ASE:

Jeff Walter (00:00)

Hi, I’m Jeff Walter and welcome back to the Training Impact Podcast. We’re a partner learning meets strategic impact. My guest today is Matthew Shepenek. Matt is a longtime friend and vice president of the credential testing programs for the ASE. What is the ASE you might ask? Well, it is the National Institute of Automotive Service Excellence. It is the organization that makes sure all those automotive service technicians out there are excellent at what they do. Matt, welcome to the program.

 

Matt Shepanek (00:27)

Hey, great to be here, Jeff. Thanks for having me.

 

Jeff Walter (00:30)

So Matt, I’m really excited to talk to you today and we have a brief time period so we’re going to just get right to it. A little bit about how does one become the vice president of credential at ASC and what exactly is the ASC?

 

Matt Shepanek (00:43)

Okay. Well, I’ll start off with what is ASE. So we’re the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence. We’re a credentialing body. We credential automotive technicians in the industry, auto, truck, school bus, medium heavy truck, mean, kind of across the board. We have a total of about 55 tests plus recertifications for all of those. our credentials are good for five years before you have to research.

 

Jeff Walter (01:12)

Yeah, well, and then and I think beyond the individual, what I find interesting on the ISC is it goes beyond just the individual accreditation, right? Because you also have the you’re heavily involved in accrediting service centers. And and schools, I believe, right?

 

Matt Shepanek (01:24)

Right.

 

Yeah, so we do, through the ASC Training Managers Council, the ATMC, we accredit training programs. So training providers will reach out to us and what we ask, and we have this all published on our website, which is www.atmc.org. There’s like seven criteria that you have to meet to become accredited, have your training program accredited.

 

So training providers submit a sample program for us to take a look at, and we basically make sure that all that criteria is being met. And then our accreditation for the training providers is good for five years. And there’s a little bit of maintenance that has to be done every year. And after that five-year period, they can renew that. We also do accreditation for the schools through the ASE Education Foundation.

 

And that entails also meeting a set standards. So the schools will have to, you know, kind of show some proof that they’re meeting the criteria that’s necessary.

 

Jeff Walter (02:25)

Yeah. So if you look at it, I mean, so it’s a very expansive, um, kind of soup to nuts from the individual to the service center, to the schools that are, are, are training folks. And I also, I always look at automotive, uh, service and, educating them. It’s, it’s a very difficult thing. You know, vehicles have, you know, 25 to 50,000 parts. Um, we expect them to be.

 

Flawlessly reliable as consumers and it’s a very complicated piece of technology, exceedingly complicated and it’s a very difficult skill to master. And I always look at it as a trainer or as a person focused on external training, getting folks skilled in that is exceedingly difficult and then credentialing them to

 

so that you know that they have some level of competence at what they do. How do you guys do that? And what are the biggest challenges in trying to do that? Because it’s a very difficult thing. And to do it at scale, right? Because you do this with, you know, we’re not talking a couple thousand, we’re talking tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands.

 

Matt Shepanek (03:44)

Well, yeah, we actually have about,

 

yeah, about 220,000 automotive and truck technicians carry our credentials. So, you know, it’s a lot. So basically, you know, our tests are knowledge-based, but we do have a work experience portion of the credentials. So folks can take our tests, but they do have to prove that they have, depending on the test,

 

Jeff Walter (03:53)

to shoot.

 

Matt Shepanek (04:11)

anywhere from one to three years of work experience. So they’ll have to fill out a form and show us that. Because we feel that that’s really important. It’s great that you have the knowledge of these systems and how things work, but we want to make sure that you’re applying that knowledge on a daily basis on the job. So we do require that work experience as well. And Jeff, I skipped right over. I’d like to give you a little bit of my background too.

 

Jeff Walter (04:33)

Sure, sure. Yeah, we didn’t get to how did you become the vice president of how does one become the vice president of a credential agency that oversees a quarter million folks?

