Seven Deadly Sins of Solar Training
Problem 1: One-Size-Fits-All Instruction
“An engineer, a project manager, and a salesperson walk into a conference room.” Sounds like the beginning of a joke, and it kind of is. The idea that you can put your team of unique people with unique roles and strengths into the same conference room, then try to teach them the same thing in exactly the same way, is absurd.
You are almost guaranteed to lose someone halfway through because a topic was way over their head and they never recovered. Someone else is fighting the urge to doze off because they could have taught literally everything that’s been discussed. Fairly early on, most people in the room started checking their email, (or compulsively thinking about checking their email if they weren’t allowed to bring their laptops).
“Thou shalt not waste my time” could be the first commandment at many busy, growing solar companies. Yet training programs usually waste tons of time by failing to ask a simple question - what do you already know? If you know the answers to that simple question, you can teach them something else (or just get them back to the work of transforming our energy system!)
A primary goal of any training program should be to upskill each member of your team in as little time as possible. Failing to prioritize this goal makes training less effective, (because it fails to focus on what matters), makes learners less effective, (because they lose motivation when they feel like the training is a waste of their time), and costs the company more money in the long-run (because it takes away from the time your employees use to create value for the company).
However, it’s easy to understand why the one-size-fits-all problem persists. Creating one curriculum for everybody costs much less than creating a personalized curriculum for each person on your team. In this series, we’ll talk about how the Generation Solar team is working to streamline the creation of custom curricula, providing personalization at a fraction of the cost of building curriculum for each team member from the ground up. Additionally, we’ll cover where we think group learning fits into a training program, (group problem solving, peer-instruction, and collaborative practice) and where it doesn’t work (lectures and information delivery).
Problem 2: Building skill silos instead of “T-Shaped” cross-training
Your engineer says something on a call that scares off a client, and you lose the deal. Your sales guy signs a contract based on an unrealistic project schedule. Your project manager approves a field team substitution request that creates a code compliance issue, requiring substantial rework and a major delay before an inspector will sign off. I’ve seen all three happen more than once, and the root cause of all three very costly mistakes is a failure to properly scope training.
In the solar industry, we often imagine that we can make our developers, installers, and EPCs function like perfect factory assembly lines, with everyone doing their individual part without having to worry about what’s happening up and down the line. But that’s a pipe dream. We rarely build the same thing twice - different land, different roof, different permitting requirements, different equipment, different client. Compared to an assembly line product, each solar project is infinitely more complex, dynamic, and unique. Everyone on your team needs to understand the implications of their choices for other team members. They need the skills to improvise and adapt when things don’t go to plan. They need to be comfortable reviewing important documents before they’re put in front of a client, or a permit office, or a subcontractor. If your team doesn’t have a foundational level of competence in every aspect of solar (from origination to asset management), more balls will be dropped, handoffs will be sloppier, and inter-departmental tension (instead of appreciation) will be inevitable.
Yet in effect, most solar training programs (including self-selected courses) end up focusing on teaching engineers about engineering, sales teams about sales techniques, project managers about contracting, etc. Effective training allows your experts to go deeper in their expertise, but as importantly, provides everyone with foundational knowledge in other disciplines.
The challenge here is defining what knowledge is foundational and what is specialized, so that your team isn’t spending their whole career in a classroom. Should your project managers and origination team be able to calculate vDrop for conductors from scratch with a pen and pencil? Probably not. Should they know that voltage drop might be an issue on a long circuit and the possible approaches to mitigate the issue? We’d say yes. In a future post, we’ll talk about our approach to drawing this line, which includes problem-centric curriculum definition, and building a “T Shaped” skill set, which combines cross-training and strategic depth to create more robust teams.
Problem 3: Measuring Progress using Compliance Instead of Competence
A person sees a drunk man crawling around on his hands and knees, looking at the sidewalk under a streetlamp. She stops to ask him if he’s ok. He replies “Yes, I just lost my keys.” She begins to help him look, but after a few minutes, begins to have doubts.
“Are you sure you lost your keys here?” she asks.
“No, I lost them in the park,” he replies.
“Why are you looking here then?” she asks.
“It’s the only place with any light,” replies the drunk.
As leaders, we mistakenly give importance to certain elements of our business simply because they’re easy to measure. It’s understandable hard it is to keep track of what’s really going on. But sometimes, we’re just drunks crawling around a light post. It’s often worth the hard work to examine areas where the real problems lie, hidden in areas where metrics are harder to generate.
Don’t get me wrong - as a management consultant, metrics and data are often the air that I breathe, and most companies would benefit from more data, not less. But just because we’re able to measure something doesn’t make it the right metric.
[Hours X (Butts + Seats)] is a terrible formula for estimating learning outcomes.
Hours-based certs are easy to administer, and certainly a good start, but outcomes vary. It’s entirely possible to show up for the instructional hours while looking at social media in another browser tab and come away without learning anything other than what Beyoncé is up to this week.
But if the status quo method of measuring training effectiveness is, well, not that effective, what can we do instead? At Generation Solar, we’ve been experimenting with alternative approaches to assess individual baselines and skill development as a result of training. More on that in a future blog post!
