Written by Megan Hamilton
June 7, 2023
It’s smart to calculate the ROI of BuildWitt Training before you buy. But once you take the plunge, how will you know it’s working?
After all, there’s a huge difference between training that looks good on paper and training that works for your people.
Today, we’ll cover 12 ways our customers know BuildWitt Training works for them, so you can get a better idea of how it can work for you, too.
Here’s a quick summary:
1. You don't have to repeat information
Raise your hand if you like repeating yourself to others. Anybody? Nope!
Our customers are excited about BuildWitt Training because leaders can let crew members repeat training at their own pace—without taking up the leader’s time.
With BuildWitt Training, leaders spend less time reminding people to grab the right tools or put the ladder in the right place. Instead, your team will learn these common sense principles from the app.
Joe Sylvester of Bachtel Excavating says, “That’s safety right there. That's the growth you're looking for, to not have to remind the guy.”
Nick Pickrel adds that his leadership team at Kingsway Services can invest in BuildWitt Training once—and then use it to teach every person in the company as many times as they need.
“So often, you guys are doing the training anyhow; you're just doing it 50 times,” he points out, adding that, “[Now] we've captured it, you know? We don't have to do it 50 times.”
2. The whole team grows
BuildWitt Training isn’t just for young workers and rookies. It’s for the whole team.
Joe explains, “If it's working, we should start seeing . . . some of our more experienced guys start to really adopt [these principles]. We have some older guys who are newer; they have just come to this company. So I think it would be good to see them grow.”
Those experienced workers should start helping the younger crew members and foremen more as they learn from BuildWitt Training.
And everybody should grow in terms of safety, interpersonal skills, and technical and industry knowledge.
3. People train on their own
Crew members learn the most when leaders empower them to take ownership of their training—so it’s important to have something available for your go-getters.
With BuildWitt Training, anyone who has a user license can view as much content as they want, as many times as they want. And it won’t cost you anything extra.
Our customers have seen employees complete hundreds of lessons that weren’t even assigned to them, simply because they want to learn.
Travis suggests tracking voluntary training to help measure your team’s growth. “So you know, paying attention to those numbers of, say, Joe completed 10 courses and Mike completed 20,” he explains.
Then you know the Joes in your company are completing the required training, and you can thank them for that. And you can encourage the Mikes of your company to keep going above and beyond to accelerate their growth.
4. People can see their career paths
Career paths can be pretty murky in the Dirt World. Newcomers to the industry especially may not know how to build the career they want.
That’s why Travis McLeod says, “BuildWitt Training is a good way to show them that there is the opportunity to advance here at Birnam Excavating.”
BuildWitt Training can do the same thing at your company, too. Ask your people where they want to go in their careers, then use the app to help them get there.
Travis explains, “Ask them like, ‘Hey, you're an operator now. Do you want to be a foreman one day? Do you want to be a site supervisor?’ If so, okay . . . do some of these courses.”
Or, you can do what Nick’s team does at Kingsway. Once leadership slates somebody for a new role, they put together a roadmap in BuildWitt Training to help that person learn the skills they need.
In short, you want to use BuildWitt Training to help people find and follow their career paths.
Visit our course catalog to see training we offer for specific careers.
5. People say it's working
This may seem obvious, but our customers know BuildWitt Training works because their people say so.
Sometimes people volunteer that information, and sometimes our customers ask for it.
“We're a smaller company, so I can meet with the guys about their training, and we can get their feedback,” Joe says.
He adds that this doesn’t take long: “It's a thing we can talk about for five minutes at a safety meeting: ‘Hey, what do you guys think? What's up? What's your feedback to me? What can I send back to BuildWitt for them to improve?’"
So far, Joe is pleased with the results. Asking for feedback has increased his employees’ willingness to use the training software, and try to understand what it’s all about—because they know their opinion of the training matters.
“The guys have really dug into it,” Joe notes.
6. Foreman send people to BuildWitt Training
People often become foremen because they’re good at what they did before, not because they’re good teachers.
Yet foremen are expected to spend a large amount of time teaching crew members technical and soft skills. Talk about unfair! These leaders aren’t prepared to train others, which sets them and their crews up to fail.
You’ll know BuildWitt Training works for your team when field supervisors start using it as a resource to train their crews better.
“We've got a foreman . . . [who’s] not the greatest trainer. Well, BuildWitt Training can help them out. Hopefully, he could just tell them, ‘Hey, go watch this video,’” explains Ryan Delozier of Geotex.