 

Matt Shepanek (04:36)

I skipped right over that.

 

Yeah, so

 

it’s kind of a long story, but I’ll try to keep it as short as possible. So I grew up in Michigan, where you’re at,

 

growing up in the Detroit area,

 

I was very interested in cars. I started working on cars at a young age. And then I started working at a Shell station while I was in high school and learned, had a great guy there who taught me a lot. And as soon as I graduated from high school, I went to college and I started working at a dealership and really, really just enjoyed working on cars.

 

I had a friend of mine that got a job developing service manual content for General Motors at the time and said, hey, you should come on up and apply for a job here. So I did that. This was with a automotive supplier. so I did

 

manuals. I did labor time studies. And then ultimately, I got involved in a training program that they were doing for Buick.

 

This is really going to date me because it was a VHS tape and a book that went out every month to the dealerships and every month we’d cover a different topic. But it was great because I got a chance to learn about training and development. I got exposed to video production. So I learned a lot about that and really enjoyed it. So I wound up staying at that company for about 10 years. And then the guy that

 

Jeff Walter (05:47)

I wait for…

 

Matt Shepanek (06:00)

that was running our department, he left and he went to work for VW and Audi at their corporate headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan. And after he was there for about six months, he recruited me over. so I was a technical curriculum designer there, mostly with the Audi brand. And I did that for about five years. And then I got an opportunity to run the technical training group there.

 

Jeff Walter (06:18)

Right.

 

Matt Shepanek (06:27)

And I did that for about 14 years and really enjoyed it. And I got to watch our technician population grow from, I think at the time when I started, we were at 1200 technicians to when I left in 2018, we were at a little over 3000. So it was, you know, really kind of explosive growth. We had 10 training centers across the country and, and I think I had 15 or 16 technical trainers. So it was a great learning experience for me. I really enjoyed it.

 

And then, like I said, I left there in 2018 and through the people that I’ve known and I got to meet while I was at Audi, I had worked on a program back in 2012 with a retired colonel and we started this program at Audi called the Audi Veteran to Technicians program. So we took technicians that were transitioning out of the military and then we helped find them jobs at Audi dealerships. And we had a training component to it.

 

Jeff Walter (07:16)

Mm-hmm.

 

Matt Shepanek (07:25)

It was a pretty successful program. placed hundreds of technicians at Audi dealerships across the country. So I had kept in touch with this retired Colonel. And when I left Audi, he called me up and said, hey, I’ve got an opportunity for you. We’re basically doing something similar for a couple other brands. And would you like to help me run the program? And so I did that. And then it was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. Helped a lot of people find jobs in the industry. These were transitioning military folks.

 

So that was a lot of fun and ultimately we wound up kind of selling a version of the program to Ford. And so I got a chance to kind of, which was really cool because you Ford’s got 3,200 dealerships across the country. So I got a chance to, you know, kind of see how, you know, how, you know, a larger organization worked and had a lot of fun, you know, implementing that program.

 

So I did that for about three and a half, four years, and then it kind of ran its course. I was looking for a new challenge and I needed to take a little break. So I told my wife, this was about November, 2021. And I told her, hey, I’m going to take a little break and figure out what my next thing is, but I’m not going to worry about it till January. I was about a week into my break and the phone rang and it was Tim Zilke. was, was the CEO of ASC.

 

Jeff Walter (08:18)

Mm-hmm.

 

Right.

 

Matt Shepanek (08:42)

And

 

he had told me that there was a guy on the staff that was retiring. And he was just asking, he knew I was in the area in Northern Virginia and was wondering if I knew anybody who might be interested. And I’m like, well, man, I might be interested. And so I wound up talking to him and went through the interview process and then started working here about four years ago. And it’s been great because while it’s not training and development necessarily,

 

Jeff Walter (08:55)

Ha ha.

