For Taco Trainer David Holdorf, Dad Jokes Are Among His Best Tools

David Holdorf can now laugh about the memories of his first time leading a training session.

“The first couple classes were just completely scary. There were friends of mine who remember those classes. They were in the audience,” he said. “And they saw how rattled I was, nervous as could be.”

But after those initial jitters, Holdorf focused on using his engineering background to enhance his teaching. He’s a residential trainer for Taco who leads a dozen or two classes each year now, with confidence.

Holdorf is part of a three-person team at Taco who help customers learn about hydronic systems. He’s responsible for the Eastern region and is a regular on Taco’s webcast, “Taco Tuesday.”

Holdorf started working in the trades as a teenager when he worked in his family’s machine shop.

When he reached his mid-20s, Holdorf picked up some college education and decided he wanted to get serious about completing a degree. He was good at math and figured engineering would be a good career to pursue. He earned his degree from SUNY Maritime College in New York City where he learned how to work on boilers.

Experience and education move him into hydronics

After deciding a life at sea was not for him, he moved into the field fulltime, drawing from his education and his machine-shop experience to land a job working on the school’s boilers. One day a friend came calling from a business on Long Island who was looking for new college grads to design and support radiant hydronic systems.

“In the mid ‘90s, radiant flooring was relatively new here in the United States,” he said.

As his skills grew, he also developed a fondness for training.

“I learned that – with all this information rattling around in my head – I was surprisingly able to share it with others in ways that, somehow, imparted useful instruction to them. It’s not like I trained to be a trainer. It was just one of those things that came naturally to me, allowing me to get up in front of a room full of trade pros, helping them in ways I still find surprising today.”

Since those early days, he’s learned to be more effective by engaging the people he’s training. Holdorf draws on his practical experience as an engineer to teach students how to physically disassemble equipment, learn how the moving parts work together, and reassemble them. “The bigger need is then for trade pros to understand the working role of components as part of entire systems.

“Hydronics is marvelous in that way,” added Holdorf. “There are relatively few real mysteries – but it’s real helpful to understand something Dan Holohan refers to: ‘to be the water.’ If trade professionals come away from my classes with an understanding of how water and steam behave, and know a thing or two about how the technology we build facilitates, improves, manages and moves hydronic heat from place to place, we all win.”

Humor helps students become more engaged

Holdorf has learned to use humor while imparting useful information during his classes. “I excel at selfdeprecation and really bad dad jokes. The dad jokes are important. The worse they are, the better,” he said.

“You’ve gotta’ have fun,” added Holdorf. “We’re doing education, but we’re also entertaining at the same time, right? It’s the blend that we all enjoy – both the instructor and the class participants. Maybe there’s a lesson in life buried in there somewhere.”