Train the Trainer: Building an Industry Boot Camp for Automotive Educators [THA 459]
Remarkable Results Radio Podcast
Train the Trainer: Building an Industry Boot Camp for Automotive Educators [THA 459]
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Hey guys, welcome. We have had so much off camera personal dialogue about training or education
in our industry. Before we even turn the mics on, there were some revelating points about
what you're talking about, the technology specialist, the mechanical specialist of which
a lot of people called technicians retiring out, aging out.
Then the thing that hit us was so are the educators, are the trainers. I know, Tanner,
you do some training, you have a mobile business. It's hit you especially hard because one
of the things that we'd love to talk about on this show and please hang around and listen
to the concepts that are coming out here is if we're struggling to find all of our new
young people to service the vehicles that are in our shops, where are we going to find
the young trainers that are going to come in and replace a lot of the retirement people.
So if we're having less choice, robots. Okay. AI, man.
Next. Well, that's different, but yeah, they'll have AI involved. All right. That was
a good idea. Thank you, Tanner. Thank you all for coming. Appreciate that.
So the AI thing is interesting to think about because I do feel like there are some training
companies. I'm sure in automotive using AI, but also we look at outside of the automotive
training companies, what AI is doing and people putting power points together with AI.
And I think in automotive, one of the things that's so different there is it's significantly
harder and more time consuming to put together a class. Most classes take three months,
the six months to write. If it's a four hour class, a lot of those classes will take
three months. If it's a eight hour class, some people are spending six months on that.
The time it takes for automotive versus other industries, case study documentation,
looking back through service information after you've documented the case study and making sure
that you actually do understand the system and are explaining it correctly. There's just so much
that goes into it, which I think is part of the reason why we're starting to see an Exodus
in training. And I would say at these events in particular, for the past two to three years,
we've seen less and less trainers or educators here. We've had some phenomenal trainers that have
retired or slowed down. And I just see that going forward. I know Matt had already spoke about
John a little bit saying that he was going to retire. Matt, why don't you like talk about that?
Yeah, I mean, go down the list because we were coming up with a list before we even turn the
mics on. And it's a scary, long list. Yeah, I mean, when it comes to aging out, the only thing
you can say is the second love thermal dynamics is the son of a guy that's entropy for all of you.
And then the other thought I had Tanner's talking about putting together an eight hour class,
I feel remiss if I don't mention that Scott Mann can put together an eight hour class in an hour.
So I think we have to acknowledge that. I've talked about it a few times. I don't know. And it's
specific to John, but it's all the names we could drop the amount of personal time they gave
up to do what they did for us. And the amount of credit their families deserve for allowing
the gift of their time for us. I don't know if we could ever pay it back. And so in John's case,
he's missed out on many events like he has a son who is extremely good baseball player college
level baseball player. He missed out on a lot of those games because he's developing content. He's
traveling to present that content. And it was a passion of his and I would never ever speak for
him that it wasn't worth it or it was worth it. The fact of the matter is he missed out on that
to spend time with us. And that's so many trainers and educators. It's not just the time in front
of the classroom because that's what we see. So that's what we equate value to. We don't see
the time spent in the basement in the bunker, putting together all the case studies, putting
together all the information, reading all the resources, the money spent on essay documents to come
up with the foundation to build up this idea to present to these group of professionals. We don't
get to see that. So how do you value that? I'm not sure our industry appreciates that, understands
that. When you said it takes four months to do a four hour class, my quickest thought was
four hours too long on a single subject to be able to keep the attention of the student.
And I know you're supposed to go around as the educator in front of the room and knock people
that are sleeping or not taking notes and encourage engagement. But is four hours just two, I mean
are certain subjects worthy of that even eight hours? I would say a lot of subjects are worthy of
four hours. I have always struggled with eight hour classes. Part of the problem also I feel with
the eight hour classes is it takes up a day at a training event obviously. So it's less classes
that you can take. And because of the way the industry is, especially if you're a shop doing
all makes all models, you're better off getting a wider variety of education and a short amount of
time. So taking more classes in my opinion than last. So I like four hour. I also like two hour
classes in hour long classes, hour long lunch and learn. What would be a two hour class? I have a
network diagnostics class that's two hours. I have a part one and part two each one is one hour.