 

Matt Shepanek (09:07)

I’ve learned a lot about the high stakes testing industry and I’m working with some great people here. And probably the thing I love most about it is the people. So not only people that work here, but I get to work with not only the OEMs in the industry, but also the entire aftermarket, the collision industry. So I’ve been exposed to a lot more parts of the industry than I was used to when I was just at VW and Audi. So that part has been just.

 

Just a thrill.

 

Jeff Walter (09:34)

That’s a really interesting…

 

That’s real. mean, it’s, it takes a lot, especially in the middle of a pandemic to say, you know, I’m going to take a little break and just chill for a bit. And, but it’s really, it’s, it’s fascinating that every time, you know, when a door closes, another door opens and you haven’t a clue how it’s going to happen. It’s, find it really, it’s, well, one like, wow. Then you actually said, I’m going to take a break for a little bit.

 

Matt Shepanek (09:44)

you

 

Jeff Walter (10:01)

in the middle of the pandemic. I mean, Matt, that’s very unusual and really very cool, very cool.

 

Matt Shepanek (10:09)

It may not have been the

 

smartest move, but it all worked out for me. I had stayed at VW and Audi for almost 20 years and I loved it there. planned on retiring from there, but just due to some circumstances, they wanted me to relocate again and it wasn’t going to work with my wife and everything. So I decided it was time to try something different.

 

Jeff Walter (10:15)

Yeah.

 

Matt Shepanek (10:36)

I was really glad that I did that and took the opportunity. And like I said, it was through folks that I’ve met during my career, you know, this retired Colonel, and we’re still friends and we still talk. then I had met Tim Zilke and some of the folks at ASC, you know, at my time at Audi. And so it’s just, you know, it’s just fantastic for me. know, automotive, I always say, is such a huge industry and there’s so, so many people and we touch so many people. But when you get into the training and development world,

 

It’s very small, so you wind up bumping into the same people over and over. And that has proven to be something that’s been very valuable for me in my career.

 

Jeff Walter (11:14)

Well, and, and, and, and now, um, going forward and you’ve, you’ve come at, it’s really interesting because you’ve, you’ve, you’ve navigated from many, different perspectives. Um, you know, almost from the ground up. And one of the things about the industry that is, you know, I mean, it’s a great industry, uh, is, but it’s got its challenges and, and some of the challenges, like when we were down in, in, Georgia last spring.

 

is, you know, it requires tens of thousands of folks to come in. There’s huge demand and finding skilled folks and then then skilling them up, getting them certified and then and then the evolution of the certification process. So, you know, and I think they go kind of hand in hand. And so where do you see, you know,

 

the future in terms of training folks and getting folks in so they can learn better, faster, quicker. And then how does that translate into any type of evolution in the credentialing side at the ASE? Or what are your thoughts there? There were some really interesting things that we were talking about last spring. And I was interested on your thoughts and how that’s evolved.

 

Matt Shepanek (12:28)

Yeah.

 

Well, I mean, you mentioned our conference, so that’s the ASC Training Managers Council Conference. So we host conference every April. And that’s been one of the things that’s been super fun with this job is getting a chance to host that and bring folks from across the industry together every year. And we get a chance to share ideas. And I usually find some good guest speakers that come in and talk about technologies, not only

 

delivery technologies, different things that are going on in curriculum design, things that can make you more efficient, all of those kind of things. So the last couple of years, we’ve really focused a lot on AI and we’ve done a lot with augmented reality and virtual reality. A lot of folks are really leaning into that. A couple of years ago, was cost prohibitive for a lot of folks to go ahead and do that.

 

Jeff Walter (13:05)

Mm-hmm.

 

Matt Shepanek (13:17)

Not only from a hardware perspective, the glasses that you’d have to purchase to do these, they were expensive. And then developing the content was also very expensive. But in the past few years, the prices have all come down, not only on the hardware, but on the software side too. So there are some folks out there doing amazing things with AR and VR right now. last year, we featured a company called Skillmaker AI.

