By Dallas T. Sutton
Without a doubt, your most valuable resource when developing experience is those that have it. So, how do you capitalize on the experience you currently have?
Mentorship
The first and most financially profitable way is to keep it. Create an environment where experience is recognized, respected and even occasionally honored. Those with experience have either been with you, or been in the field for a while, and have seen both leaders and technicians come and go but are still pulling their fair share of the workload for you.
Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on which side of the hill you are on), people will depart your organization. Ideally, you will not be the cause, but regardless, people will move on for any number of reasons. You want to make sure you foster an environment where your staff are comfortable in coming to you with their plans without fear of repercussion. Sometimes people of non-retirement age are faced with life changes that mandate a move – do not penalize them, instead work with them in order to get as much notice as possible that you use to both hire a replacement, and/or to pair them with a potential replacement to transfer as much knowledge as possible. Those that are retiring should have no problem in giving you many months of notice that you can use to great advantage from a formalized training and mentorship perspective.
Most effectively, you don’t want to wait until someone decides to leave to begin some form or mentorship. This should be something continually at top of mind. A cursory review of your inventory by modality can quickly tell you where you need technical depth when weighed against service history and active contracts. If your department fully supports CT, it should be obvious, regardless of the number of CTs you have, that you need more than one trained engineer, just to support on call and vacation functions, not to mention other absences, site to site travel requirements and an install base greater than one. This applies to any number of modalities on the biomed and imaging sides of the house.
So, we want to keep experience, want our staff comfortable with us and want depth at the modality level – all pretty obvious – but what does it take to accomplish this?
Time
The most painful part of a mentorship program is the time it takes to create experience. Although part of it, a mentor can’t simply explain a problem and a solution to a mentee – the junior technician has to experience it for it to be hardwired as their own unique knowledge. In addition to redundant formalized technical training, you will be sending two technicians to perform tasks normally required by one. This will need to occur during the most inopportune times, require overtime, will burden other members of the team, and may require salary adjustments. If you are asking your seasoned technicians to train junior team members, they need to feel comfortable in doing so, not threated by “competition.” They need to know they are not wasting their time (as evident in your efforts to retain and continue to develop the less experienced). Mentoring is an additional duty – their normal job isn’t going away – is it something you should consider a compensation adjustment? Is there some other benefit you can offer like lesser call responsibility?
Mentorship is best accomplished as a formalized process, but this is not always possible based on staffing levels, timelines or availability of existing experience. At a minimum, you should make an effort to stagger your modality-specific capabilities. You don’t want two or more technicians with the exact same training or skill set – if you have one engineer who is CT and MR trained, another might be MR and NM and a third NM and PET trained. Set yourself up so that if someone leaves, you still have at least some level of depth for those affected modalities. Once again, what does this take? Time (and money of course).
Final Thoughts
While we will never achieve 100% efficiency in the retention of knowledge and experience, we should, at a minimum, work to remove the roadblocks that prevent or inhibit this transfer.
I’ve had the good fortune to be surrounded by those who work very well together. Both the mentor and the mentee feel as though they have the autonomy to engage in the exchange of experience at will. My seasoned engineers have the authority to pull more junior technicians from assigned tasks when a teachable moment arises, and my junior technicians have the ability to engage the more seasoned techs to request insight for specific tasks. Recently, I found my most seasoned engineer holding a voltmeter for a very junior engineer. Mentorship being fresh in my mind, I inquired as to what was going on. To my dismay, they really didn’t know how to answer as the seasoned engineer had been assigned a time sensitive task and was obviously not engaged in it – there was a bit of fumbling to come up with what they thought I wanted to hear. I had to stop them and told them to just tell me what they were doing. The junior was having trouble making a board level voltage measurement because of the physical location of a wiring harness – the senior was offering advice on the best way to access and the best tool for the job. On the spot experience transfer – exactly what I wanted to hear. I complimented them both, one for asking, one for answering, and let them know it was the right thing to do, regardless of other assigned tasks.
In a similar event a few days earlier, I encountered a group of technicians struggling with the operation of an oscilloscope and an unusual test requirement setup – we all know how infrequently we use oscilloscopes these days. In this instance, I was able to inject myself as the mentor and transfer some of my knowledge and experience to junior technicians. The most interesting thing was the reason the test was being performed. We had an early life tube failure, and while attempting to replace the tube not once, but twice. It was found that the tube would not calibrate and after the second tube, a more seasoned technician began to question their original diagnosis and was exploring other possibilities. Turns out it was a manufacturing lot of bad tubes and a tube from a different vendor and lot number solved the problem. This event was being managed by a more seasoned technician, working with a more junior technician, both OEM trained, but the more seasoned had more experience in more unusual tube related errors. The end result was that the junior technician got more troubleshooting insight from the more seasoned tech and learned a little about test equipment usage.
I encourage you to recognize the expertise currently at your disposal and proactively use it to develop the next generation using the tools described here. Invest the time in the creation of an effective repository of information that your most experienced can contribute to and your lesser experienced can draw from. Formalize your mentorship program as much as is possible in your environment and use it as a recruitment and retention tool – people want to know that you are willing to invest in them. Finally, really work on retention of talent. This is a hard row to hoe, especially when dealing with overtaxed budgets and an overtasked HR department, but as a matter of survival, it is a fight we must stay in. Make your department a place people want to be. Best of luck!