Okay, so it's stuff like that. I've done other things. I've take the turbo class that's four hours
and I've cut that into two sections so that you can do two two hour classes with that. There's data
to support that though, right? There's how we learn smaller chunks is much better. And we
could probably get Paul Pate in here to speak very specifically about the learning path or George
Menchew could talk about the learning path. And now we're going to supercharge that with today's
entertainment, right? Cell phones. We've been training people to have short attentions,
bands. Oh, I think 10 seconds maybe. Yeah. So now you're trying to hold them for four hours or
eight hours. If it's just sit there and it's good to sage on the stage, they're shut down minute
and come in and out of consciousness the entire time. They're taking up a space. Yeah, that's not
talking crap about them. Like that's, but shouldn't we require as an owner or a member of a team that
is coming here, lots of classes here over the next three days and say, I've got to go back and
teach this or at least I got to give an hour up of what I feel my biggest takeaways were.
Isn't that adding value to your team, to your owner? I guess the direction I was thinking was
with so many things in our profession. I guess I don't want to go down too much of tangent,
even though that's what I do. We have a lot of stuff around here in this trade show with evidence
based. So we have DVIs. We have software that makes it easy to communicate with the client with
photos, videos, whatnot for evidence-based decision-making testing diagnostics. What do we want to
call to open up the curtains to show clients why we recommend what we are recommending? Why not
take that same philosophy into education? We're doing years of tradition unimpeded by progress.
We're doing the same thing over and over because that's what we always did, but we know it doesn't
work and it's going to get worse because of the way we are entertained nowadays further shortening
our attention spans. So we need to evolve and where Tanner is talking is instead of doing one four
hour class due to one and a half two hour classes and you'll probably get better engagement.
People will live with more information and better retention. And I always say you try to,
I'm going to use your model, learn just one thing. Any class that I mean, that's the goal. Take
something away from it. Well, if you're in an eight hour class and you only take one thing away
from it, you've wasted eight hours. If you do multiple one hour classes or multiple two hour classes
and you take one thing from each of those, now you have a lot more things that you've learned.
I think that the shorter classes offer more as far as things that you can use in your bay the
following day, I think there is more return on investment. It's a shorter time commitment,
especially if you're doing lunch and learns or things like that in an event like this. It's also
just an opportunity to get more classes in a short amount of time. And I think because of the
instructor exodus that we're seeing the shorter time commitments also make it easier to get
more instructors. And we know that so many instructors are leaving Matt just brought up George
Menchew and George is still around George and Carlos, the own AES wave. But a few years back,
George let all of us know he was pretty much going to stop presenting and spend more time with his
family. So he has stopped with George, JT, John Thorin, Scott Manna, Jim Morton just announced that
he's going to be retiring after this year. We're just seeing more and more. And then we're also
seeing people that are moving from a trainer educator role into something else. We're trying to
get our good friend Justin Morgan to jump in on this one earlier. And Justin is now working for
Pico and a lot of the BMW guys know that Justin did a ton of training prior. But Justin moving to
the job at Pico. Now he's doing a lot less training. So he's obviously still doing some stuff. But
we're just seeing a lot less of full-time instructors. I guess I would say we still have Napa who
is doing training and we still have Carco S and we still a world pack. But there's other companies
garage gurus has winded down from what I was just recently told. We saw the ATG just recently got
sold. That was put on Facebook a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully that will continue with their
training. But now there's another company involved in it. So we don't know what the outlook is.
So having our long sessions is going to make it easier to get trainers in the door to do curriculum
development if it's less of a time commitment for them. Matt, where are we going to get our young
trainers overseas? I don't know. It's a mad answer. And now he'll explain what he really
said. They're going to come. How do we give him a chance? Yeah, the problem is giving them a chance
and then, you know, it's rough to get compared to the list that we just rattled off. That's a rough
list. There's some legacy people that have really shaped the amount of effort. And then you have
John and Scott live and proximity of each other. So by happenstance, they meet each other and
they become friends and now they're better for it, not just personally but professionally the whole
bit. So where we find the people that are going to be intrigued with an idea or a thought and want
to present it and then throw themselves into the education of themselves about educating.