 

And I had gotten a chance to know these folks the past year. They’ve been working with NAPA. And they put together an AR-VR training program for new technicians called the NAPA Accelerator. And the whole idea behind this is it’s supposed to skill these new technicians up very quickly. I can’t remember the exact numbers that they…

 

say that they can cut off. But I’ve actually recently, about two months ago, I had a chance to work with a group of students. And this was down in Marietta, Georgia, at the Napa Training Center. So I came in in the morning, students came in, and these were all high

 

students, then an automotive program, but they were fairly green. And we put together a pre-test and a post-test, and it was all on

 

just one aspect of doing brakes. It was basically caliper diagnosis and replacement on a vehicle. And so I did the pre-test and then they spent a couple hours using the Napa accelerator where they had a chance to practice doing this in a virtual environment. And so after they had a chance to practice that for a couple hours, then I administered a post-test and we saw just in a couple hours,

 

Jeff Walter (14:38)

Thanks

 

Matt Shepanek (14:50)

We saw a 33 % improvement in their scores. ⁓ It was pretty impressive. So I’m kind of a believer in that being effective for performance-based testing maybe in the future. we’re looking at some of those things. We’re not 100 % sure what that’s going to look like in the future, but it may be a really good opportunity to…

 

Jeff Walter (14:54)

Holy smokes!

 

Matt Shepanek (15:14)

incorporate some of that stuff into future tests.

 

Jeff Walter (15:17)

Well, and, and I mean, and it’s to me, it’s there’s two sides of the coin there, right? There’s on the credentialing side. mean, on the credentialing side, which you’re, and, you know, correct me if I’m wrong, but with other credentialing agencies and other industries that I’ve worked with, it’s you, you, you’re trying to ensure that the credentialed individual has a certain threshold knowledge and skill set. Right. And that’s where you’re, that’s where you’re,

 

your assessments come in and your years of experience, because you sit there go, look, if somebody employed you for so many years and you’re able to demonstrate this level of knowledge, you’ve got the requisite knowledge and skills. And I think, and we’ve seen that in other, we’ve worked with some medical boards and credentialing docs in different specialties.

 

It’s the same challenge, right? It’s like you want to make sure this person has a certain level of knowledge and a certain set of skills, and you want to test their knowledge and you want to somehow assess their skills. it’s a hard thing to do, because especially on a skills assessment, traditionally been very, very manually intensive, right? ⁓ Right, yeah, exactly.

 

Matt Shepanek (16:20)

It’s difficult to scale, you know, because how do you do

 

that when you’re talking about 220,000 people, right?

 

Jeff Walter (16:25)

Right.

 

It’s scale is yeah, doing it on an individual basis. Fairly easy. If you have the knowledgeable individual, it’s replicating that person to do it 250,000 times. Right. And, but, and so it’s, it’s interesting. You guys are looking at AI from, from that perspective as, know, how can we, you know, because what you’re really interested in at the end of the day is that they have this requisite knowledge set of knowledge and skills.

 

Matt Shepanek (16:36)

Right.

 

Jeff Walter (16:51)

The other thing that’s interesting, I think, and it’s fascinating the experiment that you just ran there is, and I know we have a tremendous challenge with automotive service techs in terms of getting them into the industry. There’s just a huge gap there and it’s a great paying job. Do you see these tools like what you were talking about kind of…

 

Uh, uh, what’s the right way of phrasing it? Um, lowering the on-ramp or not blowing is the wrong thing, but, making it, you know, uh, an easier on-ramp into the industry because it, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a much more, uh, easier approachable way to engage yourself into the skill. You know I’m saying? Like it’s, you know, it’s almost like, well, I can, I can just imagine I’m putting my brain in that of a

 

you know, late teens, early 20s person and you know, it almost becomes like I’m just was listening to what you were saying and it’s almost like you get to start playing right like, like rather than sitting down with a book and memorizing that oh, you know, the caliper settings for this types of breaks is this versus that and blah, blah, blah, blah. And you know, all this like book knowledge, you actually get to start playing and, and, playing by doing and, and I’m sorry,

 

Matt Shepanek (17:54)

Right.

