Welcome back to Teaching the Unteachables, where we dive into methods for teaching and
learning for professionals like you.
Want to learn more about Hampton Engineering?
Visit Hampton.com.
We're spending a little bit of time with our good friend Keith Avery from Hampton Engineering.
Keith, tell us a little bit about how you got into the industry because it'll really
segue in today's topic about understanding your program and understanding yourself and
having better tools for promoting yourself and selling yourself in the industry.
Well, most of you all know that I work for Hampton Engineering.
We're an equipment manufacturer.
Long story, started off as a welder, worked my way into the sales field through BOC, British
Oxygen and it was two 20-year careers landed me here with these folks.
And it wasn't long after I landed here with these folks that I figured out the HVAC world
is pretty much everything there is to do in technical education.
And I would say that it is truly a great honor for you to have me here today.
Absolutely it is.
We're sure thankful for that.
So if anyone hasn't met Keith, you're going to learn a little bit about Keith and why
we enjoy Keith so much and the things that he brings to our industry.
Keith is really good at understanding the product that you are as an individual and
the product that you have to offer if it's something that you're selling.
Better yet, how to present yourself.
So today's topic is really going to be focusing on understanding your program, understanding
your content, your delivery and how to present it not only to your administration, but to
your local environment, the people that are looking at your program.
One thing really happened in our industry in the last few years that has shaped the
persona of our industry.
We keep talking a little bit about the persona of HVAC and that stigma of HVACs being like
that dirty job.
It's like one of those shop classes that you go to when you can't do well in all of the
other curriculums in school.
We're going to define that here in a minute.
We're going to break that stigma.
Yeah.
Well, it's not sexy, but we'll break that.
It can be that that's a whole nother topic.
Yeah.
So here's what we're talking about.
So if we go back to, you know, those those awkward years in 2020, 2021, 2022, as the
world was being affected by COVID, one thing happened in our industry that a lot of people
don't pay attention to.
And it's very important when we look at the programs that we offer.
The United States Department of Homeland Security declared that HVAC was an essential critical
infrastructure workforce.
Right.
So what that says, and this is exactly out of that says that workers distributing, servicing,
repairing, installing residential and commercial HVAC systems, building transportation equipment,
boilers, furnaces and other heating, cooling, refrigeration and ventilation equipment are
essential critical infrastructure workforce.
That in itself places us into a very important role in our world.
Right.
Let's talk a little bit about how that can benefit our program.
When we look at our role, one of those 17 jobs in our industry now places us in a unique
place as educators to be able to start looking at our own programs, understanding our value,
the value that we add to our school, to the administration and to our community.
And so I think, Clifton, I think you just hit a very strong chord there.
Sure.
The value of these programs, they have been so underestimated for so long.
Like you said, when you look at it as a shop class, people, I don't think understood how
important air quality, air movement was until COVID hit.
And then all of a sudden they're stuck in houses or they're stuck in buildings and they're
paying real close attention to filtration and air movement.
Like I said, I think that value thing is key.
Understanding the value that these programs bring, bring to the school and bring to the
community.
Yeah.
Because if you don't understand the value, how can you promote the content that is actually
there?
And if you don't know the demand for what is needed from us, how do we know how to plan
our programs for the future?
I've told this story before.
I was in Washington, DC at a department of energy seminar and there was some undersecretary
of energy up there and it was an HVAC conference.
They had all kinds of HVAC contractors and people into this.
And this undersecretary stood up there in the front of these people and he said, and
it almost knocked me off my chair, that over 75% of all the energy created in this country,
75% of everything produced goes to the heating and cooling industry.
There you go.
And I was in the back of the room and I was getting ready to raise my hand and call bull
when the guy I was with put my hand down and then he went on to explain that it doesn't
matter what individual industry you look at, we as a nation are either heating something
up or cooling something down.
Such a good analogy.
And where most industries, and this was about conservation and saving energy, where most
industries look at a 2 or a 3% gain in energy efficiency, that's a home run.
Well consistently the HVAC industry is making leaps like 7, 10, 15, 20% more efficient than
it was a year ago.
That's huge.
That's huge for the energy industry because anything more they don't have to produce,
they can offload.
It's cheaper to offload existing energy than it is to produce new energy to fill that hole.
So the more efficient you get, the better it is for the economy and for the energy industry.