And that's rough. So now we as a profession have to find a means or some of these companies open
up floodgates for people that are interested to go in and learn how to put together a presentation,
learn about flow, learn about learning techniques, learn about assembling a case study and learning
from reference material or sourcing reference material, all the things that they got their own class
where maybe they fly in and there's an art and a science to presenting. Absolutely. And even though
you have, so if you're listening and you've always wanted to be a trainer, great. I want to be a
golfer. I go play 800 rounds, got to hire a coach for driving and putting in short. And I think
in my opinion, do we have any kind of training curriculum to teach trainers how to train? I mean,
do you know of anybody? Only if you were working for that entity. So if you're going to work for
an independent like John and Scott, not that I'm Eric, they somehow they had a gift of wanting to
do this, but the ability to convey the knowledge. What we can ignore the fact that I host tech talks
at vision and informing technicians here at Asta. That is a means for someone in the base
presumably, right? It's usually technicians deciding like, hey, I think I have an e-case study,
I have a neat idea. I think this is how something may work or this is how I go about a problem that
I see people struggling with. And I'm too scared. And then again, that's not a drugatory. I'm not
comfortable coming up with three hour presentation or carrying an entire class and having that pressure.
And I don't even know if I really want to do this. So here's a means to come up with a half an hour,
45 minutes, an hour presentation. I am not responsible for carrying this whole class. And now I get to
get out in front of people, do my presentation and then find out like, I really like that. And then
learn from it, right? There's people there to get feedback. And then also you have the
training entities there watching go on like, hey, that's Tanner Brandt. He's a fricking spark plug.
I'm going to go talk to him. Hey, Tanner, have you ever thought about maybe a part-time job training?
You know, we'll send you here there and everywhere. I feel like every company that did that with me
eventually regretted it, but I know my name. Hey, let's face it, your shop management system is the
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trainer goes along with the Exodus again. So CTI used to have boot camp. The people that used to
teach boot camp are no longer with CTI. They relayed off both of the people that used to run it.
So that is no longer a thing. So it's interesting to think also every single WTI CTI instructor
that is currently there that's been there for the last at least like a couple of years and
prior would have gone through boot camp. So anybody going forward has not gone through boot camp.
Okay, so they have boot camp but for so many of the other young people that want to come up that
can connect themselves with a much larger company and get a mentor. Where's the industry's boot camp
man? And just because you're doing tech talks and I think it's fabulous. Take someone bring them
up, give them an hour and let them get a feel and hey, that was great. But the commitment to the months
of writing a four hour class, everything that you're doing, you're almost driving down all the work
that you're doing in tandem. How does it help me bring content to the industry? So all the work
that you're doing that you're trying to get done in an hour or two hours is going to be maybe four
to five hours to pull it back and do something with it. It's a huge commitment. Yeah, it's a 20 hour
class that Tanner is presenting next year at Vision. So you're all welcome. It's open season.
And why not? Seriously, why not get what about John and Scott, Eric and Jim? I get my point.
I was throw some names up. Why don't we get them to create a boot camp for trains? Yeah.
They're going like that sounds like work. Well, John had shared with several of us. We asked him
about what he did to prepare and he had told us that he used to videotape himself and watch his
presentations in his basement. I think it was where he told us he didn't. That was how he had
learned. So some of us adopted that from John. There were things obviously I learned by
saying from boot camp at CTI, but again, that's no longer a thing. So anybody going forward,
the only real, I guess, training that they could get to become a trainer is via online courses
or I'm sure there's companies out there that do it. Let's not in automotive. Let's just assume
that the case study that they're passionate about is just dynamic. It's good. The world should hear
about it, but they suck as a presenter. No, that happens. I know it does. I hear. Exactly.
Yeah. And if there was this training boot camp, again, let's go back to, oh my god,
Brandon and Bob, they were on your show that we recorded here.
We is chatting with them during the recording.
The certifications of everyone, the ASE and the doctoring thing and having licensing
where is an association executive looking at a group of trainers, even someone new coming in saying,
wow, they're certified with the guru, the man of Thornton certification boot camp training.
