Why 52% of Your Future Managers Are Opting Out

The owner couldn’t stop talking about the new training system. He described how much time he and his managers had spent in the past walking through process after process, making sure their teams understood what was expected.

But now, something had shifted with this new system. His team finally got it. They were doing the work with more confidence and engagement in their job.

Cameron McBurnett—network performance manager at Rainbow Restoration—listened quietly, nodding.

But underneath the owner’s enthusiasm, he heard something else. Relief.

“They spent a lot of time with their teams, coaching them, getting them to learn,” McBurnett recalled. “This [system] has allowed them to really provide their teams with more resources that actually cater to their roles.”

In a recent Cleanfax + KnowHow webinar, McBurnett joined Bobbie Jo Burnett, training and onboarding manager at FRSTeam, and KnowHow’s CEO Leighton Healey to talk about why that kind of relief is still rare in the restoration industry, and why microlearning might be the way to scale it.

The number that should worry you

Most (52%) Gen Z workers are intentionally avoiding management roles. Not just uninterested. Not just hesitant. Intentionally avoiding.

“One of the stated reasons behind it,” said Leighton Healey, KnowHow CEO, “is because they feel that the company lacks the training and the support resources and the infrastructure needed to set them up for success.”

Additionally, a third of staff said their company’s training is so outdated that they don’t trust it. They’re clicking through training to check boxes, not to learn. And when they hit the job site unprepared? “I’m sorry, ma’am. No one told me how to do this,” Healey described the typical response. “I’m just going to wait for my supervisor to call me,” all of which corrodes customers’ trust.

The infrastructure challenge

Here’s what makes the training challenge worse: The workers entering your company probably don’t own a laptop.

Healey broke it down: “A lot of workers, especially on frontline roles, are generally coming from lower to middle-income homes,” he said. And when you look at the prevalence of those homes owning desktops versus being completely reliant on mobile devices, the rates are really skewed toward mobile devices, he explained.

Yet training programs are still designed by people building courses for devices their incoming workforce doesn’t have.

The result? Sometimes, owners literally hand over their personal laptops—with access to everything on an owner’s laptop—to technicians “who’ve been there for no less than an hour” just so they can complete mandatory training.

What works

Burnett used a fitness analogy to explain: “You can’t do a couple of workouts now and then and expect to get results. You’ve got to have that consistency, and you’ve got to have some variety.”

Her framework split training into three complementary pieces:

1. In-person training teaches the why— “It’s where you start building that culture with your teams. It’s where you start building confidence.”
2. Desktop training covers the what—foundational knowledge through longer modules that establish baseline competence.
3. Microlearning content on mobile devices delivers the how—“those short little burst TikTok style videos that really kind of start teaching you the how right there in the moment.”

The crucial shift? Training isn’t going to be a checkbox activity, Burnett explained. “It’s going to be something that happens while you’re doing that thing.”

The “no time” excuse that collapsed

The most common objection to building this kind of system is the lack of time and/or resources.

McBurnett used to believe that, too. It’d take him a month to create a single piece of training content—written instructions, videos, etc. “I remember just thinking, God, I wish there was a quick way where I could just pull this in and it would just write this thing for me,” he said.

Now? “Something that took me a month now takes minutes,” McBurnett explained.

The shift came when platforms like KnowHow started using artificial intelligence (AI) to turn raw footage into structured training. Shoot a video on your phone, upload it, and KnowHow’s system breaks it into searchable modules, available in multiple languages, accessible on any device.

Burnett’s using it to transform FRSTeam’s entire approach. She shoots videos on her iPhone, then KnowHow’s AI parcels them into step-by-step training. Her teams are “absolutely loving it and are demanding more.”

The barriers to creating microlearning content that reinforces what people are taught have never been lower.

What microlearning looks like when it works

A new hire at one of FRSTeam’s locations sent Burnett an email a few days after onboarding: “Oh my gosh, this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. You guys really seem to have your stuff together. I can’t wait to tell people about this learning platform.”

That enthusiasm doesn’t stay contained. Healey describes what happens when training becomes something worth talking about: Workers, who used to complain about their jobs start saying, “That’s not how they do it at my company.” Their friends get curious. They apply, and soon, “it’s almost uncommon to get an applicant who’s NOT a referral.”

“When you work with your friends and you enjoy your place of work,” Healey observes, “you stick around.”

Where to begin

Start with an anonymous survey asking current staff one question: “Thinking back to your first 60 days on the job, give me some examples of things that were surprisingly unclear or where you honestly felt unsupported.”

Create permission to point at the holes in your training. Then pick one process—something simple that drives you crazy because it’s inconsistent—and document it. Share it with your team. Get their feedback.

“Don’t try to create your whole library at one time or in one day or in one week,” Burnett advised. “Start small and build onto it.”

The relief doesn’t arrive on day one. But when it comes, your technicians stop deflecting blame to save face with customers. They stop avoiding management roles because they don’t trust the support infrastructure. Finally, they stop clicking through training as a check box exercise. And that’s when you stop being the answer to every question—and start being the owner who can finally exhale.