Even a lot of technicians, young students going into the programs, parents of students
that are looking at HVAC as a potential career, don't understand the vast amount of opportunity
we have.
A lot of people look at HVAC like that residential HVAC technician that everyone sees because
that's all that they know.
It's the only person they've ever seen.
They've not seen that informational technology.
They've not seen that refrigeration technician that is in the background working on all of
the refrigeration systems that's cooling the heat sinks of all of our transistors from
all of our databases.
They don't see all of the refrigeration air conditioning technicians that are working
on ventilation systems at our water transfer stations.
That was one of the big ones that I used to work on.
All of our water transfer stations have huge dehumidification systems that are critical
for all of the motors, pumps, pump controls, electrical wiring inside because we have all
of that cold water running through massive pipes at high velocities.
It means they sweat like crazy.
So it's a refrigeration HVAC technician that's working on those.
We look at all of our commercial facilities.
If we don't have air conditioning, you're not going to work in those facilities.
So many different things that we can dive into.
Any others who want to hop on while we're here?
And just as an aside, being the geek that I am, when I got back to my hotel room, I
kind of Googled and played around and his 75% quote was wrong.
It was over 80.
No kidding.
Well, think about how the world's changed.
Over 80% of that energy.
I may have gone down now with electric cars, but even those, you got motors that you got
to cool off.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
All of these vaccines had to be transported well below zero or they would go bad.
So they had to come up with a refrigerated system to move these from point A to point
B as well as maintain them when they're there.
Which was fairly new, wasn't it?
It isn't just break them out and put them on the shelves.
Yeah.
You know, we had a lot of cold climate transferable operations for doing that, but not in the
scale that we needed when we started talking about mass vaccination.
Nobody was prepared for what happened or the scale when you shut down an entire economy
like that.
And then with essential workers, you've got to stay and maintain this.
You've got to stay and maintain that.
Anybody who's ever spent time in one knows that they give you ice to chew on.
Sure.
There's refrigeration.
Every hospital in this country, every floor, every ward has an ice machine on it.
They don't fix themselves.
They don't take care of themselves.
Stuff that you don't see all happening in the background.
And it's been relatively silent and benign and nobody pays attention to it until something
goes wrong.
Exactly.
Vocational programs don't look at themselves as STEM programs.
That's exactly why we're doing this.
One of the really neat things I get to do because of my job is I travel.
I travel all over the country.
I see good programs.
I see bad programs.
I see spectacular programs.
I also see the rest of the programs that are going on in those schools, whether it's automated
manufacturing or whether it's a quote unquote STEM program.
And never has have I seen a STEM program incorporate itself into the HVAC world.
Exactly.
One of the things I learned because I deal with engineering departments as well.
We sell equipment on a wide scale.
I tend to look me, I tend to look at and I tend to put forward the fact that the HVAC
industry is kind of the mechanical engineering of the skilled trades.
Absolutely it is.
It incorporates a vast wealth of knowledge.
It's electrical, it's chemical, it's mathematics.
It is truly a STEM program from start to finish, but it's never been sold that way.
No one who participates in it ever goes up to administration and said, come down, I want
to show you just how STEM-y we are.
We're here to help you understand what you are actually doing.
I think it takes people like us, not to blow our own horn here, but it takes people like
us to get these educators off their perch.
They've become so comfortable with doing the same thing over and over again.
Yes we do.
And when they look at what's going on, all they're concerned with is their numbers.
If they can keep 15 kids in class, they can keep their job.
They don't necessarily need to spend a whole lot of time learning a bunch of other stuff.
Numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, and like I said, they're comfortable up there on that
perch.
We kind of need to knock them off that perch every once in a while and say, hey look, world's
changing.
Times are changing.
So we've taken the time to do science, to change our technology.
So what are we going to be looking at going forward?
Well we've already seen a lot.
I've seen a lot of programs that aren't even teaching variable capacity compressors and
inverter technologies or don't even know exactly how things like scroll and rotary compressors
work.
And so our technology is moving at a pace much faster than it has in the past.
So many of us now need to prepare for new technology and to be able to get the technology
into our classrooms.
So let's talk about some ways that we can do that.
They've been teaching electronics or electrical forever.
The industry is fast moving to electronics.
Exactly.
Smaller, more efficient components, they're going to have to make that jump.
Like you said, with inverters and MOSFETs and it's no longer just a simple AC DC theory,
you know, switch open, switch close.