Well, that could help ourselves get that energy of the young people going and starting from
am I crazy to be thinking this weird? No, but one of the things we had talked about before
the podcast, too, was the pay and understanding what a trainer has to get paid. Well, now we're
looking at asking people to teach other trainers. So who's going to sponsor that? There's no
sensor replacement, part replacement tools being used. So who's going to sponsor the class? There
isn't a return on investment for most companies in that case. So if we're going to do a boot camp at
a training about like this, it's going to be up to the company that's putting it on to pay for it.
You know, what are they willing to pay and is it enough to get somebody when we know that all
a sudden pay is a problem. It's like the American automotive training,
Expo providers co-op group. Incorporated. You don't write that they create that.
Hang on a minute. What was that acronym? I have to remake it up. It would not be the same.
Training your AEG. I just started to start stringing things together.
That's it. I mean, okay. I had one thought earlier. This is probably a horrible spot to drop that,
but just a tie a bow on the time thing with the class hours. How many comedians have you
ever went to go see that go have a set that's three hours? None. No, they're an hour or five,
hour 10. Right. So think about the energy required from a presenter to go three, four,
maybe even eight hours to keep class engagement some reasonable. It's unreasonable to expect.
And then with this thing here with the who's going to make this happen? I'm going to bring up
a wrestling reference, right? Professional wrestling. You have the WWE has NXT. And that was the entire
purpose of that was where is the next superstar coming from? Where is the next the rock?
Where is the next stone cold Steve Austin coming from? We can't wait for the Indies to create them.
We can't. So guess what? We're going to create a training center, a performance center,
that we're going to teach them how to work out, how to take care of their bodies.
Oh, and all by the way, how to perform, how to cut a promo, all the things.
Right. Well, okay, fine, that's all under the umbrella of the WWE. How do we do that with so
many independent circuit things where you have aster, you have vision, you have apex, whatever
the vendors are or providers are the locations are how can they come together? Even on that one
thing, how do we create a means of creating or putting in creating the best environment to produce
the next John Thornton, Scott Manna, whoever else you want to throw in that conversation?
It's a great concept. I think I have an idea. Is I'm thinking through this of who pays for it,
how does it get paid for? Tanner Brandt is sponsoring. That was so amazing, man. Wow, I had no idea
you had that kind of money. Do you have no idea? He lives on a mountain, but he owns the
hash. Oh, oh, it's like Scrooge McDuck. I thought he owned the money.
Instead of a silo, it's a mountain. I wish I had that kind of money. If I had that kind of money,
I probably would. There are people in this industry that do have that kind of money, but
one of them they're not here. Some of them might be, but one of the things that I just thought about,
I don't know why, but some of the scholarships that we've had throughout the years,
there's money in the scholarship funds and some of the scholarships we have struggled to get
people to sign up. We know that every year. Yeah, it's terrible. Yeah, some of the scholarships have
even gone away because we haven't had people apply for them. So it makes me think to take some
of the scholarship funds and say, hey, we're going to do a class each year with one of these
funds or multiple funds and pay John and Scott and George, whoever wants to be involved to do
training. I mean, that's a better use of those funds at this point, especially the ones that
have gone away because nobody applied for them. So that's a thought of where money could come
from to do a trainers scholarship with the money that goes to the legacy trainers to bring them in.
Yeah, you want to be trained by this core group of legacy trainers to be a great trainer
than pay your way here, but we're going to pay to train. I just thought of the name.
I did. Okay. Don't look at me like that. No, the name of this quick. Jetsum. Jetsum. Jetsum.
JTSM. Jetsum. What's it stand for? John Thornton's got mana. There you go.
Oh, yeah, you guys are all. What's back in the scene? This is going to be dumb. JTSM.
Boom. Done. All right. John Scott, I know you just were told to listen to this. We just recruited you.
You're now hired at your. They're recruiting. I'm begging. You know what, we're going to put
you in charge of that. We're going to put you in charge of the begging parts. Okay. I got that.
I can grovel like nobody. I know you can. And I would say too, I mean, there's two scholarships
in particular that I can think of. One that you were heavily involved with and one that I was
heavily involved with. And I would say that both of those people who's the scholarships,
the people who had passed that the scholarships are for would approve of that use, I would say.
