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Teaching Specific Skills With BuildWitt Training

Teaching Specific Skills With BuildWitt Training_Featured

Teaching your crew members specific skills is one of the surest ways to keep them safe and grow your business. 

BuildWitt Training gives your crew the necessary, task-specific training to address critical growing pains in your business, like developing leaders and being too busy for all-day learning sessions.

Before we dive into how BuildWitt Training can help, let’s briefly discuss why task-specific training and finding the right program are so important.

What is task-specific training?

Task-specific training teaches your crew members the skills they need to be the best at what they do

Task-specific training is crucial because it teaches crew members the skills they need to do their jobs. Unlike generic, company-wide training, skill training is tailored to a crew member’s specific role.

For example, operators learn things like how to do machine walkarounds and run a motor grader. Laborers learn about staying safe on the ground and what PPE to wear. Pipelayers learn how to build trench boxes. And on it goes.

To sum it up, task-specific training teaches your crew members the skills they need to be the best at what they do.

What are the benefits of task-specific training?

Task-specific training may seem too simple or obvious to bother with. That’s why many companies let their employees figure things out on the job, with minimal guidance from a foreman or more experienced crew member.

That’s a poor business strategy. The Dirt World is full of complex jobs that require high skill levels. Not teaching crew members how to do the tasks of the trade sets them—and your business—up to fail. They’re more likely to get hurt, make mistakes that cost you time and money, have machine downtime, and be less productive.

Teaching specific skills changes everything. Check out the top five benefits:

Why use BuildWitt Training to teach specific skills?

A task-specific training program should sound pretty good right now. But why use BuildWitt Training?

This software is made by Dirt World experts for the Dirt World. And it’s the only training program available that’s designed to address four critical growing pains in construction and extraction businesses: developing leaders, creating growth opportunities, getting the right content, and being too geographically spread out (or too busy) for traditional training.

Made by Dirt World experts for the Dirt World

Developing leaders

Developing Leaders

Good leaders are key to growing your business. They increase retention, because crew members want to work for them. And they help with recruiting, because potential hires want to join a crew where they know they’ll get respect.

But what if nobody’s ready to lead? Maybe you’ve got a bunch of crew members who are nearing retirement and a bunch who are in their early 20s, but you don’t have many people in the middle. Who’s going to be your next foreman?

Or maybe you want to expand from one crew to two—but you need enough people who know what they’re doing to keep the first crew going and help lead the new crew.

Lots of people want to be in those leadership positions, but they don’t know what it takes to be a true leader. Becoming a field supervisor or foreman means taking on responsibilities that are totally different than being a crew member. And the need for soft skills and finesse goes up, too.

Sure, you could let new leaders muddle through it alone—but why? Leadership training is as important as safety training. (In fact, it’s one of the best ways to keep people safe on the jobsite.)

BuildWitt Training gives new and aspiring leaders an engaging way to learn the day-to-day technical tasks and—more importantly—to develop the soft skills they’ll need to be truly effective leaders.

It can also help your current leaders work better together. Maybe you’ve got two people struggling to get along, or your field supervisors don’t trust the project managers you hired from outside the company. If there’s an issue you need to address, you can assign a couple short videos for people to watch during downtime on the job. They can then use that training to help resolve their differences.

Completing BuildWitt Training’s leadership course together can help leaders gel through mutual respect and open communication. In that regard, this training is really versatile: it helps you strengthen your current leaders and build up strong future leaders.

Creating growth opportunities

reating growth opportunities

Every crew has people who want to learn, grow, and move up. BuildWitt Training gives them a chance to show initiative by learning on their own. And it gives you a metric to see who’s hungry for growth and who’s not. Basically, it shows you who your rockstars are.

Some people have gotten so into BuildWitt Training that they watch extra videos and even get a little competitive with their coworkers about who can be the biggest expert. If you assign somebody 10 lessons in a month but they watch 50, send them a message. Let them know you see and appreciate their desire to learn.

Maybe you even start building that person up to be a leader. You can tell them, “Hey, you’re a backhoe operator now. If you want to be a field supervisor one day, do some of these courses over here.”

BuildWitt Training offers a great starting point for brand-new people, too. You can take people who don’t know much about the work or the industry and plug them into this training app to learn about it. And if anyone—new or otherwise—has trouble with a topic, you don’t have to repeat yourself 10 times. You can teach them, then say, “Here, watch this video, and come see me if you still have questions.”

This training program is about more than just making money or trying not to get people hurt. Essentially, it’s an individual growth app. It’s a way for people to build their skills, build their character, and figure out what they want to do in the industry. It’s a way for them to grow continuously—and for you to cultivate workers who will help your company grow.

Getting the right content

Getting the right content

If you’re like most business leaders, you don’t have time to create a stellar training program from scratch—you’re busy running a company, after all. You need a plug-and-play training app that’s ready to go. But you still need custom content that’s tailored to your business, too.

BuildWitt Training offers the best of both worlds. The preloaded content library contains hundreds of training videos. And since they’re all microlearning lessons that take just a few minutes to watch, they’re easy for crew members to digest.

However, you’re not limited to just our videos. You can also create and upload your own custom training content at no extra cost. So if your grading practices are different than ours, no worries—you can teach your crew to do things your way. That goes for anything on the job, from working with certain chemicals to using your company’s timeclock.

You can even use BuildWitt Training to relay company policies and documents to your employees, including the ones who don’t check their emails—so there’s no excuse for anyone to miss important information.

Maybe you’ve tried to create your own training library in the past, but you couldn’t find the right platform. Or you didn’t have the time to make all the content you needed.

With BuildWitt Training, your crew members will have a one-stop shop for their training needs, and there’s no rush. You can add your own material any time. Who knows—maybe you’ll even create a content library that matches the amount of preloaded content!

Being too geographically spread out—or too busy—for traditional training

geographically spread ou

As your company grows, you’ll find yourself in situations where jobsites may be hundreds of miles apart. You physically can’t haul everyone into a training room for a half-day session anymore. Pockets of in-person sessions lose the value of getting the whole team together for training, but it can be hard to get everyone to connect and engage in remote learning sessions.

BuildWitt Training gives you a platform that crews can access anywhere—so it works great for teams that are spread out. Crew members can complete their training individually or as part of local or virtual groups.

It’s also much more efficient than traditional training. Pulling everybody in from the field for a training day—even if it’s just once a quarter—is difficult, because you’re paying people to not make the company any money. But with BuildWitt Training, you can send out a five-minute video during the day and say, “Hey, I need everybody to stop and watch this.” It's simple, short, and straightforward. Nobody has to drive all the way to the shop, sit in a room, or figure out a time schedule.

So even if your crew isn’t spread out yet, BuildWitt Training can still be a great way to save time and train more regularly. You can even make it competitive if you want and reward people who complete the most training or train most consistently.

What types of task-specific training does BuildWitt Training offer?

type of task-specific training does buildwitt

BuildWitt Training offers task-specific training for five roles. You can learn what each course includes here. In the meantime, here’s an overview of the roles it covers:

  • Foreman and field supervisor
  • Laborer
  • Pipelayer
  • Grade checker
  • Operator

Again, you can upload your own custom content for other crew members whose roles aren’t covered yet or for training that’s specific to your company.

To get a better idea about whether BuildWitt Training is the right fit for your business, head over to our website. You can browse our course catalog, check out stories from real customers, and even sample training videos for yourself.

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