Last year, when the National Plasterers Council hired Jana Auringer as its first director of education, she came in with plenty of ideas.
After all, she had suggested creating the position in the first place.
“At one point I said, ‘You need to hire a person who does nothing but work on the education,’ ” in the hopes of expediting development, approval and implementation of new programs, which had been done by committee up to that point.
Thus far in her new post, she’s trained instructors and vetted curricula for the organization’s new Spanish-language start-up classes that debut this show season, including at the 2026 NPC Conference. She wants to make sure that the best practices translate absolutely accurately from one language to the next. She also has piloted remote classes on meeting apps such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom for companies interested in training multiple staffers remotely.
She’s had a varied career, with a background in plastering, service and maintenance, chemistry, and plaster inspections. With that breadth and depth of knowledge, it comes as no surprise she was hired for the job.
Varied experience
Auringer’s career has spanned 40-plus years.
Many know her from the last position she held, as a part of the quality assurance team for Pebble Technology Inc., where she worked for 12 years before taking her NPC post. She would examine pools and spas with warranty issues to determine the cause of the problem.
“We would meet at the job site and look to see if it was a material defect, an application issue, or a water-chemistry problem— just try to determine what the problem is and how to best rectify the situation,” she says. “So basically I would look at pools where somebody was upset and make them happy.”
But she she’d had several industry careers before she even joined the materials supplier.
She happened into the industry as a college student, when she took a job as a receptionist at a plaster company.
“I didn’t know anything about pools, but curiosity got the best of me, and I started to watch what they did,” she says.
When it was time for her boss to retire, she started a new plaster firm with a partner, and her curiosity for the trade grew.
“I could demo a pool like nobody’s business,” she says.
Gaining expertise
After she and her partner sold the company, she began performing start-ups for one of her plaster company’s clients. She had to learn about chemistry and water testing, but it took a minute to find the right mentors. When the first person who offered to help told her to use the same amount of chemical in every pool, she had a bad feeling.
“Something just didn’t seem right,” she says. “I know how to cook, and you don’t always use the same amount of ingredients on every cake you bake. Or all the cookies you make – sometimes you make a dozen, sometimes you make three dozen. It just didn’t make sense to me that no matter how big the pool was you would put in [the same amount of chemicals].”
She looked around and, soon enough, she connected with Jack Beane of Jack’s Magic, as well as pool-surface expert Randy Dukes. “They led me down the right path,” Auringer says.
Her start-up business grew into a full-blown service and maintenance company. “The builder who contracted me to do the start-ups asked me to do the pool school – I would train owners how to use the pool. … [Those homeowners] asked me if I would service their pools, so I built a service route out of doing start-ups,” she says.
After she sold her route, a local materials supplier asked her to help with a case study of pools in the area that had plaster issues. From there, she began her work as a third-party independent plaster consultant, before eventually joining PebbleTec.
Organizational cred
Her tenure as an industry volunteer has played as much a role putting her on the national stage as her job with the manufacturer.
She has a decades-long history with NPC and participated in many of its education and research programs. A member since the organization’s early days, she has served as chairman of the Research Committee, vice chair of the Technical Advisory Committee, and a member of the Technical Advisory Committee and Education Committee, as well as serving on the Board of Directors and the Advisory Board of the National Pool Industry Research Center. In 2023, she was recognized as Volunteer of the Year, and given the title Member of the Year four times.
Her industry participation goes beyond NPC. She has held volunteer positions with the Pool & Hot Tub Alliance, as well as its predecessor, the Association of Pool & Spa Professionals. She has served on the PHTA Board of Directors, chaired the APSP Service Council for two terms, and volunteered on the Service Education Committee. In 2012, she was named among the first group of PHTA Fellows, the organization’s lifetime achievement award. That same year, APSP Region 3 named her Volunteer of the Decade. She now serves as a subject matter expert on PHTA’s Recreation Water and Air Quality Committee. She also is a faculty member of Genesis.
The technical side of the industry had few women in the early days, but Auringer gained her education by participating in the right places. “Once I got on the Technical Committee for NPC, I started learning a lot more about the plaster itself and the battles we were facing at that time.”
Before working in the pool and spa industry, Auringer had pursued careers in education and accounting. But when those fields didn’t prove fulfilling, it was the seemingly random part-time job with the plaster company that grabbed her attention for the long run.
Auringer explains the attraction: “It’s an outdoor environment, and nothing’s ever staying the same. Our materials change, our weather changes, our applicators and our hired help changes.”
She enjoys that vibe while working from her home on a fishing lake in Northeast Texas. “It can be a bit of a pain when I have to travel, because I have to leave five hours before my flight, but there’s a solitude out here,” she says. “It’s a great little community.”
