Every company in America today is struggling to find the talented people they need to fuel their continued growth.

Every industry is dealing with a pending “brain drain”and working hard to find new people to join their teams. Add in the challenges of appealing to a new generation of workers that have unique desires for their nascent careers, and you can be left with a daunting challenge.

And there is little doubt that finding new talent is a real issue for all businesses today. However, the reality is that finding talent is actually one of the easier parts of building a dynamic team of engaged and successful people.

The far more difficult challenge is to train, educate and promote these new people to become long-term, successful players in your company and our industry. Finding them can be relatively easy. Keeping them is the hard part.

While every business faces challenges in keeping and promoting new people, our industry faces an even higher hurdle. We need to train our new people in a highly technical and ever-evolving product offering.

Further, we need to provide continuing education for those people so they can remain a value-added resource to their customers. This was always a challenge, but it is made even more difficult today due to the unrelenting pace of change in both the core products we offer and the underlying technology they are built upon.

However, our industry does benefit from one very important resource to help combat all these challenges.

We all know that people are the fuel for our success and future growth. ASA University is the accelerant that ignites that fuel to help push every one of our people to the next level.

That resource is ASA University.

ASA University is an online repository of more than 200 courses and 20 unique role-based training tracks captured in five colleges: sales/sales management; warehouse management; purchasing and inventory management; leadership and executive management; and business management — available to every ASA member company and their teams at price points that won’t come close to breaking the bank. And don’t forget about the more than 20 job description and assessment templates available for download.

ASA University ProductPro product knowledge courses cover everything from water heaters to PVF products to fixtures and faucets. The university’s flagship Essentials brand targets specific areas of a typical wholesale distribution business, focusing on the ultimate goal of improving profitability.

Bottom line: ASA University has the classes and materials your people need. This resource helps level the playing field for our industry and gives us the chance to train and educate new entrants.

It also offers these new talented people the fuel they need to build their careers in an industry that so desperately needs their skills.

This is the magic of ASA University. It allows us to hire bright new people that need to know nothing more about our business than how to flush a toilet. With hard work and effort on their part, ASA University can help transform these people into knowledgeable and valuable long-term members of our teams.

We all know that people are the fuel for our success and future growth. ASA University is the accelerant that ignites that fuel to help push every one of our people to the next level.

We invest in our people. Our people invest in themselves. And we all benefit — with the help of ASA University.

Be well, thanks,

Bill