 

Jeff Walter (18:12)

just, and I was

 

interviewing this one woman that is a certified Lego play instructor, a serious play. And I’m like, what are you talking about? Right? It sounds like and they usually they had they use Legos to help train. And I’m like, what are you talking about? Like, well, they’ll do something like, okay, let’s talk about the company’s strategy for next year. Model it in Lego. And then explain to me, you know, I’m like,

 

Matt Shepanek (18:20)

Okay.

 

Hahaha.

 

Jeff Walter (18:40)

What are you talking about? It sounded like the most bizarre. Just, it just sounded like, okay, you know, and then, and then we, she starts telling you that it was fascinating. She goes, the, and she goes all the back to Lego and in the nineties and we were doing stuff and, and they created this whole Institute and blah, blah. But the coolest thing is what they learned and they, and they got all the scientific studies to prove it.

 

is when you start manipulating things with your hands, it opens up the right side of your brain that that that that exploratory mapping new worlds, figuring new things that you know, that’s the right side, the left side is the do do do do do the right side is the explorer. And and and what they found and what she’s found is the simple act of

 

playing with something and then much less modeling something opens up the creativity and her first exposure was she was at a conference and they were teaching salespeople cybersecurity. I mean for two days in a dark conference room and the first day it’s exactly what you would think and she went out and this is before she was a Lego series play instructor and she went out and bought Play-Doh and just put it on the table.

 

Matt Shepanek (19:43)

Hahaha. ⁓

 

Jeff Walter (19:56)

and let people play with the Play-Doh and they got one color each. And the second day, completely different experience. Everybody was, even they’re just playing with Play-Doh, they’re exchanging colors with their neighbors, they’re making things. And the fact that they were actually doing something with their hands, just engaged them in what would be a lot of folks, especially if you’re a predisposed to be a salesperson, very dry material. And that like kind of hooked her.

 

Matt Shepanek (19:58)

Yeah.

 

Right.

 

Jeff Walter (20:23)

And what I find really fascinating about what you know, the Marietta, Georgia example with the Napa that you were saying, and the, and the game in such a short period of time is I feel like it can be a, the, the, the kind of AR VR with the AI, it literally allows you to start to play with your hands and it opens up that whole right side of your brain. And it’s very cool. just, I think, you know, it might be something that

 

Matt Shepanek (20:44)

Yep.

 

Jeff Walter (20:49)

that opens the gates to get more people into the industry. What do you think about that?

 

Matt Shepanek (20:54)

Right.

 

know, Jeff, so, you know, having been in the training and development, you know, world for, you know, a good part of my career and being a former technician, you know, the thing that I learned early on was most technicians are tactile learners. They learn by doing, touching, feeling. And I know personally myself that that was the case because I would read, you know, how a certain system works or something like that. And sometimes I’d struggle. I’d look at the illustrations and

 

try to figure out the diagrams and everything. And a lot of times it wouldn’t click. But then if I was sitting in a class and an instructor, as we’re talking about a system, he passed around a part and I got to touch it and feel it. One example that always sticks with me is leak detection pumps. I can remember reading all about them and trying to figure it out. And I was struggling with the concept. And it’s actually pretty simple.

 

And as soon as one got passed around a class and I was able to open it up and see a diaphragm and see how it worked, I was like, this makes perfect sense. But when I was just reading about it, I was struggling to kind of get it. But then when you physically touch it and see that, it all clicks. And that’s the beauty of the AR VR stuff. And especially with these young people that I was talking about is they took to it so quickly. they’re able to actually

 

perform these tasks in a virtual environment. It’s just fantastic. And I think that the other advantage to this method of training, you think about it like right now, with EVs, they’ve kind of slowed down a little bit, but they’re not going away. They’re gonna be here for a long time. But when you have to train technicians on EV safety,

 

Jeff Walter (22:23)

Great.

