Any roofing business owner understands the importance of having a set of highly skilled roofers. The difficulty with this and any construction job is two fold. First, employee turnover is often too high and keeping skilled employees on staff is difficult. Two, industry regulations and safety requirements change so often its difficult to keep your team up to date with all of the certifications and requirements.
There are a number of ways though that you can keep your crew of roofers where they need to be by offering a robust training program for your roofers.
Hands On Training
There is no doubt that Hands-On-Training for jobs like Roofing is a requirement. The way you go about instructing new crew members needs to be thorough and done properly. Before you bring them up start working on a job they should shadow your best workers for at least a few days. Have them see what they’re doing, what problems they face, and how they overcome those.
Once a new roofer is comfortable with the work and understand what makes a great roofer great, have them do some work but this time have your best workers shadow them. The length of time that they shadow a new roofer can vary based on how well they perform, but it’s important to allow your best roofers the opportunity to share their insight and knowledge with those just starting out.
Safety Training
Before sending any roofer up on top of a build be sure that they are properly trained with safety measures. In some states this may require passing safety tests. It is often recommended to owners of roofing companies to have a safety exame that they require their team to use.
The one difficulty with safety training is that it can quickly become expensive to put together a safety course each year and then take time away from a job site to have your team go through the training. Luckily business owners have another option for training their roofers. This includes creating and leveraging an online course through a elearning solutions provider.
Creating an online course would allow your crew to take their training while at home, away from the job, and not require them to miss any labor hours on a project. We’d highly recommend investing the time with an organization that can help you quickly and easily create a safety course that you can run current and new employees through to meet your states minimum safety review requirements.