wild Tech, you may run into some of that. I can tell you some crazy fucking stories from WildTech. There was just all kinds of all kinds of different people there. To be honest, to be quite honest with you, what's what was crazy about it was is that I went there and I told somebody, I said, you know why I got along so well with the people there is because some of them were more obnoxious than me, which is tough. I even said that about one kid I worked with. He was so obnoxious that he reminded me of me, but uh and he ended up being a friend of mine, and I I haven't seen him in a while uh and i understand he i i tried to find him on the internet at one point and found out he'd been arrested I don't know for what I can only I'm I can only guess uh he got kicked out of that school so many so many fucking times uh he and he was honestly he was hilarious he was a hilarious individual I love that kid uh and he helped me out a lot he uh he had he was in a situation where he could help me with some stuff and he did so I I can't say anything bad about him he was always cool with me so uh but to the instructors he was a fucking enormous pain in the ass uh here's some another cons of the of it of the uh of being an instructor facility and budget constraints instructors frequently face tight school budgets meaning you may have to work with outdated shop equipment limited donor vehicles or restricted tools and tooling supplies yeah you're not gonna get the best of stuff sometimes and you may not have anything at some times uh I know the schools I went to I remember thinking that the tool selection was pretty rudimentary and then I figured it out later was that it wasn't necessary to have multi-millions of dollars worth of tools to get the job done and this helped me out quite a bit when I got out in the field I realized I didn't need to spend a hundred thousand dollars for tools I had some real basic tools and some of them I still have let me let me just I think I talked about this before but I have sockets quarter drive and three H drive sockets six point sockets that I bought at AutoZone back in 2003 when I started working as a professional and I still have them and I paid $15.99 for them so they have made me 10 to the millionth power of money over what I've spent on them. They've been they've been amateurized millions of years ago but that was one of the things that we had to face when we were at these training centers was that the the tools that we had it was bare minimum and that was on purpose. So sometimes as an instructor you have to deal with the fact that you don't have the proper equipment to train anybody on and then sometimes when they got out in the field some of these technicians are a little bit clueless when it comes to some of the equipment that they're running into I know that uh the uh alignment racks that we have at the shop I work at now are extremely high tech up to date quick fast good good looking and working hard and they work good but I was never fucking trained on anything like that at all I just had to kind of figure it out sometimes sometimes that happens too uh one of the last cons here and there were there were uh more cons than pros and I hate that when that happens but here's the last one credential and certification requirements transitioning into full-time teaching often requires obtaining teaching certificates continuing education credits or maintaining specific industry credentials such as ASC master status alongside your daily teaching duties you're gonna have to keep up with us you're gonna have to keep up you're gonna have to learn the new stuff too and in some cases if you want to teach in certain places the state may require that you have certain teaching certificates or continuing education credits uh they don't just let you wander in because you say you know what you're doing and then start teaching they don't lots of places don't uh as far as I know for brand training like with the BMW boys a lot of them are just former BMW technicians they were probably pretty good at it and I think that there's a number of reasons why they don't do it anymore. I think probably the number one reason if I had to guess would be because the job is so goddamn physical. It is really physical. Obviously I'm sitting here with a like I don't even know what's wrong with my back I'm not a doctor unfortunately for me right now but my back is kind of achy and I I've been kind of uh mainlining aspirin all weekend to try to get it to calm down um but I will go to work I'm one of these people who can work through pain I'm not a I'm not a pussy let me put it that way okay but uh that was one of the things I wanted to bring to you was the pros and cons of being an instructor and I would say that if you got the opportunity to be an instructor you should look at it very very seriously especially if you possessed a personality that would work well with other that works well with other people if you have patience with people that you work with I I I actually have that myself personally uh some of my patients get tested when the people I work with don't treat the equipment correctly and I want to smash their face in with a hammer but uh and it happens frequently unfortunately but uh I think a lot of us possess a lot of the qualities that we we've that really would be necessary to be an instructor but uh I think a lot of us I think a lot of technicians nowadays would not even think about being an instructor uh and in many cases once they saw that the pay was not nearly as good as being an actual technician they might uh they might beg off on that so what I want to say out there to all of you instructors out there wherever it is you're working if you're training students to be automotive technicians or heavy duty technicians diesel technicians even aircraft technicians whatever whatever training you're providing I want to say thank you for putting knowledge into people's heads for making them smarter for making them better at what they do for letting them know that there's different stuff out there that they need to deal with sometimes sometimes it's on a daily basis with some of these car companies I want to say a very hearty and sincere thank you for what you do. So from uh from my point of view here as your Uncle Jimmy I just want to say that if it wasn't for instructors I probably would not have made it as far as I have I have made it about as far as I am ever going to make it and I may not ever have to deal with an instructor again the rest of my life because uh pretty close to uh mandatory retirement age believe it or not yeah I'm an old fucker what can I tell you but I did want to I did want to just give a shout out to all the boys that I've ever had as instructors and to all the ones that I have not had yet wish I had I want to say thank you again. I have had instructors all the way back to Wildtech and then at step school and then at uh factory training facilities such as New Jersey and Atlanta where these individuals uh did a very fine job and put it into my head which is not easy it's not easy putting things into this fucking head of mine trust me giving me the uh the instruction I needed and the confidence that I needed to move forward and to be successful and I feel like I am very successful at this career and uh helped me to solve problems that I didn't even know I was ever going to have and then when I had them a lot of times they had filled me up with information necessary to keep myself going in that in the in a positive and forward direction. Much more so than really anybody out there. I can remember my like I said my first instructor filled me in on the fact that I could probably make a hundred grand a year if I uh pursued a specialized training. He wasn't right for a long time but then eventually yes it did come around and uh one of the