Industry initiatives seek to ease tech shortage, but challenges remain

Those who attended last month's National Automobile Dealers Association Show in San Francisco had plenty to talk about: irksome factory mandates for dealership improvements, the inevitable transition — desired or otherwise — of their businesses to mobility centers, the impact of President Donald Trump's tariffs on auto retailing.

But getting at least as much attention at the NADA Show was a more nuts-and-bolts (literally) concern: How will dealerships find, hire, train and keep the technicians they need to staff their service bays, amid a growing shortage of, and cutthroat competition from other industries for, tech talent?

The numbers are increasingly alarming. New-vehicle dealerships employ about 317,000 service technicians — an average of 16 per store, NADA says. But nearly 30 percent of techs are leaving their jobs every year. NADA warns that franchised dealerships will have to hire 76,000 technicians this year — and a similar number annually through 2026 — just to fill expected openings.

The TechForce Foundation reports that the number of graduates of postsecondary auto tech training programs continued to drop in 2018. NADA estimates that such programs will produce about 37,000 new techs this year — less than half the number that dealerships will need.

The growing gap between technician supply and demand goes straight to dealers' bottom line. The hiring-software provider Hireology calculates that each day a technician's bay is vacant because of a job opening costs a dealership $1,200 in gross profit. Yet Hireology CEO Adam Robinson notes that dealerships take eight days, on average, even to respond to applicants for service department jobs.

Job seekers often labor under a lot of misconceptions about career opportunities at dealerships, including for techs, Robinson says. But some dealerships, he told me, are "delivering a really poor experience to those who might want to work here. Unstable pay, unstable hours. Flat-rate pay is the single biggest impediment to tech retention."

It's not that technicians take vows of poverty: The typical dealership tech earns more than $61,000 a year, NADA notes, and master techs can command six-figure salaries. But a recent survey of 35,000 dealership technicians by the consulting firm Carlisle & Co. identifies factors that are causing them deep dissatisfaction and driving them out of the industry, notably dealerships' heavy reliance on flat-rate plans.

So it's crucial that NADA is stepping up its full-court press to help its members recruit and retain technicians. NADA announced in San Francisco that it is creating a website that will promote technician careers — a welcome antidote to the "my job sucks" commentary that prevails in online discussion groups of dealership techs.

More important, NADA plans to make its website the first coordinated source of information about training programs — including their locations — and scholarship opportunities for aspiring technicians.

"It is incredibly difficult for a prospective technician to find clear information on how to gain training and certification," concedes NADA's new chairman, Charlie Gilchrist, president of Gilchrist Automotive in northern Texas. "We know that as many as half of the seats in OEM training programs go unfilled each year."

The NADA effort also will reach out to high schools, community colleges, technical institutes and the U.S. military to talk up tech careers for students and veterans. Of course, nothing prevents individual dealers from engaging in such outreach in their communities now.

Automakers are helping. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles is expanding its Mopar Career Automotive Program of technician training, which has 9,000 students. A major feature of the initiative is an "Assemble Your Future" campaign that will introduce students to dealers, veteran technicians and race drivers to boost interest in technician careers.

NADA, its members and automakers still need to take more specific steps to attract, train and keep female technicians. Barely 1 percent of dealership technicians are women — a figure that goes a long way toward explaining the overall tech shortage.

Other obstacles continue to confront dealerships. When technicians leave, they often don't just retire or go to work at another dealership or aftermarket shop. They defect to competing industries — airlines, railroads, boating — and take their skills and experience with them. That trend is the topic of the cover story in this issue.

Another story this month is more encouraging. We detail the collaboration among a Virginia dealer, a sheriff and a community college to launch a program that is training inmates to become service technicians. Their idea deserves emulation as part of the broader search for techs.

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