Good Tech Vs. Good Employee
Written by: Ian Clayton
Edited by: Merielle Donaldson
At the beginning stages of your career, you will not be the best technician in the shop (or at least you shouldn’t be - if you are, you’re in the wrong shop). But on your way to becoming a better technician you can prove to your employer that you have value by being a good employee. And yes, there is a big difference between the two. You can be a beginner technician and a good employee and provide just as much value to your employer as someone who is a great technician and a horrible employee. Below are the traits of a good employee as provided to me by ChatGPT, and a few that I added on my own.
Traits of a good employee:
1) Punctuality/Reliability: This, in my opinion, is the most important trait you can have in your career and in life. Your punctuality shows a respect for not only your employer but for others as well. When you show up late to something you are demonstrating a disrespect for someone else’s time (our most valuable resource in life). The boss will notice who is here on time and who is late, who stays a few minutes extra and who punches out exactly at quitting time. It is my personal observation that people who are late are usually consistently late, tend to have poor time management skills, and tend to be incredibly disorganized. A few extra minutes here and there adds to the paycheck, but it also adds to the time that you have hands on vehicles, which will contribute to you becoming a better tech. Show up on time!
2) Communication Skills: This one is extremely important in our industry. You need to have good communication with your service writer, service manager, and/or shop foreman, who in turn need to have good communication with the customer. However, this is not limited to communication about issues with customers’ vehicles. Communication skills include conversations about everything related to your employment and the work that you are doing on a daily basis. If you feel like a job is over your head, you need to communicate that; if you feel like you are ready for more challenging work, then you need to talk with someone about that as well. This is something that I have struggled with in my career so far and is something I wish I had done better with in the past by learning from my mistakes and becoming a good communicator. This is not just a skill for your professional career but a skill for life - try being married and you will quickly realize that not communicating well is a recipe for failure.
3) Adaptability: This one is crucial as a new technician; every day you will be learning something new or encountering an unfamiliar situation. I continue to learn even after almost five years of working in this industry, and just the other day I had to. Acquiring new skills and adapting to situations is a necessity in our field - there are hundreds of different vehicles with a multitude of different setups and they all require different skills to be worked on. Stay flexible (both physically and mentally)!
4) Initiative: The biggest thing you can do in this category as a new technician is to seek out opportunities for improvement. But remember to communicate with your supervisor that this is something new for you, making sure that there is the understanding that you may take longer and that help may be needed. Growth in life and as a technician will not come from doing things that you are comfortable with; your supervisor will continue to give you the tasks that you are comfortable with because they are the matters at which you will produce the best times. It is on you to communicate and take the initiative to become a better technician.
5) Teamwork: “A rising tide lifts all ships.” You get the idea. Helping the team and the shop grow will help you grow your skills as a technician and improve your reputation as a quality employee. Your boss would rather have a newer technician who is slower and makes mistakes but is easy to teach and get along with than a technician who can do great work but is hard to deal with. The latter brings down the energy of the whole shop and is a headache for everyone in the building. Just remember you are not the only person in the building - you are part of a team, you win and lose as a team, and the better the shop is doing, the more your skills will grow and flourish. Don’t let frustration with a tough job or the details of unnecessary paperwork come out in the form of a bad attitude to those around you. “You can be anything you want in life, just don’t be an asshole.”
6) Dependability and Accountability: This is just a crucial one in life in general as well as a critical part of becoming the best technician you can. For this I will recommend one of the most important books I have read: Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Admit when you make mistakes and don’t make excuses; just own up to it and don’t let it happen again. This accountability for your actions will build trust between you and your managers - not so much trust in your abilities but trust in your word. Your abilities will grow over time, but if your managers can’t trust you and your character then your employment at a shop will be considerably more difficult. Without this trust, you will not be given the chance to grow your skills because your managers will not give more difficult jobs to someone who they can’t trust as a person.
7) Professionalism: As much fun as it may be to redline the forklift around the parking lot (personal failure), it’s not the professional thing to do. Equipment is already expensive, don’t add to your employers’ expenses through unprofessional or reckless behavior. Maintaining your professionalism is a trait that will lead to an increase in your reputation as a person and will eventually lead to increasing your skills as a technician. I feel like this encompasses all the things we have talked about before this, but if there is one thing that ChatGPT is good for it is incredibly generic information.
8) Time Management: This is an extremely crucial task in our industry (I will save the rant about our industries incredibly flawed billing system for another day). We all know how we get paid or our shop gets paid, i.e. book rate. Our employers/you (depending on your pay structure) can only bill so much for a given task which means that you need to be extremely efficient at managing your time. If you spend far more time on a project than the book rate has assigned to it, you and the shop are losing money. The skills to complete those jobs more efficiently and “beat the book” will come with time, but the best thing you can do as a new technician is not waste time. This can mean looking at the service information before starting a new task so you’re not removing things that don’t need to be removed, not getting into an overly involved conversation with a co-worker, and staying organized. Stay focused on the job, stay focused on what you are supposed to be doing, and eliminate as many distractions as you can.
9) Continuous Learning: This is just a byproduct of the job at the early stages of your career and just happens by showing up to work every day, as I mentioned above. However, it can and should go beyond that. This can look like attending seminars when they are available, getting that ASE certification, or showing the initiative to take on more difficult tasks as I mentioned earlier. If you want to know my thoughts on getting your ASE certifications see my post on that, but the truth is that increasing your knowledge (especially in the early stages of your career) is crucial and showing your employer that you are willing to take the initiative to do so will make you a better employee.
10) Resilience: See my last post on failure in our industry. Trust me when I say that it will happen, it has happened to me several times and will probably happen several more. But I’m not going to become a better technician or employee if I quit or stop trying to get better, and neither will you. An important part of this resilience is communication and dependability/accountability. When you do fail communicate with your manager that you have made a mistake, communicate that you didn’t know how to do something and now you do. The more resilient you are in this industry the better an employee you will become and a better technician you will become in the process.
There is a reason that ChatGPT generated the list of traits above for “what makes a good employee” - they apply broadly to people in all industries and occupations. Moreover, there is a lot of crossover between what makes a good employee and what makes a good person - that respect for others’ time, willingness to learn and adapt, teamwork, determination, and the continuous urge to grow and become the best version of oneself. Just remember that your skills as a technician will grow over time but you can be a good employee from the second you walk in the door.