There is a growing shortage of younger technicians who want to get into automotive repair as a career. According to the Manpower Group, “Hardest to Fill Survey for 2013,” automotive mechanics (technicians) are among the hardest positions to fill in the U.S. Going back to 2008, they are frequent and prominent in this list of dubious distinction.
The reasons for this are complicated, both the result of attrition, a growing economy that is driving consumer demand and a trend that is seeing fewer and fewer young people choosing automotive repair as a career path. While a great many of the most experienced and knowledgeable technicians are retiring or moving on to opportunities in other industries (a concern in and of itself), the number of young people choosing automotive repair as a career is not adequate to meet the current or future needs and poses tangible risk to the automotive repair industry.
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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. Also, we need to look at why we need to be aware of who we are talking to if we want to make this work for us and make this work for this generation of young people.
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, understand what makes them tick. Millennials 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.
Millennials are comfortable with and even look forward to change. They have less appreciation for something that is static or lasts unchanged forever than for something that can be traded in or is upgradeable. They were playing advanced video games by the time they were 7 or 8. Millennials do not believe in “no pain, no gain” and cannot relate to “I have paid my dues, so should you.” In millennial thinking, suffering is not part of the learning curve. Millennials 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 on that T-ball team.
Millennials were raised to be assertive; they were told and reminded that their opinions and ideas mattered and were important. They are not afraid to ask questions, and they want answers. Older generations encouraged millennials to stand up for themselves. Millennials strongly believe in working smarter not harder. They are always looking for shortcuts and simplified ways to do things; not because they are lazy, but because they want to be more efficient.
They are a very important key to our future and the future of our business. Somehow the automotive repair industry needs not only to engage but also to embrace this generation of young people and show them that there are significant and very real career opportunities out here for them. Somehow we have to show them that automotive repair is a viable path to their future.
Pairing up for Progress
An important consideration in all of this is how your existing staff of technicians will react to you bringing on a young technician and how they will treat him or her when you aren’t around. By its very nature, being a technician in an automotive repair shop is competitive (limited car count divided up among technicians who have bills and kids and a life), and if you are not careful that fresh faced young millennial will end up getting a very unfriendly reception and be exposed to a side of the business he would probably rather not see.
My very strong advice would be to assign a senior technician as a mentor for any young technician we would bring on and provide him with incentives toward the success of his charge. You need to make these arrangements finite and closed ended (12 to 24 months) because we are not looking for a permanent arrangement and want results sooner rather than later but giving that seasoned tech great reasons to invest his time and effort in an aspiring young tech will pay huge dividends down the road. A very basic example would be an 18-month plan that would pay a portion of the young technician’s billed hours to the senior tech, with bonuses for ASE certifications and for exceeding production goals. It all needs to be paid for out of generated sales, but the advantages to this approach are many. For it to work, it needs to be a win for the senior technician, the junior technician and most especially for the business. Under ideal circumstances, the senior tech would be training his replacement, with the junior tech benefiting from the years of knowledge and experience of his assigned mentor. Rather than facing a hostile adversary, our young millennial would have a motivated and interested mentor (bonuses assure the right motivation) to set him up for a long and successful career. Everyone wins.
There is no doubt that it takes the right mentor (senior technician) to make this work as well as some forethought and planning. Bringing your senior tech in on your intentions early is critical, and he or she has to have a win on the other side of it all. If the thought is you will use your seasoned technician to train his replacement when the senior has no plans of moving on, you are setting yourself up for civil war and the young technician up for failure. That definitely is not the view of the industry we want to provide.
By the same token there has to be a value in it for the young tech and a viable career path to his or her future. If we assign a senior tech who is reluctant to pass on any of the knowledge he has gained over the years and who looks on the young technician as a gopher or errand boy (I have seen this far too many times), you can rest assured that the young tech either will move on or never achieve the great career he had anticipated. You, as a shop owner or service manager, have to guard against this. If this is going to work, and it is to everyone's advantage if it does, leadership and oversight are very important parts of any plan you would come up with. The senior tech benefits financially for his time, effort, knowledge and experience. The young up and coming technician gets a mentor and benefits from those years and years of experience. The shop assures its core competence and viability into the distant future.
Somewhere in a high school or junior college technology program there is a young millennial with lots of ambition trying to decide what do with his life. At the same time, old Bob out in the third bay is starting to slow down and think about retirement.
It doesn't matter what generation you are working with, automotive repair can look like a job or like a lifelong career opportunity. What it looks like to that young technician is entirely up to you. Show them a legitimate career opportunity, I promise they will come.
