Helping your local collision repair training program help you
By John Yoswick
Count Amber Alley as among those in the industry seeing the benefits of working with the collision repair training program at a nearby school. Alley, the manager of Barsotti’s Body & Fender in San Rafael, Calif., said her shop is involved with a community college taking part in a pilot project funded by the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Foundation. Currently in place at four schools around the country, the project uses a two-year model in which students rotate spending eight weeks at school, then eight weeks working in a shop.
“We hired a young man from the program last semester, and it’s been going amazingly well,” Alley said.
Part of what interested her was the assistance with mentorship the program provides to the employer.
“Although we have for years hired on people and tried to develop talent within our walls, one thing that I found challenging was connecting the right people with the young person, developing a good road for their success,” Alley said. “In this program, there’s a lot of unique relationships between us and the instructor at the program. It kind of connected the dots for us.”
Instead of immediately partnering the student with a journeyman technician, Alley instead had him work with a …
