by Richard Vurva

Despite being online for just a few months, the NAHAD Institute (www.nahad.org) is receiving positive response from distributors.

Developed by the National Association of Hose and Accessories Distributors, the NAHAD Institute is the education initiative begun more than three years ago to define a comprehensive curriculum for the hose and accessories distribution industry. It is made up of four separate components, with a fifth under development.

Field testing conducted using employees of NAHAD members indicate that companies are eager to utilize the Internet as a training tool.

“The NI Training Toolkit provides an opportunity to take any person in any level of the organization and provide them with a training guide to help employees improve themselves, and therefore improve the companies they work for,” says Joe Mika, Goodall president.

Mika is co-chairman of NAHAD’s training and education committee, which created the NAHAD Institute.

Goodall plans to adopt the toolkit as a key element of its employee training efforts.

“We’ll have someone monitor the performance of each employee going through the different courses,” Mika says. “He’ll keep a training portfolio on each employee. When we’re looking to promote someone from within the company, we can go back to this portfolio to see what training this individual has had.”

The toolkit is an online tool that helps distributors create a training plan for a department or for an individual employee. After creating a plan, a distributor can view it or change it at any time by entering a user name and password. They can also search for training resources for specific job categories. For example, a recent search for materials on sales management produced 18 programs, including classroom instruction offered through the University of Industrial Distribution, videos, workbooks and textbooks.

Valuable resource tool
It’s an incredible tool,” Mika says. “There is more information available on the NAHAD Institute than any distributor has in a training library.”

Chuck Holmes of the Center for Distribution Excellence, co-developer with NAHAD of NI On-Line, one component of the NAHAD Institute, says the Internet training is designed to augment, not replace, other training.

“The idea of NI On-Line is to have a readily accessible, cost-effective method for providing basic training in a wide variety of areas to managers and employees,” he says. “The objective with an NI On-Line course is to teach the basic concepts and vocabulary of a subject. More advanced training in the same subjects, as well as others, is available through the University of Industrial Distribution, the NAW videoconferences in which NAHAD participates and other programs led by experts.”

Steve Gray of Lewis Goetz & Co., a Pittsburgh-based distributor, says distributors will be impressed by the breadth of training material available.

“As distributors, we’re all starved for information about how to train our people cheaply and effectively,” he says. “This is going to be a big benefit. When we have a new hire, we now have a vehicle where we can give that person an idea of what their job requirements are going to be.”

He says the training materials are broad-based, with modules suited to a wide variety of job levels within a distributorship. The management curriculum of 22 courses is scheduled for completion by fall 2001, and employee-level courses will be added through summer and fall of this year.

“This is a better resource even than some larger NAHAD members have, and it’s available to every member,” he says.

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2001 issue of Progressive Distributor. Copyright 2001.

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