Internship program gives students a fast track to industry

July 25, 2014
Keenan Auto Body’s Collision Repair Opportunity Program is an internship program that creates a career path for future technicians and helps cultivate new talent for the company.

The industry’s shortage of collision repair technicians is cause for great concern. Talking about this major issue is one thing, but creating an internship program within our shops is how we feel we create a career path for future technicians and cultivate new talent within our company.

Earlier this year, two students became the first to complete a 9-month unpaid internship with our company – something we’re calling the “Collision Repair Opportunity Program” (CROP) – and now both have full pay and benefits as productive employees with us. Because of the success of this pilot program, we’re expanding it to include more students at more of our locations.

CROP grew out of a strategic planning session we had in 2012, when “cultivating talent” was among the issues we saw facing not just our business, but the industry as a whole. Once we created a basic framework for CROP, Max Sorensen, who manages one of our locations, took the lead and did a lot of the legwork on the project, working with our marketing director Craig Comacho to get the word out to the vocational and technical high schools in our area.

Here’s how it works: Graduating high school seniors apply for the internships through our website, just as if they were applying for a regular position with our company. We then select interns using a basic aptitude test and a three-interview screening process. Our employee who will be serving as that student’s mentor during the program participates in the third interview to help us ensure the two will be a good fit.

The chosen students then begin a nine-month internship working with the mentor in either our body or paint department. We provide them with a starter set of tools, as well as a workbook that spells out the curriculum.

At the end of the first three-month “term,” the intern must complete both a written and hands-on test. Upon successful completion of the testing, they can move on to the second and third three-month terms of the internship.

We piloted the program at just one of our locations the first year and were very satisfied with the results. Our first intern, Oscar Cantoran Corona, completed the program this past March, under the mentorship of that location’s head painter, Nate Tarr. Oscar is now working in our paint department, has zero student debt, and gets to keep the tools (valued at about $1,500) that we provided at the start of the program.

We had one student who, five weeks in the program, decided body work was not the career he wished to pursue. Although not an ideal outcome, we felt good that he gained some work experience and was able to move on to another profession before he invested years and thousands of dollars pursuing collision repair training.

In May, our second CROP intern, Cesar Serrano, completed the program under the mentorship of body technician John Pinkitti. Cesar has moved into a blueprinting role within our company.

As I said, we’re now expanding CROP with interns at three of our other locations as well. One key: It’s imperative to have very qualified instructors as mentors. They need to be not only quality technicians, but also able to continually narrate for the intern what they are doing and why.

We held a meeting this past spring to explain the program to other potential mentors within our company, noting that it isn’t just “free help” for them, but nor will it hinder their productivity. It ends up really being a wash; the boost to the mentor’s production provided by the intern is essentially offset by the time the mentor spends helping the intern learn.

But there are other benefits, the mentors say, in the form of satisfaction of helping another person learn the profession and of building a legacy for the talent and career they’ve developed.

And for us, we see CROP as a key part of our strategy to grow the talent we’ll need as our business continues to grow.

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