I would agree. I think it's a brilliant move. We want to train our young people that we want
them to apply, but where are the young people that are going to go through your courses on, you know,
tech talks, yeah, that you may even go to an individual who you don't even know who's going to do
an hour at vision here, wherever else you're going to do tech talks and tell them, listen, you got
to apply for this because the best of the best is willing to train. Not that I see a lot of logistics
in the way of making this happen, but we've got to start this dialogue. Let this episode be the
dialogue starter on how to train our trains. And unfortunately, I might be able to answer that
question better in another year or two because with tech talks and now with techs informing techs
here, asked a 2025 in Raleigh, North Carolina, she popped that I'm having people approach me that I
don't know. I don't know them. That didn't happen before. I would have to recruit. I'd have to
call friends and ask, now I'm getting people approaching me saying, I would really like to do
this next year. And so in a year or two more, maybe we could see how the new breeds coming up,
the young techs sitting there going, I have this one car. I had this one car. I think I could do
that case study. I think that would be pretty neat to go up there. Well, then take this is a case
study idea. Forget about making this a full-fledged portion of a scholarship and pick some people
that we believe someone in the initials. Wow. That was great. They've got the passion. I've
spoken to them. They'd love to do this. Let's do a beta test. Yeah. Before you make the big splash
with it, find a couple of potential passionate educators. Let's teach them how to educate
and ask John and Scott or an Eric and whoever else we could get. Maybe they could each
watch John's videos, watch Scott's videos, watch Eric's, your commitment to observe and watch
and find your own style, but gain the confidence in presenting and realize that you're so in charge
of that student being engaged and the transference of this education. One of the last thing I want
to quick point out is if we can get more people involved in the tech talks thing, we also need to
make it a point to get training companies to attend to watch them because we have had some very,
very good tech talks presenters through the years. Nothing ever happened after that. They did a
presentation. It was phenomenal. Nobody picked them up as a trainer. I'm going to throw out a
couple of names. Mark Warren was always really good at watching and seeing who was doing what
and what trainers were coming up. Jeff Masterman, who is also no longer training and is retired.
He was with standard motor products. Jeff was really good about watching and seeing who was doing
what in the industry. There's been companies in the past, Chris Chesney was also really good about
that as well. Chris was phenomenal at that. He was kind of the first one to grab Brynn and our whole
group. But there was a lot of presenters of tech talks that no other companies paid attention to
that should be teaching. Jeff Masterman, but you're so right about that. Think about those are
great names. I think Orion Coimian too. I mean, all of these guys that are directors or VPs
of training in these big companies that to your point were on the outlook for our young people.
Maybe this whole resurgence needs to just maybe we need to get them all on a call and say
where are we going to replace all of these people? We're recruiting our butts off to get young
people into our industry and we've got these great venues around the country to teach and train them
and are we going to have enough trainers? Right. I think there's at least a dozen that have
retired or announced they were going to retire this year and will retire in the coming months
or coming next year. The word trainer, I don't like people know that I have this
major passion and ministry for this language shift in the industry and I want to call
our people educators and what we do with them is to be educated, continuing education,
which is what this conference is all about. It's an education conference. It's not a training
conference, an education conference. What about an audition? Just think about this for a moment.
Vision Asta tools as an association group, this education consortium, the JTSM group,
goes in front of them and says, we need one audition slot for every conference. We're developing
some people that are going to come inside the industry. Can you give us one? Unproven, but trust us,
this individual is on their way, but we need to have a live thing and then we're going to be there
and we're going to watch and we're going to videotape. Even if it's done locally, maybe it doesn't
have to be done nationally, but I'm just throwing concepts and floating ideas of how this thing would
work. I think it's the right thing to do. That was an idea for tech talks, was to try to recruit
some veteran presenters or educators to sit in a row or do matter where they sat, but to kind of
grade the present. That's so much like got enough, like what they would give me. But why?
Kind of like my scratch off is I'm not a winner, but it would be constructive criticism.
You dropped about 45 ohms, or maybe that's so critical, but you have a habit of ohms,
you fidget with your hands, you don't ever look out at the attendees, you're always fixated on
the screen reading this long. Clearly you're nervous, there's nothing wrong with that,
everybody starts out that way, but these are the mannerisms to keep an eye on and work on,
and maybe after class pull them aside and say, hey, I got a technique, take this rubber band,
put it on your wrist every time you say, give yourself a little bit of a snap.
