Anyone in the Collision Repair field?, starting my job in a week... advice? Options

[Badkarma]

i graduated from UTI Houston for collision repair. i also attended and graduated from the Mercedes-Benz ELITE training school. i wast recently hired at a shop in oklahoma that my friend works at. he also graduated from UTI. im really hoping to make something of this opportunity, and i wanted to get some advice from some new tech's in the field, and some experienced collision repair technicians. what are some things i should look out for?


Any advice or suggestion would be greatly appreciated..

Thanks, Erich




This post has been edited by Badkarma: Feb 21, 2009 - 4:46 PM

[BLINKYxMUNKEY]

You are just out of school, so they won't let you work on your own. Just learn as much as you can, and don't be afraid to ask questions. Everything will start coming to you naturally. Don't rush anything.

[creis]

although I'm not if the field myself, my girlfriend worked for a shop for 2 years, and my nobor for 20+ (auto repair though) I would watch our for the managers, I have seen it and heard it many times where a tech will work on a high cost repair, then the person cant afford it so the manager will make a deal to forget the bill cost if they sign over the cars title to em. if that goes though the manager deletes the repair record and the takes the car, thus the tech does not get paid for the hours due to the compleatly rediculous payrole system auto techs have, paid per hour per, per job only kinda bs.

my .02, but then again I'm not in the industry myself.

[blu94gt]

I "apprenticed" a bit with collision repair at the dealer I worked at when we were low on mechanical work. I would say my BIGGEST piece of advice is 99% of the time the job is not going to look perfect, so you totally can't be a perfectionist. While aiming for perfection is good, there will always be 1 little thing that your trained eye will find. Most customers just want it to be shiny and no longer damaged.

The advantage to my shop was we were just re-conditioning trade-ins so we didn't have to do any major work, and the managers kept lowering the standards to save money lol.