AYES Program. Has it worked for you??

[Michael White]

I am interested in your opinion and comments on the AYES program. This is a program to set up students in voc. ed schools to work in our dealerships using a mentoring program. We are going to start our second year and have personally had good successes with it, while others have not. No real patterns I can see to determine success or failure. Many of the failures are related to the student's lack of motivation.
Has anyone else participated??
Mike

[Mike Vogel]

Toyota has a program called T-Ten and we use it at our dealership. We usually start the students on our lube racks but they usually get bored quickly with that. What I have done is let them team up with a master tech when they do not have any oil changes to do so that can be under his wing to learn things the best and fastest way to be done. This has helped greatly with their attitudes.

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Mike Vogel
Claremont Toyota/Ford
Claremont, CA

[Michael White]

I am familiar with the Toyota program, but it is different than AYES. In fact, Toyuota is a major sponsor of AYES. AYES is a program to attract high school students in their sophmore/junior year who might have interest in our business.Through job shadowing, students get an idea about what goes on in our shops. They spend at least 1 day in our shops. If they have interest, then interview processes are arranged. At some point, dealers are connected to a student. Then a mentor tech is trained. During the summer months, the student works next to their mentor. Its a 2 year program. At the end, the student gets a nice set of tools, free, and hopefully you have the begininngs of a great apprentice technician who already knows your shop, product, etc.This program is expanding rapidly. Pilot programs are going on now to expand it into the body shop area. Hopefully we will be able to modify it and expand it into the community colleges and trade schools. It is not the total solution, but it is a great program and a great first step.
Ford, GM, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota are just some of the sponsors.
Do a search on the web for "AYES" http://206.231.19.41/indexX2html
have no idea why the address is this way.

Mike

[This message has been edited by Michael White (edited 10-28-2000).]

[sallen1]

We used AYES in both shops..

Miss the help! (Students had to return to school). They learned fast and were valuable to our shops.

Hopefully they both return, but we'll stay involved. You need to farm these prospects early and get them involved in what a dealership technician is all about.

scott

ps. quite a bit different than ASEP, btw.

[This message has been edited by sallen1 (edited 10-30-2000).]

[David Eby]

We have been involved with the AYES program for three years now and have sponsored Three students. Two of the three have stayed with us. The one that left was a good student but was lacking in motivation. In general I feel that two out of three is good. The two that we still have are good workers and really want to learn. I feel that if we want techs in our shops down the road we need to start growing our own now and the AYES program is the best way out there now to do that.

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