Why The U.S. Has A Shortage Of Auto Mechanics

Automotive technicians are very necessary and the service is very scarce. The staffing situation has been really very challenging. Data from industry analysts JD Power indicates that customers are waiting at least one more day, sometimes much longer, for their cars to be repaired. This is happening at the same time. When the average age of American vehicles continues to reach record levels, buying another car is out of the question as many new and used vehicle prices hover around record levels. The

shortage

also presents challenges for dealers. Kevin Massey owns a Ford dealership in Napa, California, and despite in-house training and competitive salaries.

He has been struggling to find service workers. Revenue has decreased because I don't have enough people to serve customers. We have the demand, but we don't have enough service personnel to be able to do it. Whether it's technicians or service advisors, about half of a dealership's profits come from parts and service, all the dealerships I know have similar challenges to us, there just aren't enough technicians, it's not just dealerships. Research indicates independent repair shops across the country. Faced with the same

shortage

, the pandemic has exacerbated the problem, but the shortage of technicians has been long-term. Those in the business are concerned that it's due to some kind of profound generational shift away from working in the trades we've been on several calls with.

Whether it's manufacturers and dealers combined, and it's not like there's a ready-made solution immediately on the horizon simply because it's been going on for a while, the

auto

motive industry is going through some of the biggest changes in history for over 100 years. , the vast majority of cars have run on gasoline now EVS are slowly but surely gaining ground. Maintaining them requires a completely different set of skills and also brings with it a lot of uncertainty for dealers and for technicians and aspiring technicians planning careers, but there are also many opportunities. Today's cutting-edge

auto

mobiles are increasingly built around computers and software.

If you like working with your hands, you like working with computers, and you like fixing things that are broken, this is the industry that dealers, automakers, and others in the industry are in. trying to learn more about the shortage and how it can be resolved overseas there has been a serious shortage of workers in a variety of service positions during the pandemic the big resignation as everyone calls it dealerships are also experiencing that customers are waiting longer for service appointments It typically takes about three and a half days for customers to get a service appointment, but this year in our annual Customer Service Index study, we saw that increase by about a day, for what is now about five days to get a service appointment and depending on some brands 20 percent of customers were taking more than a week to get a service appointment, output slowed down dramatically not because we want we want we want We want it to be fast we just can't do it, sometimes we have a shortage of personnel, sometimes we have a shortage of spare parts and, like in all stores, we are trying like men to do it quickly.

We want you to have a good experience in addition to the worker shortage. Supply chain turmoil continues. There are fewer loaned vehicles. On top of that, the shortage of spare parts, but certainly staff has been one of the factors, as the longer time to get a service appointment. Worker turnover is also quite high. The highest turnover rate is among service advisors, they are the people who interact with clients and schedules. Sell ​​service work and communicate what needs to be done to the technician. We see that right now there is a turnover of close to 50 in a year, which is surprisingly high and makes it really difficult to build relationships with clients if that is the case in the positions we have had.

The service advisor problem is one of the most difficult positions to fill because it requires the ability to listen to customers, understand how a vehicle works, and communicate with technicians. You say the car is making this noise and they need to contact the technician. cars make this noise right now this is what it does this is what it sounds like this is what it feels like and be able to communicate that a technician who will work on your car and return your vehicle repaired the first time so you don't have to come back because that really creates dissatisfaction that number is astronomical of dissatisfaction when you don't fix it right the first time.

Massey also said he needs at least some staff who can speak and understand both Spanish and English. but long before kovid there was a shortage of technicians, the National Automobile Dealers Association estimates that the industry is short about 37,000 train technicians each year, that technician shortage has been constant and quite widespread, it is notoriously difficult to recruit people for the job of technician. It's also difficult for employers to retain them, of course, the first thing that comes to mind for anyone who thinks about this and the texts themselves when you ask them is money, the overall compensation level is low given their skills and there isn't a huge variety in salary or so much growth there, the average salary for an auto mechanic in 2021 was 47,990 people in the bottom 10th percentile earned twenty-nine thousand and ten dollars and people in the top 90th percentile earned seventy-five thousand one hundred dollars, but She can earn more.

A technician who is a high performer in this business can earn between eighty and one hundred thousand dollars and that is pretty good money. One of the challenges with technicians is that in many cases staff are paid based on the work itself. It is a type of fixed rate. work that is paid based on the work assigned to it, so sometimes it may not be as stable if there is not as much work available. Flat-rate work also incentivizes technicians to work quickly or efficiently, but may not take into account the amount of time they spend. when doing other tasks, like diagnosing problems, the job often comes without benefits or other benefits, and we often find that taxes, when we look at them, have very few common benefits that are offered, you know, even like individual health insurance, Not all technicians offer that. 401k's are offered even less, especially someone who may be young and then have a family, if they don't get what they need in terms of benefits at work after a few years they will probably look elsewhere, but the techies don't seem to feel that way either. .