That's still going to be there.
That legacy stuff is always going to be there.
Legacy equipment is still going to be around.
They're going to need to update their programs.
And there's only so many ways you can do that.
They're going to need to find manufacturers, equipment manufacturers that are willing to
step up to the plate, maybe send their engineers in to teach a class or to train the trainers,
so to speak.
Exactly.
I'm not a big fan of donating equipment, as you can see.
But that's also part of it.
If these manufacturers can drop a newer component on them, whether it's a scroll compressor
or an inverter and say, hey, look, six or seven years ago, I went to the EHR show at
the McCormick place in Chicago and there was one little row and it was the Korean island.
Yeah, that had new technology.
That was the only place you saw mini splits.
Now that's all you're seeing.
That's it.
As minis and DRVs and VRSs, you know, so all of it is changing.
And they're going to need to stay in touch with manufacturers.
They're going to need to stay in touch with people like you, Howard, people like me who
can put them in touch with the people that they need to be talking to.
And that's really what we're here for.
Clifton, you and I talked a while ago.
In my world, everything is sales.
And the faster you understand that, the easier things are going to become.
And it really is.
You know, when a baby figures out that they can get what they want by smiling, they employ
that smile.
That's a sales skill.
There are, man, this goes back to a conversation I had in Ann Arbor, Michigan in a really bad
Chinese restaurant one night.
We were sitting around the table after a UA event, a UA training event.
And I was sitting there with some of ESCO's trainers and judges and we were talking and
somebody said to me, well, you know how to talk to these guys.
We don't know how to talk to them.
And that's when it hit me that they don't look at themselves as salespeople.
When you change the way you look at yourself and how you approach what it is that you want
to get, all of that comes into play.
Communication skills, collaboration, verbiage, how you approach, when you approach, make
sure you know what it is that you're asking for.
Be concise.
You know, they're not looking for a PhD dissertation.
They want to know what the problem is.
They want to know that you have the solution and they want to know that they can be the
key.
It's a feather in their cap.
Sure.
Absolutely.
It now becomes bigger than the program itself.
Many of us were technicians before we became educators.
It fascinates me that you could sell a $20,000 HVAC system, but you can't get a $500 meter
for your own program.
Yeah.
I think I that more often than not has absolutely no technical knowledge whatsoever.
He's an academician and he's probably spent his whole life in academia.
There are some administrators that have worked their way up.
They're usually running some of the best programs that understand that the skilled trades are
what keeps this country moving forward.
But a lot of these administrators are just that.
They're administrators.
They're sure.
They're making business decisions.
They've gone to administrative college and that's what they do.
Their job is to raise money and put out fires.
Yes.
So like I said, at a 30,000 foot level, when you fly over Ohio, you look down, you see
all these little farms.
Well, all those little farms belong to me, but wait a minute.
There's smoke coming out of that one over there.
You know, so you need to find a way to get their attention, get them to you, have them
take ownership of your program.
Big part of that is how you talk with them.
This isn't my advisory.
He's not one of my advisors.
He's an industrial partner.
These are the guys that are telling us what we need to do.
Exactly.
When I talk to schools that are looking to hire instructors that are starting new programs,
and I will tell you this, lately there are more and more high schools that are putting
basic HVAC programs or HVAC prep programs back online to slate these kids to go into
the technical colleges.
But the guys that teach these programs, the instructors, when I'm talking to an administrator
or a principal and we're talking about who they're hiring and the bottom line is whoever
you hire, they've got to be passionate about what they're doing.
This isn't the kind of job you take just to take the job.
You know, if you want this program to flourish, this guy has really got to be passionate about
HVAC from top to bottom.
And if he is, then he's going to move heaven and earth to make sure that that program succeeds.
Keith, is there any email or contact information that you care to share with people while we're
here?
My personal email is my first initial and last name.
That's K-A-V-E-R-Y at Hampton.com.
Sales at Hampton.com will get to me as well.
That's the general office email.
So I mean, if you need to talk, you can call me there.
If I'm not there, leave a number.
I'll get back to you.
I'm more than willing to talk and help anybody.
Like I said, if I can make your program better, it's going to make this industry better.
It's all going to be better down the hill for everybody.
Once again, it's been a hoot to hang out with you and we really look forward to continuing
these conversations.
Lytton, thanks for having me.