Curt HennelerFollowing recent announcements about classes starting up and partnerships being formed, RV Technical Institute (RVTI) Executive Director Curt Hemmeler on Thursday detailed various recruitment efforts under way, now that things have returned to a sense of normalcy following the pandemic.
Hemmeler joined the organization when it was still in its early phases. No sooner had the institute graduated its first class, than the pandemic hit. That resulted in more than a year of adjusting by Hemmeler and his team, who made sure the school was still moving forward and continued to graduate new certified technicians. Now, Hemmeler is turning his attention to what he said is his favorite part of the job. A big factor in his hiring at RVTI was his decades of experience in technical education and training.
“We’re at a point now where I can really work on why I was brought here, which is recruitment,” he said. “One of the big recruitment avenues that I wanted to bring to the industry is my connections and my experience with the school counselors of America. …
“As you think about RVTI, we are there to train, we’re there to certify and we’re there to recruit. And we’re now into the recruitment stage of things, and the first big event was last week in Vegas. It’s a four-day event and it’s called the ASCA (American School Counselor Association) event. This is something that occurs once a year, and it is all the school counselors from across the country and even Puerto Rico and different provinces. They come together at a location and this year it was Vegas.”
America continues to face a “trade skills gap” with the constant demand for skilled trade workers such as plumbers, electricians and HVAC personnel, with a declining number of students pursuing those careers. But one thing those occupations do have are entrenched contacts within the nation’s schools, and students – depending on their locale – often have a clear career path to being employed in those jobs. Not so much for RV techs, which is what Hemmeler said he is out to change.
The lack of certified RV technicians has long plagued the industry. The massive post-pandemic RV boom in the past 15 months has shined an even brighter spotlight on the issue.
“This (the ASCA event) is our gateway into more than 24,000 high schools across the country,” he said. “And these are the people that influence things. So we went in there – Camping World of Las Vegas provided us an RV to show – and I will say, we stole the show. We sat in about a 30-footer, we had some folks from Camping World join us, Tammy (Holland, RVTI’s manager) was with me and there was over 3,000 school counselors.”
Hemmeler said he had a receptive audience of counselors who hadn’t really heard a pitch like his before from the RV industry.
In an ideal scenario, Hemmeler said, a school would become an RVTI Learning Partner. The school would provide an instructor who RVTI would vet and train. RVTI would provide the curriculum and use its connection with local RV dealers to provide units or parts that the students could learn with. The dealerships would have a vested interest because of an automatic recruitment pool of qualified workers created for them.
“These schools, in theory, will be producing Level 1- and Level 2-certified techs while they’re in their junior and senior years in high school,” Hemmeler said.
During his Zoom call with reporters, Hemmeler also highlighted RVTI’s first trade show partnership with the Jones Technical Institute in Jacksonville, Fla. J-Tech, as it’s known, is RVTI’s first trade show partnership. It’s an ideal fit because the school already has an HVAC program, an auto and diesel program, and a marine program.
Other recruitment partnerships RVTI uses include the state of Indiana’s prison system and a school district in Texas that is serving as an RVTI Learning Center. The institute recently graduated a class of 20 young women from a local minimum-security prison, and the 20 are now Level 1-certified RV technicians. RVTI is working with local dealers in that area to find a job for the graduates, who are 100 percent qualified to do pre-delivery inspections on RVs.
Another event Hemmeler is very excited about is this October’s Future Farmers of America convention in Indianapolis, where RVTI will find itself in front of more than 5,000 people.
“What’s different is these are students, these are actual high school students,” he said. “The FFA (convention) will give us more immediate results.”
All these avenues of recruitment include both short- and long-term goals, Hemmeler said. Establishing more RVTI Learning Center partners will be critical in being able to scale up to meet demands of all these new recruits.
For that, Hemmeler said he has a plan: Recruit help from RV technicians – those on the back end of their careers ready to give up the day-to-day wrench turning, but eager to earn a living in the industry. These people, Hemmeler said, are ripe to become adjunct professors.
“That is an evolution that is part of my long-term strategic plan, is not to throw these folks out to pasture, but to use them and to give them opportunities to give back to these young folks that just talked to their school counselors and found out about RVTI,” he said.
