February 13, 2026
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Written by:
David Boyes
Keeping your team engaged with training is a challenge that a lot of shops face from time to time. Even if training is quick and easy, and your team sees the value in it, motivating your team can be hard.
A simple way to bring some energy is to add incentives. Friendly competition, small prizes, and short challenges give the team something to work toward and look forward to everyday.
In this blog, we’ll cover why incentives matter, how to set up challenges that actually stick, and four simple ideas you can run in real shops with prizes that won’t create chaos.
Table of Contents
Incentives are challenges and prizes that give your team that extra motivational boost each day.
They help by giving training a clear target again. Instead of focusing on just getting it done, there’s something more enticing to aim for. Sometimes the reward is a small prize, sometimes it’s bragging rights. Either way, it gives teams a new and exciting reason to stay consistent with their training.
Incorporating incentives also helps the team stay connected. When people are working toward the same challenge, training stops being a solo task and becomes part of the shop’s culture.
Read More: Build an Auto Shop Culture That Technicians Expect
for Motivating Your TeamChallenges work best when they’re easy to understand and easy to stick with. If the rules take too much explaining or the scoring feels complicated, interest drops off fast. The goal is to make participation simple for the team and management easy to run without extra effort.
Short challenges tend to work better than long ones. A week, a few weeks, or a month gives the team enough time to build momentum without letting the challenge drag on. Shorter timeframes also make it easier to rotate challenges so things stay fresh and don’t start to feel repetitive.
It also helps to keep each challenge focused on one clear goal. When a challenge tries to reward too many things at once, it’s harder for people to know what they’re working toward. A single focus keeps expectations clear and participation higher.
Prizes don’t need to be expensive, but they do need to be something that feels worthwhile for your team, and keeps things interesting. A mix of team prizes and individual prizes usually works best for most shops.
Team prizes build culture and keep things supportive. Individual prizes add a little competition and raise the stakes a little bit.
Simple prizes that tend to work well include:
Be sure to reward effort and improvement too, not just top performance, so newer techs stay engaged and the same two people aren’t the only ones who ever win. When recognition highlights progress, consistency, or stepping outside someone’s comfort zone, it keeps motivation spread across the whole team. Over time, that kind of balanced recognition builds confidence, strengthens buy-in, and reinforces the idea that growth matters just as much as raw talent.
Incentives and challenges don’t have to be a big production. Most shops do better with something simple that’s easy to roll out and easy to keep up with, even during a busy week.
To get you started, here are four challenge ideas you can try in your shop.
The consistency week challenge is designed to keep your team engaged and focused on hitting their daily training goals for the week. The goal here is to reinforce training habits even when your shop is busy.
Challenge: Complete daily training at least 4 out of 5 days in one week.
To keep this challenge fair, structure it so multiple people can win. Instead of rewarding only one top performer, anyone who hits the goal earns the reward. If you want to add an extra push, build in a “Perfect Week” bonus that’s small but motivating.
For example, prizes could look like:
This one is for the tech who’s putting in the work and getting better, even if they’re not the highest scorer in the shop. Instead of rewarding whoever already knows the most, this challenge rewards progress. It’s a good way to keep newer techs engaged and keep experienced techs from coasting.
Challenge: Show the biggest improvement over the period of a month
“Improvement” should be measured in a way that’s simple and visible. You can pick one metric and stick with it for the month, such as:
Sometimes training starts to feel solitary. Everyone logs in, completes their training, and moves on. There’s nothing wrong with that, but over time training can feel disconnected from the rest of the shop. A team goal challenge shifts the focus from individual goals to team goals.
This format works well when you want to strengthen shop culture. It also creates some natural training accountability. If the whole team benefits from hitting the goal, people are more likely to remind each other, check in, and stay on track during the week.
Challenge: Hit a weekly training goal as a group.
To get started, pick one team target that’s clear and achievable, and if the team hits it, everyone earns the reward.
Here are a a few goal examples you could use:
Read More: Group Training vs. Individual Training: Finding What Works for Your Automotive Team
This challenge is meant to promote knowledge sharing across the team. Instead of training being an individual experience, it gives the shop a simple way to share quick takeaways that other teammates can actually use. It also makes it easier to recognize people who contribute something positive to the team.
Challenge: Share one useful takeaway from training each week.
Keep it simple and quick. Each tech shares something interesting that they learned from training. Then the team picks the most useful fact each week. The easiest way to keep this from dragging is to keep it short and focused on shop improvement.
A simple format could look like:
Keeping training new and engaging matters if you want it to stay consistent over time. When training starts to feel the same every day, it’s harder to keep people interested. That’s why Today’s Class builds gamification into our software. Gamification adds game elements to training to keep users engaged as they learn.
It gives daily training a little more structure and visibility. When a technician earns points, builds a streak, or sees their name move on a leaderboard, there’s a clear sign that progress is happening. It makes training feel active instead of passive.
It also gives the team something specific to work toward. Clear targets, small milestones, and visible rankings create focus. Streaks reward consistency. Points reward correct answers.
When progress is easy to see and hard work is recognized, it’s easier for teams to keep the habit of daily training steady week after week.
Read More: Why We Use Gamification In Our Training Programs
Motivating your team to train doesn’t require a big time investment. It usually comes down to just keeping training visible, giving people something clear to work toward, and recognizing progress along the way. Daily training may already be the expectation, but small incentives and friendly competition help maintain momentum when the shop gets busy and focus shifts elsewhere.
If you’d like to see how Today’s Class can help support and motivate your technicians and service advisors, reach out to our team. We’re happy to walk you through how the software works and how it can fit into your shop.
Read More: 8 Tips to Increase Participation Rates for Automotive Team Training
Tags: Training
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