More dealerships are creating initiatives to hire, train and retain techs

A few years ago, the Greater Memphis Auto Dealers Association surveyed its 54 members about job vacancies for service technicians. The responses were alarming.

Member dealerships identified about 200 immediate openings for technicians — nearly four per store. As veteran techs retired or left for other careers, there weren't enough qualified candidates to replace them. Tech training costs were high, as the closest instructional programs were out of state.

So the Memphis dealers decided to "take the bull by the horns," says the association's president, Kent Ritchey. The association affiliated with a local technical college to create a tech training program, which will enroll its first students next month.

"We realized if we didn't do it, no one else is going to," says Ritchey, president of Landers Auto Group, which operates six franchised dealerships in Tennessee and Mississippi.

As dealerships face quicker turnover and shorter tenure among service technicians, along with growing customer reliance on — and demand for — service business, filling a tech vacancy by raiding the store down the street is no longer good enough. Instead, dealerships and dealer groups and associations are developing innovative ways to find, hire, train and keep service techs.

The Memphis dealers association is partnering with the William R. Moore College of Technology, a 100-year-old training school in the city. The college closed its auto tech program in the late 1990s because of a lack of funding, President Skip Redmond says. The dealers association provided $500,000 in seed money to restart it.

"We were the perfect match," Redmond says. "We had the flexibility to create a program specific to the dealers' needs."

The association is spending $2 million to buy and remodel a former dealership in Memphis to house the tech program. It hopes to raise $1 million more from automakers and suppliers to equip the facility, Ritchey says.

"We can't do this without them," he says.

The first class of about 75 students will start the two-year program next month in temporary classrooms, Redmond says. When the permanent center opens in about a year, he expects enrollment to rise to about 200 students.

Graduates will earn an associate degree along with tech certification, and will be placed in internships at area dealerships, Redmond says.

That kind of clear career path is crucial to attracting and retaining good dealership technicians, says Adam Robinson, CEO of the employment platform Hireology. Stable pay and appropriate work-life balance are other crucial elements, he says.

"Dealers can innovate in all these areas today and be more successful in the search for tech talent," Robinson says.

Group 1 Automotive, which operates 173 U.S. new-vehicle dealerships, said this year it is creating "a well-defined path for career advancement" for its techs, and rolling out "a new, flexible work schedule featuring substantially more days off over the course of a year to attract and retain talented service ... technicians." The public company did not respond to a request for comment.

Robinson also thinks the industry needs to update the service tech's job description.

"If I am going to sell the future of automotive technicians as a career path," he says, "the thing I am going to focus on is that cars are more computer than mechanical."

At Downtown LA Motors, a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Los Angeles, newly hired service technicians' first assignment is often to greet service lane customers. That helps techs learn about the dealership's operations as well as the work habits expected of them, says Neal Goldman, fixed operations director of Downtown LA Auto Group, which operates the dealership.

Like LAcarGUY, Downtown LA Auto hires graduates of East Los Angeles College, which Goldman calls "a great resource for us."

One of those graduates, Greg Corral, 20, is a quick lube tech at the Mercedes-Benz dealership. He came recommended by Adrian Banuelos, chairman of the college's automotive technology department.

Corral says he "always wanted to work around cars" and aims to keep moving up the service tech ladder at the dealership. That will mean passing Mercedes-Benz's online tech program and benefiting from the dealership's in-house training, Goldman says.

"The experience of working on cars and having a shop of service techs you can consult and learn from is golden," he says.