7. Your custom content takes off
In addition to 800+ preloaded lessons in our content library, you can create and upload unlimited custom content in BuildWitt Training.
That way, you can add any training content that’s specific to your company—whether you want to make a branded version of a video we already created or you want to cover a topic we haven’t touched on yet.
The more custom content you upload, the more resources your team has to grow.
“I think what's great about BuildWitt is the in-house product we can create to help with that growth,” Joe says.
In fact, you can help gauge your success with BuildWitt Training by how much people use your company’s custom content—and how much better those people perform on the job.
8. You see improvement across multiple areas
With BuildWitt Training, your people get education in multiple areas, including:
- Industry knowledge for heavy civil, aggregate, and paving
- Safety basics
- Leadership and soft skills
- Technical skills
So as your team completes more lessons, you should see improvement across a wide range of areas, such as fewer safety incidents, better communication between the field and office, increased productivity, lower turnover, and fewer crew mistakes.
Travis points out, “The main thing with this program is just being able to have that internal growth within the company, improve health and safety, improve training, improve retention. I think it all comes from giving more knowledge to our employees.”
9. Your people develop personally
Training for job and technical skills is necessary. It keeps people safe and helps them stay productive—which is good. And if that’s where you stop, your business will be better.
But what about your people?
You want them to grow professionally and personally. That’s why BuildWitt Training is helping your people be their best with learning plans that focus on personal growth—like managing money and improving mental health.
As Nick puts it, “You know, if we're a stepping stone to your bright and better future, great. But we want you to feel like, ‘I can have a family, I can have a life, and I can keep moving up in my career here.’”
In other words, balanced lifestyles and motivated attitudes are a mark of people's success with BuildWitt Training.
10. Skills go beyond the basics
Working in the Dirt World means lifelong learning.
Whether someone has been on the job for 20 minutes or 20 years, there’s always a new task to do, role to try, technology to master, or process to use.
So it’s important to get your people to move past the basics and learn more in-depth skills and industry knowledge.
Mickey St. Clair says, “We'd like to take a basic person—someone who knows basically mowing their yard, doing landscaping at the house, that kind of stuff—and make them into the person we want them to be. We want to mold them into the work that we complete, from running excavators or skid steers to larger excavators and dredging to full-scale clearing and conversion jobs.”
For Mickey’s team at Dragonfly Pond Works, BuildWitt Training is helping them move past the basics to handle more intense tasks.
11. Onboarding improves
You’ve got a lot of work to do, and you need to get new hires producing as quickly as possible.
Turnkey onboarding with BuildWitt Training makes ramping up new hires a lot easier. You can choose from preloaded learning plans that teach them the basics of the industry, safety, and their jobs so they’re prepared to step onto the jobsite and start producing.
Joe says he hopes to see Bachtel’s new hires continue to grow and get up to speed faster as the company uses BuildWitt Training to help with onboarding more.
Ideally, if you use BuildWitt Training for onboarding, you should see recent new hires learn what’s expected of them and start producing quality work faster than past new hires.
12. Profitability increases
Training helps increase profitability in several key ways.
First, it increases productivity and efficiency. Well-trained crews simply get more work done faster, and more completed projects mean more money in the bank.
Second, it reduces costs that cut into your profits. Training cuts down on crew mistakes, safety issues, machine downtime, and high turnover. So you’ll get to keep the money you used to spend fixing these problems.
If BuildWitt Training is your training program of choice, then you should be able to clearly attribute financial gain to it.
As Ryan puts it, “We invest in our people. The better they do their jobs, the more money we make in theory. And then everybody benefits from that—not just an owner or a board. Everybody splits that shared value. I think the stock in the company jumps right there.”
Takeaways
Before you buy any training software, it’s important to know what to watch for so you can determine how well it’s working (or not) for your team.
Let’s recap the 12 ways our customers know BuildWitt Training works—and how you can too:
- You repeat less information
- The whole team grows
- People train on their own
- People can see their career paths
- People say it’s working
- Foremen send people to BuildWitt Training
- Your custom content takes off
- You see improvement across multiple areas
- Your people develop personally
- Skills go beyond the basics
- Onboarding improves
- Profitability increases
Learn more about how companies of all different sizes are succeeding and solving their biggest problems with BuildWitt Training.