drawbacks to that was that I was working in an area where they have artificially suppressed wages but that's a uh story for a whole nother podcast okay um I've had some instructors who were extremely good at what they do and were very helpful. I have also had some instructors I don't want to call anybody out but I had some instructors who were extremely tough and felt like they were doing a good job because they were extremely tough and it was uh in in many cases my fellow uh my fellow uh technicians my fellow uh classmates felt like it was too tough and unnecessary so they walk a thin line at times ladies and gentlemen sometimes instructors do they have goals that they want to achieve and that they have goals that you should want to achieve and sometimes those goals are a little too lofty most of the time I would say probably 99% of the time they are right in the middle you need to meet them halfway they're going to tell you everything you need to know and you have to be able to scoop it up stick it in your head and know it and then demonstrate it and that's all they can ask for you is to just pay attention and to show up it's all you got to do show up and pay attention and be alert take notes I've got reams and reams of notes I've taken when I've gone to school uh every time and even notes that I've taken when I've done the prerequisite training that they have uh insisted on having insisted on us having before we went to school so it's not for nothing and you know uh if you're a technician and you're listening to this and you're like yeah yeah yeah okay technician uh instructors are great and we love them and all that but you know what good is that for me as a technician let me tell you something right now and and if you don't buy into this then maybe you need to reexamine what you're doing with your life whenever somebody trains you or offers you instruction or tells you anything and I mean anybody whether it's the kid in the bay next to you telling you how to take something off a car or whether it's a foreman who's showing you how to diagnose something or whether it's an instructor at a training center anywhere in the country when they're telling you something and showing you something what they're doing is helping you become more valuable and that is something that I have preached right here on Grease the wheels I have preached that from day fucking one you need to make yourself more and more and more valuable valuable every day every day make yourself more valuable every day. It's important because that's the only way you're gonna get ahead in this business okay if you just decide you're gonna be a moron and do breaks and oil changes you're that's what you're gonna be that's all you're ever going to be you're gonna have to endeavor to learn more to get better earn more to be better and then help train other people as well along the way regardless of whether you're an instructor or just a fellow technician. Okay the knowledge is out there you need to share it uh obviously if somebody wants to share knowledge with you you should try as hard as you can to be as receptive to it as you can and I've talked about this a gazillion fucking times here comes one last time okay there's really no advancement available in a shop for you as a technician all you can do is raise your status raise your level of intelligence raise your level of training become more valuable and just earn more money that's all you're ever going to do. I mean yes you could become a team leader you could become a foreman you could you could do all of those things but you're still gonna be a technician who works on cars. The only real advancement if you're looking for an advancement in the company to make more money you could go ahead and become a service advisor or even move into management and become a service manager. But then guess what? You're not fucking working on cars anymore are you? No you're not so you have to make that decision. You have to make that uh you have to make that decision and you have to either stick with it or you have to shun it. And this is one of those things and this is the last thing I want to tell you before I get out of here okay I praise instructors because it involves giving I praise them because it involves putting information into your head and making you more valuable and that to me makes them valuable very valuable and if you don't correctly partake of that value if you don't ingest that value if you don't have that value enhance your life and your occupation then that's on you. If you want to get better if you want to be an excellent technician you have to really honestly train 247 you you have to be training all the time because shit changes so goddam fast. It it's mind-numbing I have there are many many systems that I've had to learn how they work before I could figure out why they don't and there was no official training on it and sometimes there's not even any official information on it. And sometimes there is official information on it and it doesn't seem correct or it even seems wrong. There's some stuff coming down the pike now which I can't wrap my mind around and somebody's going to have to explain it to me at some point but uh that's neither here nor there we'll figure it out when it when the time comes obviously but for you as a technician I want you to know something else too okay if it's a job that you don't like if it's a job that you can't stand or if it's physically kicking your ass I want you to know there's other things that you can do there is a million probably more than a million different jobs out there that you can do. You don't have to be a technician you just don't have to you could certainly be an instructor an instructor would have to be I would think an instructor would have to be somebody who was probably successful as a technician maybe not if you know what you're doing and you just can't do it for some reason or another you could certainly be an instructor there's no reason why you couldn't and if you're no good at that there's always something out there's always something else you can do trust me there's nobody that does this job being an auto mechanic there's nobody who does this job who is stuck in it. If you feel like you're stuck in it you're only stuck in it in your mind being an instructor is easily one of the best ways to get out of the shop and into a profession where you're still pretty close to the shop and you're still pretty close to the guys in the shop maybe not your guys maybe new guys different guys maybe different guys every week but you're still in the field you're still doing something that maybe you love you're still working with cars you're still working with people it's obviously uh a very uh very good alternative to what you're doing okay so for those of you who think you're stuck look around this is just one of a thousand different avenues that you could go down that involves not having to work for one of these greedy corporate greedy cocksuckers who doesn't want to pay you makes you do all kinds of shit for free. All right all right that's enough for your Uncle Jimmy here I think I've probably pissed off everybody I can but I've held up all the instructors and said hey thank you very much for what you do especially the gentleman at the Atlanta training center for BMW thank you very much for being there boys I appreciate it uh I I hope to get in to see you again but I don't I don't suspect it's gonna happen. If I do I will make sure that I come around and shake all your hands. I I appreciate what you do. I appreciate what all the instructors I've ever had in the past have done for me and all of my fellow uh technicians and uh with that I'm just gonna put an end to the podcast and we do it the same way every time because consistency is one of my things and when I'm consistent I just say see ya