NADA Academy launches work-friendly training program for high-potential employees

The National Automobile Dealers Association wants to give dealerships a better training option for staffers with the potential to be top managers.

The association is offering a new NADA Academy training program intended for new department managers and promising employees at dealerships, NADA said this week. The NADA Professional Series consists of a pair of two-day sessions. It begins in June and will be offered at three locations nationwide. Registration is open now.

As the number of dealership principals continues to shrink, NADA sees a need to reach deeper into dealerships to develop employees sooner, Camron Wilson, the association's director of tailored training and business development, told Automotive News.

Hal Wurster, vice president of business development and marketing for NADA's dealership operations group, wrote in an email: "We want to reach up-and-coming dealership managers, so we can train them to do things right the first time."

Ideal candidates are high-potential employees looking to move to a department management role, or employees who are fairly new to management, Wilson said.

"We want to show people that there's more of a career path within a dealership, and we completely built a brand-new curriculum for this program," Wilson said. "We even went so far as to restructure our entire organization within NADA."

Late last year, the association's dealership operations group expanded its curriculum design team from three people to 11, she said.

"While we were in the restructuring process," Wilson said, "we also brought in four vendors to help us learn the newest and best adult learning principles and techniques so that as we were building this content, it delivered in a way that participants take away the most they can in a short amount of time."

In addition to training in Tysons, Va., courses will be offered in Dallas and Cerritos, Calif., with the goal of attracting candidates from dealerships around those cities or people within driving distance, Wilson said.

The program is tailored to be convenient for employees working a typical dealership schedule. It includes two days of core competency classes -- focusing on sales, service, parts and office -- and two days of leadership classes. While it requires four days out of the dealership, NADA has designed the class schedule so participants take the two sessions at separate times.

"We built it this way so that brand-new or a high-potential employee gets everything they need in a short amount of time to really run a successful department," Wilson said.

The program also includes online training components that can be done before and after each two-day session, plus two online modules on dealership management system technology and human resources management.

DMS training will be specific to the system that the participant's dealership uses, said Georgia Munson, NADA Academy instructor.

"I was made a manager one day because I was really good at what I used to do -- not because I was going to be good at what I was being promoted to do," said Munson. "And so getting them into this management online component will help them have some of that basic core management skills that they're going to need."