 

Matt Shepanek (22:31)

You know, there’s a lot of things that you have to be concerned about. But if you’re not actually on a car and you can do that in a virtual environment and you don’t have to, you know, worry about anybody actually hurting themselves, that’s a pretty important thing. One of the last things that I did before I left Audi, we were starting to do some battery repairs. So the battery would come out of the car, you would…

 

open the battery up and then you could test individual cells, you could balance the cells, and you could actually replace individual cells in the battery. And so you get into things like that and there’s a lot of safety concerns. the folks at Audi AG in Germany, they developed this whole virtual training program to allow technicians to…

 

do this in a virtual environment, which I thought was brilliant. Not only because it eliminated a lot of the safety risks, it was expensive. As I mentioned, when I was running that group, we had 10 training centers. So if I had to equip each one of those training centers with a battery that we could open up, and it’s probably going to get opened up and worked on by hundreds of technicians. things are going to break. Things are going to wear down. And you might have to replace them.

 

I mean, it saves hundreds of thousands of dollars in that case. So that’s just one example, but I was very impressed in this little demo that we did with Napa, and I think there’s great potential in this. like I said, it really works well for technicians being tactile learners too.

 

Jeff Walter (24:02)

Yeah. Well, and and I, and to, and I’ve, I’ve heard the tactile learner, you know, and the thing about the, the, uh, Lego series play that got to me was we’re all actually tactile learners and it, and it, and, uh, they’re just, and, and so it’s very exciting. And I think that all this AI coming down, especially in the automotive space where it, it, just is, it’s just.

 

It’s so exciting to see and Matt, I know we’re short on time here. So before we go, I wrap up. there anything else you wanna, any pearls of wisdom that you can drop on us in the short time we have left? And if not, if folks wanna get ahold of you or the ASE and they were interested in these certification programs, what would one do?

 

Matt Shepanek (24:49)

Sure. Well, we have, you know, obviously our website, www.ase.com. There’s information on all of our tests. We have, as I mentioned, know, 50-something tests and then the research. And we also have some EV safety tests out there too that we would encourage people to check out. And then on the ASE Training Manager’s Council,

 

All the information on that and on our accreditation for training programs is at www.atmc.org. My contact information is on there and feel free to drop me a line. And I’d also encourage anybody in the training and development world, please take a look at ATMC because it’s a great way to network and see a lot of different types of training programs and learn and share information with folks that are in the industry.

 

Jeff Walter (25:35)

Yeah. And I would just add one thing as somebody that’s been a part of ATMNC. It’s an excellent organization also for automotive adjacent. know, in forklift or any type of large mechanical trailers, they are doing such cutting edge stuff that it is a great organization to be a part of to see what’s coming down the line.

 

Cause these things that are, you know, affecting the auto service techs are going to be adopted in the wider audience. And so I would also encourage folks that are in what I would think of as auto adjacent or vehicle adjacent industries where it’s power sports or, um, or, or, or trailers or, you know, uh, high lows or, uh, industrial equipment. Um, it’s, it’s a great place. And that conference, uh, in April.

 

It’s a great place to kind of expose that you guys do a great job. And I get a tremendous amount of information out of it that I end up disseminating to my clients that are in all different types of industries. It’s very, it’s very sort of a great place. thank you for that, Matt. And thank you for organizing that. and, and again, and, and again, Matt, thank you for being a guest today. Uh, as Matt is the vice president of credentialing testing programs for the ASE. Matt, thank you so much for your time.

 

Matt Shepanek (26:58)

Thanks, Jeff. It’s been great.

 

Jeff Walter (27:00)

And to everybody out there, thank you for listening. Hope you enjoyed it.