And just try to get away from the ohms and the auras or join the
toast masters. Yeah, honestly, we've got toast masters, remarkable results, toast masters.
It's a great group. It's been going on. I think we're starting our third year. It is really
impact that so many people there on it. And of course, I'm on it, Tracy's on it, Tracy was our
president last year. And when you stop to think about, here I talked for a living, actually the
last 10 years. And I learned so much in toast masters that I was shocked. And every time there's
friends that are toast masters in a room when I give a speech, they just put me in a straight
jacket and says, oh, we're going to count your oms and oms. We're going to count your presentation
skills. We're going to count your body movement. We're going to count, we're going to look at your
eye contact to your point getting into a local toast masters or even our virtual one that meets twice
a month. Be so important. Yeah, I would agree completely. I mean, as a part of the presentation
and keeping people engaged, the certain mannerisms lend themselves well. It might be looking at people
making eye contact all about the room, not doing the certain fidgety things that I don't know
if it's even like a distraction. It's just kind of that the whole presentation itself of you as
a presenter, as you as an educator. And then, yeah, some people can keep people engaged because
they're just naturally hilarious. You know, Brinkline, I could probably watch him do 16 hours straight
because I just find he's got a direct line to my funny bone. And it's not trying to be funny. He's
not putting on a comedy show. His presentation technique. It's not levity. It's almost calming to
the point where you can, you feel good when you're around Brent. Yeah. And Bruce Amaker, if he's
kind of check out your worried that he's going to do something to you. And so fear keeps you engaged.
You know, fear is not a bad thing, especially anyone. Let's talk about getting up on stage and
making a presentation. Don't tell me that you're overconfident every time. No, of course not.
Making sure that you know your material helps your confidence. However,
anybody who teaches in front of 10 people over and over and over may become confident doing
10 people, all of a sudden, when there's 1500 people in the room, that changes things. Or even
online. Yeah. I had less issues teaching webinars online and being nervous until COVID happened. And
one of the webinars I taught was I think somewhere around 1500 people or 1600 people. And at that
point, you're going, if I screw up, there's a lot of people that are going to hear me screw up
on the other end. And also during COVID, it was people from all over the globe. So you knew that
you were going to screw up on a global platform at that point. So learning to work through those
things, learning how to prepare yourself so that you do have confidence, but also never being
overconfident and knowing that there's techniques that can help you. I read a book that was from
the people that started TEDx and they talk about if you're nervous telling the audience that you're
nervous and the audience will help to lift you up and support you so that you feel better about it.
One of the things I've always told other instructors is hang out at the back of the room when people
are coming in, introduce yourself, talk to everybody. That way, everyone feels like a friend
as they come in and you feel less nervous, less like you're talking to a stranger. You've met
some of the people in your front row and that helps you as well. Yeah, most of like Thornton's class is
he's walking around shaking hands. Yeah. Yeah, thanks for going to my class. He's done that
since I can remember. Yeah, I don't know if that's why he does it. That's why I do it. It helps me
to meet people, get a couple of names and interact with them and feel like. Hey, look at this was
a episode. I had no idea where it was going to go but I think it went to some really great places.
Lots of concepts thrown in here and if you're on the sidelines, feel passionate about training. Listen
to this thing again. Reach out to Matt or Tanner. Me. You want to be in Toastmasters. Remarkable
results stop. Biz forward slash Toastmasters. I'll get you to the Toastmasters site. You can come
anytime. You don't even have to join. Just come in and hang out and see what it's about. I think
we may have stumbled upon something here that brings light to the educator shortage that if we're
short 100, 200,000 young people or call plain old specialists in the base in the next two or three
years, who's going to teach them Google Google AI or YouTube Gemini or something. Yeah, and maybe
not necessarily all in the right way. The one I YouTube honestly could be a good platform to put
together some instructor training on there so people could watch it. That's not about. But there's
all kinds of that out there. But I think specifically the person in the room is a unique person
that we're teaching to. They're coming from all walks of life with all different kinds of
experience and education, pay plans, years in. It's not like I'm going to go to training to teach
how to speak at a convention. It's not about learning communication skills as much as it is
about knowledge transfer in our business because it's all high tech. And we have to have individualized
training programs or different means of teaching different people. I'm pretty lucky if I read it or
see it, I can do it. That's not many people. No, not at all. But honestly, that's not putting myself
over. It's just a reality. Other, most of us hands on doing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're not doing that
virtually. Or I guess you can. It's a lot of hurdles and then a lot of hurdles. Hardly worth mentioning.
