News

Frontline Training Spotlight: Dallas Area Rapid Transit

Posted April 2021

Time and again, providing good training has been shown to yield an overwhelmingly positive return on investment. Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) has put that fact into practice and has championed its frontline workforce training program, despite the disruption caused by the pandemic. DART has continued to provide employees with the training resources they need by using new methods of delivery and responding to new requirements.

The agency’s leadership has looked beyond the usual method of doing things to find innovative and effective ways to enhance maintenance capacity and capability. According to Carol Wise, DART’s Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, “At DART, we take great pride in our training department. Our dedication to upgrading the skills of our workforce means that our workers are equipped to provide better and safer transit services to our customers. We believe that increased training also leads to greater innovation and problem solving by our team. DART’s involvement in the Rail Car Consortium has also given us a national perspective and the opportunity to collaborate and contribute to high quality training materials in concert with our local union.”

DART’s rail maintenance training department has training specialists who are dedicated to specific subject areas and have brought in-house some previously contracted out courses. In-house training specialists are now able to tailor the classes specifically to DART’s rail equipment. Between 60 and 70 percent of rail car maintenance training is now done in-house with only the most specialized classes still taught by contractors. Feedback from employees has been positive because they now receive training on equipment they have seen before and know they will be working on soon. In addition, DART recently reorganized maintenance training into separate entities creating bus and rail maintenance departments. Rail maintenance training will be located in the rail maintenance shop in closer proximity to the workers adding greater focus to individual and customized training.

DART’s general framework for training is structured similarly to a college degree track for a particular major. Each occupation has a list of classes and the time frame in which they should be completed. There are core classes that are required as well as a list of courses that they can choose from once those classes have been completed. At DART this training schedule is called a “career plan” and is a valuable tool for employees to keep track of their training and for the agency to make sure that employees are progressing.

Sam Clark, Manager of Maintenance Training, says that in the 20 years that he has been with the agency, DART has continuously had a strong emphasis placed on training. “There has always been an understanding that to have a workforce that operates at capacity, they need to be trained the right way. Very few technicians come in with transit experience so it is essential to use training to build them into performers that help meet the needs of the agency. DART’s maintenance training program guides that process,” says Clark.

Each training specialist has a particular group of technicians assigned to them based on occupation. Within a particular client base, the training specialists are responsible for monitoring the progression of the technicians through the six classifications, or levels. They interact with the shop managers, do follow-up work when training is completed, and make sure that knowledge has transferred from the classroom to the field.

President of ATU Local 1338, Ken Day, says that union buy-in is critical to the success of any training program. It also serves as a good recruitment tool. “If you have labor bragging about the training program, that makes a huge difference for people deciding whether they want to work somewhere,” says President Day. He sees DART’s participation in the national training consortiums as a step in the right direction, in that respect. DART is also implementing new technologies like battery electric buses. From President Day’s perspective, every time a new piece of technology is brought in, it is an opportunity to develop a new and improved training program.

For many agencies, the pandemic halted or constrained training efforts and caused focus to shift to other concerns. Despite the circumstances, DART has adapted its training and made sure that employees have what they need in order to effectively learn in an era of social distancing and remote learning. To that end, the agency is implementing a new learning management system so that employees can access course resources virtually and stay on top of class schedules and the list of required classes for their career plan.

DART has begun creating and incorporating several types of videos as a supplement to traditional classroom training. Prior to the start of the pandemic, DART trainers had started creating short videos that quickly demonstrate a certain maintenance task. These “micro-learning” videos have just the information that is needed for a technician out in the field to follow step-by-step instructions to perform a given task. The need for tools like this only increased after the start of the pandemic because of social distancing requirements.

In the full instructional videos, a technician is shown completing a task while voice-over narration describes the detailed instructions. DART trainers have adopted this format for creating the videos because it provides both visual and verbal cues to help the trainee properly understand what is being done and enable them to do the same tasks on their own.

The value of these videos as instructional aids goes beyond simply supplementing the classroom training. Some components of the equipment that the technicians are required to work on are hard to teach how to maintain because of lack of visibility of certain parts or difficulty in demonstrating due to tight spaces. 3-D animation and videos capture every side of the equipment in detail so that employees get a full grasp of the material.

DART benefits from its membership in three of the Transportation Learning Center’s national training consortiums, which are signals, rail car, and traction power maintenance. For each consortium, DART shares in costs and provides subject matter expertise for the Center’s instructional designers who then create introductory and advanced instruction-ready and interactive courses. These courses are based on APTA-approved and industry-recognized training standards. Throughout the entire coursework development process, member agencies direct, test, and review training materials.
Each consortium course includes: instructor guide, participant guide, presentation slides, hands-on activities, quizzes, course assessments, answer sheets, handouts and job-aids. Video and online instruction are also included for some courses.

All materials are available to DART via the Center’s web portal, www.TransitTraining.net . Member agencies also gain access to Train-the-Trainer sessions, Mentor checklists, searchable inventory of member location technologies, and eLearning lessons.

For more information on the national training consortiums, please contact Xinge Wang .