We trust that they can make a career out of their work. There is a real lack of career progression or understanding of what the career path is. Our industry traditionally did not have a career path. We are trying to create a career path to be more professional every day. The daily work of a technician can be exhausting in the shop and dealership culture, they can seem like texting hard, you know, they tend to work long hours and often have strange schedules, you know, if someone has to work in the evening shift or on the weekend, you might work six days in a row and you know it's manual labor, it can definitely be exhausting and a lot of text messages tell us, when we survey and interview them, that they don't feel appreciated, that don't feel like you know there's a real work-life balance or any kind of social component, the automotive technician trade may be suffering from some of the same reputation challenges seen in other trades at the end of the day, when We look at the younger group of people who are not getting into the trades or what we would call a trade, the big part of this is that the career of a technician we have found has become less and less desirable over the years, You know, it used to be that a lot of people grew up, you know? working on cars with their parents had an interest in it, it was a respected career field, kids would potentially be oriented towards that field of sensations in high school and maybe even earlier and now we see more and more that the same trend does not exist and that most high schools really push you know everyone should go to a four year college and there's a much smaller number of people going into the technical field the schools that also provide that service and education have really cut back so someone who He says, hey, look, I want to have auto shop classes.

Many of the schools don't have them anymore, the salary for technicians is very good, but there is no place for them to train, so what are the solutions? How can dealerships or shops struggling to find or retain talent turn things around? Nowadays, you want to recruit younger people, many of them will want a more stable and well-known Pace structure. One idea to handle the wage problem is to provide some kind of guaranteed minimum wage for new technicians who may not get many jobs at first. or maybe spending a lot of time on diagnostic work or their training knowing that they are going to achieve at least of education and its tools, that they need to become technicians, that it is very difficult for them to continue in the career.

Massey has instituted pay and retention bonuses for technicians, which helps to some extent. There's always someone who can pay more than we can pay, but can you give them the environment that we can and that's where we want to win? That's why I worked very hard to make sure our work environment is better than anyone else's. We provide benefits. The f401 K. have health care, so yes, we have all those things, we want you to be healthy, we want you to have fun and we want you to be able to earn a living. He also recruits us as Ford dealers and we go to the schools and try. to attract those young people and say hello, come work for us, we provide a great environment for some rules, he casts a wide net, we also as a store see it a little differently.

I'm looking for people in other trades or other industries, you could be a waiter, you could be anything if I know you have a work ethic and you're going to come to work then I want to talk to you. He takes seriously the need to provide a career path. We are trying to create a career path to be more professional. Trace your career path, you can map out what your payment plan will be in the future. They have an in-house training program, we have what's called Quick Lane to help you, which is basically maintenance and light repairs here to help you get started there and train you and we will train you to go from Quick Lane to used cars, from used cars to their specialty within Ford or Lincoln.

Large dealer groups or service chains may have the size and scale to develop their own independent recruiting and training resources. Store owners like Massey may not have the resources to take on recruiting or retention challenges as much as they would like. We'd like you to learn about ways OES can help even small distributors who may not have the same resources as larger distributors. dealer groups can take some of those ideas and some of those practices and implement them on a smaller scale so that this problem can be addressed across the board and not just for the larger dealer groups.

Ford recognizes that if we do not have technicians we cannot service the vehicles, therefore the brand image and brand expectations fall. They have done things. They provided scholarships. They are doing things within the school to attract more to the trades. This severe shortage has turned recruiting into a seller's market for job candidates. They are able to aggressively negotiate benefit payments in the case of service advisors, they can move from one job to a higher paying one, some of the seniors receive a signing bonus as if they were an NFL player, we are seeing it , but industry experts.

Let's just say now is an exceptionally interesting time to be in auto service with increasing electrification of vehicles. There's a lot more going on in this space than there used to be for a long time. Vehicles haven't changed much right now with the rise of electric vehicles and in the case of hybrids, there is a lot more going on and a lot more things that technicians can do, learn and be trained in, and now it's really a completely career. different that brings with it uncertainty. One of the frequently touted benefits of EVS is that they do not require as much maintenance as regular vehicles.internal combustion there are no oil changes, for example with an internal combustion engine you lubricated yourself and there was a lot of oil and a lot of grease and that is what made an internal combustion engine run well, we are seeing it.

It decreased drastically with the Bev, so that the amount of oil and all that disappeared because you don't have oil in the car, so we are seeing that change. Dealers certainly have to take into account the fact that their service departments are probably up and running. to look different, I don't know in five years, but in 10 years, let's say 30 percent of vehicles sold or EVS will require less work or different types of work, reshaping the perception of the automotive technician could be as simple as Highlighting the tremendous technological changes that are taking place. An auto mechanic is really an auto technician.