Are you a boots-on-the-roof solar installer and want to get into deeper technical aspects of the job? Has it been difficult to make the switch because your bosses need you to keep doing what you’ve been doing? Greg Sellers of Stable Solar shares how his company helps someone like you advance your technical skills so you can transition to becoming a solar technician, rather than simply continuing to do the same installation jobs on roofs day after day.
Here’s the video transcript.
Solar Academy: Hi everyone. This is Kerim Baran with Solar Academy. I have with me Greg Sellers of Stable Solar. And today we’re going to talk about something important for solar technicians and their career path and development. So Greg, tell us a little bit about the opportunity that Stable Solar offers to solar installers and technicians, especially those guys who are on the roof day in, day out and doing the actual boots on the roof work of solar.
Sellers: I’ve found, Kerim, that the people who do transition to being technicians are out in the field and started off installing solar. Installing solar is a fairly easy thing to get into because the training level is not high, mostly. What you need is ability to stay on a roof for significant periods of time and take direction.
And so it’s a good way to break in. And there’s a lot of folks who do that. Some folks are fine with that. They enjoy just being up there all day, but a whole lot of people would rather do something more closely related to – they’re more ambitious. And after a while doing the same thing all day, every day, it’s hard. It gets repetitive and you really want to do something different.
My very first job was washing dishes in a restaurant and I spent a year asking my boss if I could become a waiter. And after 12 months I realized they needed dishwashers too badly. They were never going to let me wait tables. That’s kind of what a lot of installers face. The demand for installers is so high that it’s hard to say, “I want to let you get off the roof and go get the training and do the on the ground stuff.” But the need, as we see it is so is huge for solar technicians and the opportunities are much better both professionally in terms of what you can earn, but also in terms of your growth and the variability. You’re doing something different every day.
What I like about the residential side of service technicians is that it is different every day. You’re not doing an industrial site where every day is going to be the same number of units. I went out to a few industrial sites in the desert and it’s just acres and acres of the same thing.
And so you just spent all day in this acre and then the next day in that acre. It’s just tedious as well. But residential, it’s all different and the opportunities are there. And we see a lot of people who are very excited about serving as mentors – people who’ve been in the industry for a while and are excited to help train others so they don’t have to go out in the field everyday, but also because they know the value of what they have to offer.
We do a lot of that. We are excited to develop training pods these days remotely. I do a ton of training remotely when somebody gets to the site and they say, “Hey, I’m looking at this, this and this. I’m not sure what I’ve got.” Let’s walk through that. This is what the error code means…
Those resources are there to make sure that you can be successful. And then once you’ve learned what the error code is, next time you can do it yourself. So, that’s how we kind of approach it.
And we’re looking more aggressively now to try to help folks who want to transition from being installers to technicians, help them on that.
Solar Academy: And with your team at Stable Solar, between the people on the team, there are probably decades of solar experience. You guys are a wealth of information for the career development of these technicians, I’m sure.
Sellers: Yeah. And we’re excited to share that information with people who want to learn.
Solar Academy: Great. Thank you. Thank you very much for this information, Greg.
Sellers: Thanks Kerim.