Problem 4: Failing to Focus on Motivation
If access to information was all that anyone needed in order to learn, we’d all be polymath super-geniuses. In the Information Era, everyone has access to more information than they could ever need. But if anything, the opposite seems to be true. And that’s partly because people only learn what they really want to learn.
This sounds a little basic, and it is, yet we ignore this fundamental fact, often assigning a learning curriculum to teams without any conversation. In all of education/psychology of learning research, this is probably the single most important and best supported research finding: you cannot force knowledge into people’s brains. They have to truly want to learn it.
Unfortunately, with many required training programs, the main motivation can be summarized as “I want to finish this annoying training so that I can do something other than this annoying training.” Another very common motivation is “I want to complete this training/certification/etc. so I can look better to my bosses and make more money at some point.”
The research is clear - neither of these commonly found motivations is likely to be sufficient to drive the development of challenging new skills. People need to tap deep internal resources necessary for intellectual transformations - that means training has to start by connecting to what they care about, their personal identity, and be something they look forward to (in other words, fun matters).
We’ll talk about some approaches for tapping into deeper, personal, intrinsic motivations later in this series, but the short story is that building relationships and treating the professional as a full person are indispensable to training outcomes.
Problem 5: Promoting Cramming
Imagine going to the gym once a year, working out until you can’t stand, and then hobbling out to your car, exhausted but happy that you don’t have to work out for another year. Ridiculous, of course, but that’s effectively how we approach professional training.
Courses, webinars, and workshops generally take place over a short period of time, are highly intense, and include little to no followup.
Unfortunately, this runs directly contrary to what we know about how people actually learn. The good news is that our brains are highly efficient learning machines, and can often learn a lot fairly quickly in the right context. The bad news is that our brains are almost equally efficient forgetting machines. Unless we are prompted to recall and use the knowledge we acquire, 90% of it will be forgotten within a few months.
We know from decades of research that the way to make facts stick long-term is to plan for ongoing review from day one. Otherwise, our brains simply prune those synaptic connections to make space for something more relevant. Great training programs can be frontloaded, but require ongoing follow-ups that most industry-standard training programs lack.
How much follow up is needed to keep the knowledge and skills fresh? How much would just be an unnecessary distraction? Are there alternatives to formal follow-up exercises that can be built into every day work? We’ll explore our methods for finding the sweet spots for what researchers call “spaced repetition” later in this series.
Problem 6: Most Training Content is WAY Too Passive
In addition to tapping into individual motivation, great training generally requires people to actually do something. Maybe one day we’ll hook into the Matrix for a few minutes and come out knowing kung-fu, but that day is not today, and passively watching videos online doesn’t teach much of anything unless it’s quickly paired with actions that turn theory into practice.
It’s here that the phrase “there’s no substitute for experience” has more than a grain of truth. No amount of passive educational content is going to be an effective substitute for actively solving problems. However, there are lots of ways to pair content with experiential learning so that people can learn by doing in no-risk environments (where they can make mistakes without costing the company countless dollars). We’ll review some of Generation Solar’s preferred active engagement methods like simulations, games, creative prompts, quizzes, case studies, and more in a future post.
Problem 7: Emphasizing Right Answers Instead of Judgment, Values, and Tradeoffs
In the messy real world, we rarely get to work on problems with “right” answers. Yet most training programs assume that the goal is enabling trainees to arrive at a “correct” solution.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want an engineer to tell me that it’s a subjective judgment call as to how many amps can be safely carried by inverter output conductors if we use #4 AWG THHN current-carrying conductors run in 2 inch Sch. 40 PVC conduit with two other inverters sharing the same pipe. There are some answers that are more correct than others! It’s important that we train those core skills, and traditional training is pretty good at teaching this type of subject matter.
But the reality is that even in that very “objective” example, that engineer might have to debate an inspector reviewing the plans, or worse, showing up at the end of the job with an ax to grind. Is your junior engineer ready to defend their assumptions about ambient high temperature and therefore conductor derate, and therefore whether half the wires in the site need to be pulled out of conduit and re-installed, at great cost to your company? Are they able to foresee a possible conflict and make the right call in the first place? The most seemingly “objective” question can easily turn into a question of judgment and understanding tradeoffs when reality gets a hold of it.
Bottom line is that working in the real world is messy, and training needs to accommodate the messiness to be truly valuable. There are many elements of our work where we have to make judgment calls. Contrary to common wisdom, it is possible to train the judgment that we need on the job... yet most training programs don’t.
We at Generation Solar think judgment matters a lot for our solar clients, and we think that training judgment may be the “special sauce” to any great training approach. We’ll talk a lot about this point in future blog posts. Sneak preview: good judgment includes understanding the tradeoffs involved in a decision and appropriately weighing relevant values. A bad judgment call fails to do one or both of these.
What are your growing pains?
If any of this resonates, we’d love to hear from you - feel free to comment below. If you’d like to hear more about our solutions to the problems we’ve outlined in this post, we’ve made it easy to sign up for new posts with our once a week (or less) email newsletter. If you’d like to discuss options for training your team, please email info@generationsolar.us for a free initial consultation.