You were born with a magic brain. Yeah. That's what my mom said.
She said she asked you to shovel the driveway. Our mile long driveway. I had to shovel that.
Tanner, final word. I hope that this dialogue has given some of you some ideas to potentially
help us move forward with it. And maybe some of the companies putting on the conferences will
consider what I brought up about scholarships and consider helping move this idea forward.
They trained the trainer's scholarship. Wow. Bad anything. Anything else?
I mean, seriously, though, I think we covered a lot of really interesting ideas that we should follow
up with. Thank you for people to follow up and change. That's what it does. All the guys that we
mentioned, John, Scott, George, Jeff masterman, all of those guys are now going to have to step up. Yep.
I mean, all right. Please help. Look everyone. Thank you for listening. All kinds of great podcasts on
the automotive repair podcast network. Thanks. Thanks for being on board to listen and learn from the
premier automotive repair business podcast, remarkable results radio. Get your episodic education on the
ARPN Listing app at automotive repair podcast network dot com. Also enjoy the podcast on our
Carm Capriotto YouTube channel. Carm is all for advancing the professional automotive service
industry. Until next time.
About this episode
A deep dive into the challenges facing automotive education, particularly the shortage of trainers as many experienced educators retire. The discussion highlights the need for a structured boot camp to train new instructors, emphasizing the time-consuming nature of creating effective training programs. Guests share insights on the importance of shorter, more engaging classes to cater to modern attention spans and the potential role of AI in education. The episode concludes with a call to action for industry leaders to invest in training the next generation of educators.
Original notes
Thanks to our Partners, NAPA TRACS, Today's Class, KUKUI, and Pit Crew Loyalty
Watch Full Video Episode
The automotive industry faces a growing crisis: as veteran trainers and educators retire, there’s no clear path for the next generation to replace them. Creating quality training is time-intensive — often taking months to develop just one class — and the personal sacrifices required have deterred many from stepping up.
This episode explores the urgent need to evolve automotive education, from rethinking long-form classes to developing shorter, high-impact sessions that better fit today’s learning styles. At the heart of the conversation is a proposed solution: an industry “Trainer Boot Camp” designed to teach aspiring educators not only technical knowledge but also the art of presentation — structure, flow, delivery, and audience engagement.
Another proposed solution is the creation of a Train the Trainers Scholarship to fund legacy educators like John Thornton and Scot Manna to design and lead this new initiative. Modeled after the WWE’s NXT Performance Center, the idea is to proactively cultivate new education “superstars” rather than waiting for them to appear on their own.
This is more than a conversation about teaching — it’s a call to action to preserve and reinvent the future of automotive education before the knowledge gap becomes irreversible.
Recorded Live at ASTA 2025 https://astausa.org/pages/asta-expoMatt Fanslow, Riverside Automotive, Red Wing, MN, Diagnosing the Aftermarket A to Z Podcast
Tanner Brandt, Autodiag Clinic
Thanks to our Partner, NAPA TRACS NAPA TRACS will move your shop into the SMS fast lane with onsite training and six days a week of support and local representation. Find NAPA TRACS on the Web at http://napatracs.com/ Thanks to our Partner, Today's Class Optimize training with Today's Class: In just 5 minutes daily, boost knowledge retention and improve team performance. Find Today's Class on the web at https://www.todaysclass.com/ Thanks to our Partner, KUKUI Stop juggling multiple marketing tools. KUKUI’s integrated platform delivers 4x better website conversions, automated follow-up, and real-time ROI tracking. Get industry-leading customer support with KUKUI at https://www.kukui.com/ Thanks to our Partner, Pit Crew Loyalty You’re probably tired of chasing new customers who never return. We understand. Pit Crew Loyalty ends the one-and-done cycle, turning first visits into lasting, reliable revenue at https://www.pitcrewloyalty.com/ Connect with the Podcast: - Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RemarkableResultsRadioPodcast/ - Join Our Virtual Toastmasters Club:
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