The ASE Education Foundation and S/P2 have announced a partnership to develop and distribute The Workplace Mentoring System, a mentoring program for the automotive industry. The program is designed to help businesses identify and train service personnel to become mentors to students and entry-level employees. This program will be available to the entire industry: automotive service, medium/heavy truck, and collision repair and refinishing.

In early 2017, S/P2, ASE and the ASE Education Foundation met to discuss and address one of the biggest issues the automotive industry faces: the technician shortage. The organizations specifically discussed the issue of how to mentor young technicians as they enter the automotive industry.

S/P2 has created the Workplace Mentoring System, which offers online courses covering the roles of the three key players – the mentor, the mentee and the manager. The courses explain the roles and responsibilities of a mentor and a mentee, as well as laying out the responsibilities of the manager who should oversee the mentor-mentee relationship. It includes content from choosing the mentor and hiring the mentee, to handling business decisions such as pay plans and tool issues.

“Mentoring is an essential component of a successful ’grow your own’ employee process,” said Trish Serratore, president of the ASE Education Foundation. “S/P2 has created an online mentoring program that focuses on the mentor and the mentee. It also allows the instructor to be involved, to monitor, and to be a resource. We see this opportunity to team up with S/P2 as a way to help the industry grow the next generation of technicians, both in the classroom and in the shop.”

“To provide a complete mentoring system, we knew we had to provide a framework for the tasks shops should use to train and evaluate an entry-level technician,” said Kyle Holt, president of S/P2. “The ASE Education Foundation task lists, formerly known as the NATEF task lists, are used in hundreds of automotive schools, are industry-generated and industry-approved. Working together allowed us to provide a mentoring program with task lists for automotive service, medium/heavy truck, collision repair and refinish, and collision estimators. By teaming up with the ASE Education Foundation, industry can use the same roadmap that is widely used across education, with the flexibility to customize the task list to fit their facility’s specific needs.

“Those shops who are going to thrive will have to grow their own technicians,” added Holt. “With the Workplace Mentoring system, we want to give the forward-thinking shops a true competitive advantage.”

Next steps for the two groups are to fully integrate the ASE Education Foundation tasks into the Workplace Mentoring System and to develop a pricing model for accredited and non-accredited programs and ASE Education Foundation partners. In addition, the development of downloadable, customizable task lists, as well as mentoring tracking via computer, tablet, or phone, is underway.

For more information on the S/P2 Workplace Mentoring System, schools or businesses should visit sp2.org.