Hi all, I appreciate what you're saying about urging dealerships to only hire highly skilled technicians, but I have a different take on it. For many technicians straight out of the few schools out there, working for a dealership is a good way to get started in this business. Sometimes these folks are actually members of the PTG and sometimes they actually are RPTs (for instance the recent cohort from North Bennett Street), but they're still new and have much to learn. They can learn a lot prepping pianos for a dealership, learn things that it would take a lot longer to learn on their own. They also have a lot to offer, because after one or two years in school they are, after all, pretty solid. I don't think it makes sense to create barriers for solid techs who don't have much experience. Regards, Zeno Wood Zeno I think what Jeannie, and I, are talking about are not graduates from NBS, or other training schools. What we're talking about is the dealer who hires the guy, or gal, who bought a tuning kit last week, read a book on how to tune, and walks into a dealer and offers to tune pianos for the sake of learning. These people have no skills, no knowledge, and no idea of what to do with a sticking key, and don't recommend doing anything else to make the piano play our sound better. The dealer is happy to pay this person $25 for a floor tuning, and pass the piano off as being "factory prepped". Not all dealers do this, but enough to give all piano technicians a bad name. What we're trying to do is get manufacturers to tell their dealers that if they want to sell their pianos they must have on staff at least one "factory trained" technician. What the definition of "factory trained" is, is open for discussion. But that, in itself would solve a lot of the problems we're discussing here. Wim -----Original Message----- From: Zeno Wood <zeno.wood at gmail.com> To: caut at ptg.org Sent: Mon, Nov 23, 2009 4:40 pm Subject: Re: [CAUT] Jeanie's brain storm - was Boston changed to dealers... Hi all, I appreciate what you're saying about urging dealerships to only hire highly skilled technicians, but I have a different take on it. For many technicians straight out of the few schools out there, working for a dealership is a good way to get started in this business. Sometimes these folks are actually members of the PTG and sometimes they actually are RPTs (for instance the recent cohort from North Bennett Street), but they're still new and have much to learn. They can learn a lot prepping pianos for a dealership, learn things that it would take a lot longer to learn on their own. They also have a lot to offer, because after one or two years in school they are, after all, pretty solid. I don't think it makes sense to create barriers for solid techs who don't have much experience. Regards, Zeno Wood On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 8:19 PM, Jeannie Grassi <jcgrassi at earthlink.net> wrote: Hi Rex, I do believe such information has been given. Certainly Yamaha’s 37 Steps is one example. I believe Kawai has a checklist also. That doesn’t seem to be the problem. And there are plenty of technicians who know what to do. What I was referring to are dealers, and indirectly manufacturers, who take the cheap way out by hiring unskilled and new technicians to do such work, who have had little or no training simply because they are willing to do it. If the manufacturers aren’t stepping up and saying they expect the pianos to be prepped in a certain way, the dealers aren’t going to spend the money to pay a qualified technician to do it. I realize that most of what I have been saying is wishful dreaming, but wouldn’t it be great if we were actually respected and appreciated for the work we do and if we were actually allowed to do it? jeannie -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20091123/708f1d74/attachment.htm>
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC