When your air conditioning stops on a hot summer day or your furnace fails on a freezing winter morning, you need someone you can trust to come out to your home. At Watkins Heating & Cooling, our ongoing HVAC training program ensures that our technicians and installers deliver the highest level of quality service that you need. Led by Watkins service managers and industry experts from outside companies, our weekly training courses help keep our team at the top of the industry in knowledge and skills. With a 4.9 Google Rating on over 3000 reviews, we’re proud to be known for our craftsmanship, and for fixing things that the other guys can’t.

Why HVAC Training Matters for Customers

A faulty furnace or broken air conditioning can cause serious discomfort for your family or even lead to an emergency. When faced with these nightmare scenarios, you need a team who can fix your home comfort system quickly. The longer you’re without heat or cooling, the more stress your loved ones are under. You also need someone who can fix your system correctly. Shoddy craftsmanship from second-rate contractors can lead to repeated fixes and future breakdowns that cost you tons down the road.

That’s why we invest time and resources into rigorous HVAC training at Watkins. By having our technicians troubleshoot real-world scenarios in training, they become equipped with the skills to handle any job they face. As a family-owned HVAC company for over 30 years, we focus on lasting solutions, not quick fixes. Our HVAC training ensures everyone on our team can diagnose and fix your HVAC system promptly and professionally. This saves you money and keeps your home safe and comfortable.

If you’re an Ohio homeowner who chooses Watkins, you’re choosing a crew with thousands of hours in field experience, technical training, and NATE certifications. We only hire the best and brightest so you know what you’re getting. This commitment bring you the peace of mind that you deserve. When our Watkins HVAC tech arrives at your home, you can count on kindness, professionalism, and expertise. Our teammates are also trained to explain what’s happening with your system clearly to you each step of the way to help you stay educated on your system and make the best choice for you and your family.

Our focus on quality, backed by a two-year repair warranty and One-Year Buy-It-Back Guarantee, ensures your HVAC system performs reliably for years to come.

Why Working at Watkins is Different

We stand by our work at Watkins. If we mess up, we fix it or buy back your new HVAC system, guaranteed. That’s the Watkins difference: experience you trust and results you can count on. Replacing an HVAC system is a detailed job requiring skilled installers who take their time and don’t cut corners. We choose care over speed, paying our HVAC installers by the hour with bonuses for quality—not rushing jobs to beat the clock.

You can learn more about who we are here.

Our core values of Gratitude, Integrity, Respect, and Balance drive everything we do at Watkins Heating & Cooling. We hire based on character, employing people who align with these values of caring. Some of the most common feedback we receive in reviews is around how kind and compassionate our team is. We use in-house professionals (not subcontractors) who we treat like our own family.

Check out our customer reviews to learn more about what homeowners have to say about our team.

Launching a Career in the HVAC Field at Watkins

If you’re looking to start a career in the HVAC field, or advance in the HVAC industry, our in-house training can be the perfect path to that future. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, HVAC jobs are expected to grow 8% over the next 10 years, much faster than the average for all occupations, particularly with AI and the tech boom taking over so many other professions. This makes HVAC one of the safest careers to get into with an eye on the future.

While trade schools can provide a solid foundation to find an HVAC career, they often leave graduates in piles of debt and without real-world experience. If you enroll in a trade school, be prepared to sit in a classroom the vast majority of your time. At Watkins Heating & Cooling, we offer a better alternative: get paid to learn on the job. When you’re hired on at Watkins as a new technician, we’ll give you the optimal combination of in-house training programs and hands-on field experience with some of the top HVAC technicians in the industry. We only train individuals we’re willing to hire, ensuring a seamless transition into our team.

We provide all the copper, sheet metal, and other materials needed for every job and training course, so you can practice the basics of things like brazing till you master them. By taking the Watkins route, you can enter a career in the HVAC industry with real-world skills and no gap in income.

Whether you’re a teenager with your high school diploma, a college grad seeking an entry-level career, or you’re already in the field and looking to move up, we have the perfect setup to position you for success.

For those looking, please note: we do not offer online HVAC schools or online learning. We also do not provide training or jobs for HVACR technicians(the refrigeration side). We remain laser-focused on HVAC only.

Ready to jumpstart your HVAC career? Visit our careers page to apply today.

Weekly In-House Training: Building HVAC Excellence

On a weekly basis, our managers host HVAC training courses at our Centerville headquarters, where our team of 50+ HVAC technicians and installers sharpen their technical skills on real HVAC systems. From troubleshooting A/C units to fine-tuning boilers, these sessions ensure our team is ready to serve you. Our service manager Brad Gardner also teaches at Butler Tech separately, bringing valuable industry insights to his role at Watkins.

Watkins’ warehouse is filled with furnaces, heat pumps, air conditioners, and all the materials needed for our HVAC technicians to practice real-world scenarios. Our HVAC training focuses on troubleshooting fundamentals, teaching our team to tackle mechanical and electrical problems with precision, like diagnosing issues in an air conditioning system’s compressor. This hands-on approach builds the necessary skills for complex tasks they’ll need to use in real jobs, like brazing copper for air conditioning installations.

Separately from our service manager session, we often bring in pros from some of the top manufacturing companies in the industry like Trane and Daikin. These external training programs provide another professional perspective for our team to learn from and even more real-world simulations and scenarios to practice.

We don’t just follow a random plan – we train on the challenges we’re seeing most in customer homes, like the toughest jobs or unique systems many in the industry have never worked on before. It’s not just about learning new things either. We only hire those with a strong base of knowledge and experience, so much of our training is about repeating what our team already knows to keep their skills sharp. Here are just a couple quick examples of recent training units:

Electrical Wiring Exercises

In the image below, you can see our junior service techs building electrical boards to demo how the thermostat and relays work together in an HVAC system. This exercise helps them hone their wire preparation and connection techniques for a perfect electrical circuit.

Our Advanced Electrical Troubleshooting class in the image below was put on by the industry’s leading HVAC manufacturer, Trane. In this class, Trane’s pro simulated 14 HVAC electrical issue scenarios. Each technician left the training with a greater mastery of how to effectively troubleshoot any electrical problem they see in an HVAC system.

Expert Brazing Training

In our brazing sessions, HVAC technicians master proper techniques that set us apart, like flowing dry nitrogen during brazing to prevent oxidation. Unlike others who cut corners, we ensure every connection is secure and systems are optimized for longevity. This session in the image below was led by our CEO, David Watkins, who brings decades of HVAC field expertise to the table.

Mastering Every HVAC System

Our managers and industry experts conduct detailed training sessions on specific systems like heat pumps, furnaces, mini-splits, boilers, geothermal units, and everything in between, so our techs are experts on any equipment they run across.

In the image below, the team is doing a deep dive into heat pump parts, studying thermal expansion valves and electronic expansion valves to master precisely how these metering devices operate. This same in-depth, hands-on focus is applied to every system we service.

NATE Certification Exams: The Industry Gold Standard

When choosing an HVAC contractor, certifications matter. Our Watkins HVAC technicians prepare for and get certified through the North American Technician Excellence (NATE) exams, the industry’s top credential for HVAC expertise. These rigorous tests cover air conditioners, heat pumps, furnaces, boilers, mini-splits, water heaters, and more, ensuring our team delivers service you can trust. Our emphasis on technical training prepares them not just for these exams but for delivering top-tier results in the field.

Unlike companies using untrained subcontractors, we prioritize verifying our employees’ skills with certification exams before sending someone out to your home. This is just one way we guarantee quality for our Ohio customers.

Staying Ahead of Trends

In an industry that’s constantly evolving, our commitment to ongoing HVAC training keeps us at the cutting edge, ensuring we deliver the most efficient systems and informed guidance to customers seeking service.

Whether it’s navigating government updates like the 2025 legislature ending HVAC tax credits, or adapting to technological shifts such as the phase-out of R-410A refrigerant in favor of R-454B and R-32, we’re here to stay educated ourselves so that we can educate homeowners.

Our focus has always been, and will always be, on you, our customer. This is why we’re so passionate about constant training. And this is why we have a two-year repair warranty and One-Year Buy-It-Back Guarantee. At Watkins, we’ve got you covered, always improving for you and your home’s comfort.