Dealership policies worsen - and can relieve - a shortage of mechanics

There's a general consensus in the industry that there's a serious shortage of automotive technicians able to work on today's advanced cars and trucks.

Now, some analysts and experts say that simply recruiting more technicians won't help. Dealerships today are losing technicians too fast for recruitment to make up the emerging gap, they argue.

"The numbers are staggering," says Mark Davis, automotive programs manager at Seminole State College of Florida. The college's Associate in Applied Science degree program is a national curriculum leader that graduates about 100 technicians a year. There are Ford- and General Motors-certified tracks, as well as a generic import-brand track.

Davis says Ford and GM estimate a need for a total of 15,000 new technicians for their U.S. dealerships over the next five years. Davis estimates the North American shortfall at more than 25,000 in that same time period.

"I don't think there are enough training institutions in the U.S. to keep up with the shortage," says Davis.

Industry analyst Harry Hollenberg concurs that the technician shortage is big and unlikely to change soon. Hollenberg is a founding partner at Carlisle & Co., a Concord, Mass., firm that collects and analyzes data for automakers.

Carlisle's most recent report on service technicians and advisers, released in 2014, found that an ongoing industry churn sees 20 percent of luxury-brand mechanics and 25 percent of volume-brand mechanics leave their jobs each year.

They may be leaving to go to another dealership, to an independent shop or even to a nonautomotive job. Every departure is an expensive disruption. "From a team perspective, it makes it very hard," says Hollenberg.

What's causing this problem? Both Davis and Hollenberg point to a key part of the dealership service pipeline: the service adviser system.

"We asked the technicians, "What's the biggest issue you have?' The No. 1 issue was communication with the service adviser," says Hollenberg.

Service advisers rarely come from the technical side of automotive maintenance. "A number of dealers hire their service advisers based on their selling ability -- they were really good waiters at a restaurant where the dealer principal had dinner," says Hollenberg. In the 2014 report, Carlisle found that most service advisers with 10 or fewer years of experience came from retail, restaurant, hotel and hospitality businesses.

Traditional payment for service advisers compounds the mismatch between them and technicians, as well. The average service adviser receives 60 percent of his or her pay in the form of commission. This can lead to overselling of maintenance procedures and overpromising customers on delivery times for work. Technicians bearing the brunt of this see little reason for loyalty to a particular dealership.

The service adviser issue is just one of the many barriers to finding enough technicians that ultimately can be traced to old management styles and outdated compensation packages, says Davis.

At the vast majority of dealerships, "everything is based on sales; very little has to do with fixed ops or service," he says. While even a mediocre service department will pay the majority of a dealer's overhead, few dealer principals concentrate enough time on rethinking relationships with technicians or costing out what employee retention is worth to them, says Davis.

Technicians bring to the dealership their own tools and, often, certification-level expertise. But once there, they often find their pay unpredictable because it is based on workflow scheduling and automakers' flat-rate payments for certain warranty repairs. "There've been lead technicians at dealerships that are actually making less money now than they were five years ago," says Davis.

This can discourage junior technicians and make them ripe to jump to other industries where salaries are predictable and benefits are available.

The quick oil change and tire-rack business also has caused problems in employee retention and promotion. The express lane, staffed with interns or young technicians typically being paid $11 per hour, can be an excellent customer-retention mechanism, but it also can become a dead end for some technicians, many of whom become disillusioned and leave.

"These quick-lube positions were meant to be your new technician entry-level jobs. You brought them in on a very low wage and then promoted them. That was the theory," says Hollenberg. In practice, the absence of formal promotion programs has left such techs stranded and powerless, he says.

Too few, too slowly

Automaker and dealer-association programs to recruit new technicians, whether military veterans, minorities or women, are admirable, Davis and Hollenberg agree. But such programs are not turning out trained technicians quickly enough and in enough numbers.

Until the churn factor is fixed, those programs will have little impact on the overall need for more mechanics, they add.

Remedying the situation will require a new focus by dealer principals on management of their shops and some new thinking about investments in salary and benefits, as well as promotion mechanisms that will lead to workplace stability, they say. Only then will the flow of new technicians begin to fill the workplace reservoir.

Davis sees an opportunity at this year's National Automobile Dealers Association convention, March 31-April 3 in Las Vegas.

"There's got to be some sort of roundtable discussion with dealer principals [and] fixed ops and manufacturers' representatives," says Davis. "You can't keep with the same model you've had for 30 years when everything around you is changing."