Where Can I Attend Backhoe Training Courses?
Are you looking for a new career? One that will allow you to be out in the open air?
Are you hoping to get certified through backhoe training courses to be able to work on local construction projects?
Backhoe training courses are in abundance at schools across America. Do a quick search online, and you’ll find they come in a wide array of formats, some you can take from the comfort of your own home.
But is that the best route for you? Or should you consider backhoe training as just one aspect of your career? Should you find something that will make you even more successful as you take a job and look for advancement?
What Backhoe Training Courses Offer
The purpose of a backhoe training course is to get you familiar with operating the machinery. Different schools do that in different ways.
With a little searching, you’ll find some schools do that with video instruction. You pay for the course, you have access to a membership site that provides video instruction, and after watching a series of videos and answering a few questions, you’re awarded certification you can use to get a job.
It may sound like an easy path, especially if you don’t have a more viable solution near where you live. But will an employer really consider that beneficial when they look for someone to hire to operate their machinery?
Operating heavy machinery takes skill. If you don’t have the necessary skills in place, you can put yourself and others around you at risk.
What You Should Learn in a Successful Training Program
Here at West Coast Training, we feel all backhoe training should be two-tiered: classroom time and field experience. No matter how much time you spend learning in a classroom environment, nothing takes the place of getting your hands on the equipment.
To learn to operate a backhoe effectively, you should learn things like:
- Backhoe fundamentals
- Personal safety while operating the equipment
- Operational safety both in and around the equipment
- Machine safety to ensure your equipment is working the way it should
- Stick time, to understand how to operate a backhoe from startup to shutdown
- Preventative maintenance and procedures to recognize problems before they occur
- Trenching and excavation techniques
- How to transport equipment to the worksite, including loading and unloading procedures
Think you can learn all that from a video? Or even from a one- or two-day course where you’re overwhelmed in just a few hours? And competing for stick time with several other classmates?
Where You Learn Isn’t as Important as What You Learn
Some backhoe training courses focus on one thing: giving you just enough information to pass a test. Can you really fully understand everything there is to know about a piece of heavy equipment in one day?
When you find the right training program, you’ll know it almost right away.
Take our backhoe training—it’s actually a part of our larger Heavy Equipment Operator course. We don’t focus on giving you as much information as possible in one day, on one piece of equipment, and setting you loose. Instead, we work to maximize your earning potential and give you a lifetime of knowledge to fully help you in your career.
Our Heavy Equipment Operator course is an 8-week program that provides you with both classroom and hands-on experience for 10 hours a day, 50 hours a week. That means that when you graduate from our program, you’ll have over 400 hours of quality instruction that ensures you understand every nuance of the job, from startup to shutdown, from beginning to end. And the backhoe is just one piece of machinery you’ll learn to operate. Other equipment includes dozers, graders, excavators, loaders, and more.
How would that look to a potential employer?
Sounds good, right?
But what if you’re not from around here? What if you don’t call Washington home?
That’s not a problem. We offer complimentary double-occupancy housing in our local motel for all students. But if you prefer to have your own accommodation, there are local RV places around too. We also offer complimentary transportation from our housing to the school and twice per week to the grocery store. We can also help with bus transportation and make local area recommendations.
And wouldn’t it be nice to know that after two months of training, you would have valuable experience that employers want, would be knocking on your door for, for opportunities that would never exist with a simple one-day online course?
It’s Who You Know, Not What You Know
Those quick, one-day online courses are set up by businesses that are building opportunities for themselves to make money. They automate the certificate program in order to make it easy on themselves. Record a video once, write a workbook once, and sell it many times.
We have an entirely different approach. Just look at our history.
West Coast Training was founded on the desire to provide the best curriculum by utilizing the best instructors in the field. These aren’t professional teachers—these are some of the best operators in the business, who work in the field every day and can give you first-hand testimony to what backhoe operations are really all about.
What’s more, we’re not just a “churning” site that takes your money, sends you a certificate, and considers the job finished. We care about you for years to come.
We belong to the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER) guidelines. That means your credentials will be recognized nationally; you can take your training and certification wherever you choose to look for employment.
And because we also want to make sure you get a job that offers you stability and advancement, we also provide postgraduate employment services to help you achieve your goals. What other backhoe training courses provide you with these things?
- Job search strategies and resources
- Resume preparation help
- Interview practice
- Guidance throughout the process
We’re in it for the long term. We don’t succeed unless you succeed. That means ensuring you have the right skills, make the right connections, and move forward with your career.
No matter where you choose to live.
Are you ready to move forward, to select a training program that cares about you from beginning to end?
The best place to start is with our free quiz. You can find out in minutes if our Heavy Equipment Training program is right for you.
Come on, what are you waiting for?