Putting a young tech on a career path

June 26, 2014
Finding a technician at all can be a challenge in many parts of the country, but finding capable, productive, quality technicians in many cases is a near impossibility.

One of the most consistent and pervasive challenges facing repair shop owners and service managers is keeping their shops fully staffed with technicians who are up to date on their training and capable of working on late model vehicles. Finding a technician at all can be a challenge in many parts of the country, but finding capable, productive, quality technicians in many cases is a near impossibility.

The reasons for this are many and varied, but big factors in all of this are our lack of a game plan in training and recruiting as well as negative perceptions of the industry. If we do not put automotive repair out there as a viable career option early, making training opportunities highly visible, attractive and available to young people graduating from high school today, we might find ourselves in an ever tightening staffing crunch that will begin to impact our business and our ability to compete or even survive. Come to think of it, this kind of sounds like where we are today.

Cars today are very complicated, with systems and sub-systems that require in depth training, special equipment and skills way beyond anything we saw in the 1980s. The good news is that cars are much more reliable than they ever used to be. The bad news is that when they break, you have to have specialized knowledge, skill and experience to fix them. The current shortage of qualified technicians is a critical issue facing repair shops in the U.S. and a significant risk to the automotive repair industry, particularly away from the dealership world.

New car dealers, representing car manufacturers from all around the world, have long faced the challenge of staffing their service departments. Unlike the automotive aftermarket, which can refer a customer back to the dealer when they can’t or don’t want to work on a particular vehicle for a particular problem, dealerships have to be ready to handle whatever shows up at their doors. They have long aligned themselves with high school, technical school and community college automotive technology programs and have long had the benefit of well trained technicians graduating with career paths laid out.

There are automotive technology programs across the country that are dying for sponsors, and though forming these types of partnerships can be time consuming, we are talking about our viability and survival and something worth exploring. Being a sponsor is not a marriage or financial obligation, but it is getting involved in the direction the automotive repair industry goes and doing something very constructive in shaping what that future industry would look like. That you would have access to an emerging generation of technicians in this effort would seem a great side benefit to your sacrificing a few hours of your time each month.

Making Your Mark
I think all of us dream about that perfect tech, with that perfect combination of knowledge, skill and experience walking in off the street and rescuing our service operation. But while we are waiting for that unlikely event to occur, I am going to suggest something a bit more constructive and have you contact an appropriate high school, technical school or community college in your area and see what they might have to offer. Get on their industry advisory board, donate some of your time or buy them a piece of equipment and take the time to meet some of the students. All of this is an investment in your future. Even though we still can hope and pray that perfect tech walks in and saves us somewhere along the way, beginning to partner with a local school gives us the opportunity to engage and interact with both students and teachers and gives us the very real opportunity to use that real world experience we have been gaining all these years and advise on curriculum and training priorities.

Most important of all, we get to engage and interact with the technicians of tomorrow and get first crack at the training, knowledge and experience they represent. Identify promising students and set up internships for them, get to know them, while they get to know you. Give them a career path while investing in your tomorrow. Begin to solve your staffing problem instead of waiting for that solution to walk in your door.

Who’s Available to Hire?
Before I go too much further I want to talk to you about who we are hiring out there and why old strategies for recruiting and retaining this generation of workers might not work and why we need to be aware of who we are talking to if you want to make this work for us and make this work for them.

Generation Y, otherwise known as the millennial generation, refers to individuals born between 1982 and 2005. This is the newest generation to enter the workforce. A great many of us are challenged by them, but that is often our treating them like other generations and making little or no effort to understand them. Rather than waiting for them to blindly follow us, which probably won’t happen, we need to find ways to effectively engage them and lead them, and in this, to understand what makes them tick.

Millenials have been praised and rewarded for creativity, innovation and thinking outside the box since they were potty trained. They were not told that coloring outside of the lines was wrong; they were praised for their courage and creativity. Millenials are comfortable with and even look forward to change. They have less appreciation for something that is static or lasts than for something that changes or is upgradeable. They were playing advanced video games by the time they were 7 or 8. Millenials do not believe in “no pain, no gain” and cannot relate to “I have paid my dues, so should you.” In Millenial thinking suffering is not part of the learning curve.

Millenials want to be on a team and believe that everyone can and should contribute. They grew up in the era where everyone got equal time and opportunity to play. Either everybody or nobody got a trophy and there were no losers, only winners in that T-ball game. Millenials were raised to be assertive. They were told and reminded that their opinions and ideas were important. They are not afraid to ask questions, and they want answers. Older generations encouraged Millenials to stand up for themselves. Millenials strongly believe in working smarter not harder. They are always looking for shortcuts and simplified ways to do things; not because they are lazy, because they want to be efficient.

I need point no further than our military and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to highlight the fact that Millenials can be just as steadfast, just as determined, just as courageous and just as willing to suffer hardship as other generations. They just tend to be a bit more assertive (irritating to some older generations) in doing those things. They aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and they sure as heck aren’t going to change just because we might want them to, so we might as well learn to live and work with them. They are a very important key to our future and the future of our business.

As I am sure is the case in your town, within 20 miles of my front door there are three high quality automotive technology programs (The Gudelsky Institute for Automotive Technology, Northern Virginia Community College Automotive Department, Lincoln Tech: Automotive) packed to the gills with young, highly motivated students who are learning the latest trends in automotive repair and technology but need the time and opportunity to gain experience. Each of these programs reaches out to high schools. Each of these programs has at least one car manufacturer listed among their sponsors. Each one of these programs also has several new car dealers listed among their sponsors.

Why should the dealers have all that exposure and why should they have access to all of those new technicians? What do dealers know that we don’t?

That young man or young woman looking for a career may have heard things about life as a technician in the automotive repair industry but they will not be working for the industry, they will be working for you. What view of the industry are you giving them?

Maybe it’s time we thought about our future. Maybe it’s time we thought about our industry. Maybe it’s time we became a sponsor. 

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