Why Take an Online Home Inspection Course?
Our students tell us there are three solid reasons they benefitted most from our online course: Time, learning style, and retention.
Time
The internet affords us what many likely remember used to be available only at the office with expensive, high-end servers and desktop computers. I worked in corporate America in the 90s and remember thinking about how convenient life was becoming and how information was being shared in ways that were nearly impossible to imagine just 25 years previous.
It’s one of the reasons we started HI-TEC Home Inspection Training. Technology is at the point where we could author, design, film, edit, and post our unique curriculum and teaching style in a matter of weeks to a state-of-the-art platform where anyone can have access to it. Because of technology, it is now possible to spend weeks instead of years designing an effective distance learning course people can learn and grow from.
For the student, an online course means so much more than time, but let’s face it, the digital age has us focused on time more than any other period in human history. Families are now two-income households and we’re all working harder to balance career and personal life. Between maintaining our careers and raising the kids, Americans need to budget what little personal time we get when we’re awake. Fewer and fewer people have the time or money to take two weeks off to learn a new career.
An online education where we can pick and choose the time we’ll dedicate to it is the most effective way to further a career or start a new one.
Learning Style
You may have heard or read how everyone has a different learning style. We learn through seeing, hearing, or interacting with the subject matter and each of us has a dominant learning style where, when used correctly, we retain the most information.
I’ve seen and heard some modern technical trainers say that online learning is not effective when learning home inspections. They say that without the hands on teaching, there can be no learning. What I find amusing about their position is how these so-called “educators” spend the vast majority of their in-class time lecturing while students sit at a desk.
If we were to dig a little deeper, we’d see how home inspections is a technical, knowledge-based industry, and it is most important to absorb the knowledge first before applying it in the field. This is why so many states require field training in addition to the classroom environment in order to obtain a home inspector’s license. Since hands-on comes after the classroom, then it really shouldn’t matter whether the classroom is in byte-sized chunks on the student’s personal schedule or in a classroom over a two-week period.
Visual and auditory learning styles can be catered to in an online class, and HI-TEC does an amazing job of combining pictures, lectures, and video to accomplish just that. Take a look at our free preview and see for yourself how we do it.
Retention
If you’ve ever taken a course to prepare for a professional level exam, you know how stressful it can be to prepare. The questions we often ask ourselves are: What’s the best way to study? How do we guarantee we’ll remember enough to pass the exam? What will my employer think if I don’t pass on the first attempt? Finally, once we pass the exam, a good portion of what we learned is quickly forgotten. The retained portion is boiled down to only the information we need to know to do our job.
With home inspections, it’s a little different. Home inspectors must retain nearly everything they learn in class because they experience everything learned in class each week as they perform inspections. That’s why we give each student access to their online materials for a year after they pass the exam. The ability to go back and revisit any portion of the training you want is critical to retaining the knowledge you need. You can’t do that with live in-person training, and it’s why we provide every student from our live classroom sessions with the online materials, too.
I say in class and while performing consulting services with graduates, “Repetition is the mother of skill.” Combining a unique teaching style addressing multiple learning styles with the ability to go back and revisit it frequently and at any time results in retention; it’s retention that makes the first year home inspector successful.
Closing
HI-TEC thinks like a school AND a business. We have live classes and a fully self-paced curriculum to suit the many needs of our students. We discuss everything about the home inspection career in every class we teach. Like we’ve mentioned so many times, we want to be a part of your success and that means teaching you everything we know about passing the exam and starting your career. It’s how we give you the high ground advantage. We’re better because we focus on the core competencies you need to get started. We’ve worked for the biggest schools in the country. We know what students need to be successful, and how to best provide everyone with the knowledge and skills required to make home inspections a lifelong career. We don’t make sales pitches in class, and we teach the marketing in every class so you can get licensed, get marketing, and start recouping your investment right away.
Give us a call at 877.51.HI.TEC and let one of our admissions experts help you get the answers you need!