Last week The NEWS was in Chicago in full force for the AHR Expo. At the expo or any event, the handshakes and passing out of business cards can start to feel very routine. But there are rewards for the effort we put into it. It made me think back to a seminar I attended last year on the power of networking.
The Oklahoma geothermal industry suffered a tragic and shocking loss on Friday evening [Dec. 9, 2011] when Scott and Rocky Beller, cousins, were killed in a small-plane crash while returning from an electric utility planning meeting in western Oklahoma.
Now I realize that people are reading this article in late January and those resolutions that you proclaimed so loudly three weeks ago are barely a faint memory. But this is also a good time to come up with some New Year’s resolutions for your business.
These comments concern whether there’s a huge need for new, skilled employees, and what individuals have done to promote HVAC as a career to high schoolers.
As the HVAC industry gears up for the International Air-Conditioning, Heating, Refrigerating Exposition (AHR Expo) next week, another annual trade show worth mentioning has come and gone — the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Why mention CES? There are two reasons — Nest and relevance.
When it comes to encouraging high school students to pursue post-secondary studies in vocational programs such as HVACR, the fall guys for failure to do so are usually the high school counselors. Well, it just might be the blame rests not with the counselors but with those who are telling the counselors what to push and promote.
It has been my pleasure to write an occasional column for The NEWS for the last seven years. With upcoming changes to our staff responsibilities, those musings will be less frequent. Oh, you will still see a few errant missives from my keyboard, but I’ll mostly be tending to the type of duties admirably handled by Publisher John Conrad during the last 10 years.