Company Spotlight: How STC is Structured to Solve the Training Problem 

The team at Solar Tech Collective (STC) has released four courses covering challenging topics over the past 18 months: Ground-fault Troubleshooting, NFPA 70B, 2026 NEC Changes, and Comprehensive 2026 NEC Requirements for Electrotech. Who are these people and why should you trust them? 

Today, STC is a thriving consulting and training organization that focuses on training and product development challenges that are impeding the development and deployment of electrotech. It all started with a conversation during a NABCEP conference happy hour in 2024, when Rebekah Hren, Brian Mehalic, Jason Fisher, and Alex Jahp found themselves in a passionate discussion about the unforced errors and problematic patterns they’d witnessed time and time again in training and product development projects.

Challenges and Patterns

If there is widespread acknowledgement that training is essential to improving safety and productivity in the solar, storage, and electrotech space in general, why does it so frequently fail to deliver? STC identified a veritable litany of blunders they’d seen over their decades of experience, such as: 

• Assuming that internal technical experts are the right folks to develop training programs, while also assuming they “know it all” and have kept up with the industry
• A focus on conceptual knowledge, rather than applying practical skills
• Training as an afterthought, without the programmatic support to be effective
• Shoestring budgets leading to poorly designed/incomplete/unengaging/ineffective content 
• Ignoring the needs of the intended audience – not everyone is an engineer, nor is everyone a skilled technician 
• “Reinventing the wheel” with seemingly endless iterations on a few of the same general courses 
• Insufficient support from technical experts for students as they progress through a course

Developing a Solution

The driving force behind the creation of Solar Tech Collective (STC): most organizations lack the right people and structure to create effective training. The vision: a company purpose-built to better support the growth of the companies and people in the electrotech space. 

From the get-go STC internalized key elements to address these challenges and set itself apart from other organizations:

• Training is at the heart of STC. The very people that develop the courses provide support as folks progress through them
• STC is out there. They carefully assess what a particular audience needs to make a class effective and enjoy spending weeks sweating in PPE in the field to create the content
• STC has a deep bench. All team members have both practical subject matter expertise and extensive curriculum development experience and enjoy collaborating closely
• STC is continually building expertise through technical consulting, providing support and actionable guidance to clients ranging from Fortune Global 500 companies to early-stage startups
• STC helps write the standards. They are deeply involved in the development of codes and standards, ensuring that they are in the room learning both what changed and why
• STC doesn’t work in a silo. They have an extensive network that allows external collaboration and input gathering 
• STC strives to make training as accessible as possible, designing courses that are company-agnostic and hosted on multiple platforms to expand their reach and keep costs down

How Does STC Develop a Course?

Magic? Sheer force of will? While good training does always involve a bit of magic and requires persistence, STC has developed an effective, methodical approach over the years: 

1. Course Origination

Determining what to develop and when typically emerges organically through discussions with clients, teaching at conferences, and via input from friends and colleagues across the industry about challenges and opportunities they see. Any proposed course is rigorously assessed to ensure a sufficient addressable market. This is a delicate balance between content depth, development cost, and duration.

2. Course Structure

The team elaborates a course structure, including lesson titles, descriptions, learning objectives, and required content type(s). This step is crucial to ensuring the content delivers the outcomes potential customers seek: improved safety and job performance. 

3. Project Management

A project plan is created including progress tracking documents, a schedule, and a budget. The project tracking documents contain a breakdown of all of the content that needs to be developed, who is going to develop it, who is going to review it, and when it is going to be delivered. The creation of a single lesson involves dozens of creative steps and technical reviews before it is finished, making scrupulous project management key. 

4. Content Development

Each lesson is designed around the content and audience. Beyond research and the development of a presentation and graphics, a single lesson may also involve travel to the field, filming that requires detailed scripting, input from external technical experts, and more. 

Proper recording setups to produce high-quality audio and video is key, whether sitting in the office or in the field on a noisy jobsite. STC performs all of the video and audio creation and editing themselves to ensure technical accuracy and high quality.

5. Course Rollout

STC works closely with multiple industry-leading training providers to host their training, like Heatspring, and make it available to as many students as possible. STC facilitates the initial build out and provides ongoing curriculum updates in the various training provider learning management systems.

6. Ongoing Development and Student Support

Courses continually evolve as regulations, best practices, or interpretations change. Students receive detailed responses within a single business day to any comment or question that is thrown their way. And mistakes happen: when they do STC is quick to make corrections to ensure accuracy.

What’s New with STC?

Turning it all over to the robots. Just kidding! STC is real. Really real. And while AI is a valuable tool, it’ll never replace the human side of training, where connections are key to understanding.

Beyond that: a comprehensive class on the 2026 National Electrical Code (NEC®) covering all things electrotech – PV, ESS, EVs, PCS, and more. After that STC will return to developing classes to improve the skills of O&M technicians with “central inverters 101” and thermal imaging training on the docket.

On the consulting side, STC is constantly evolving its processes to provide ongoing code and standards support covering more than 35 codes and standards to companies in the product development space.

Finally, STC continues to dream big: aspirational goals include delivering more in-person training and spending more time working in beautiful places.

Get in touch with them if you have any projects that fit that description!