Mentoring programs allow veteran techs to share expertise with young apprentices

Dave Wright watched older service technicians at his dealership struggle to turn wrenches and contort themselves into cramped spaces after years of wear and tear on their bodies.

The fixed operations director at Shaheen Chevrolet in Lansing, Mich., saw multiple problems. His shop was losing production, and older technicians were losing pay, because they couldn’t turn the hours they used to. The techs often were counting the days until they could lay their tools down and rest.

But Wright also saw an opportunity. The older techs’ bodies might be aching and worn out, but their minds brimmed with years of knowledge and experience that could help young apprentices become productive line technicians.

So last month, Shaheen launched a program that assigns two veteran techs as mentors to five apprentices. The mentors don’t do any wrenching; they only coach the apprentices on diagnoses and repairs. Their pay is based on how much work the apprentices produce.

“We’ve told them that we don’t want them turning wrenches anymore,” Wright told Fixed Ops Journal. “We want them to pass along their thought process, their diagnostic ability, and teach these young people what took them 30 years to learn.”  

One mentor, who is due to retire in two years, has two apprentices; the other has three. Wright hopes he can train five or six apprentices in that time to become line techs.

“If these guys can pick up 80 percent of his knowledge over the next two years, I’m 300 percent ahead of where I would have been,” Wright says. “Now I’ve got five guys with 80 percent of his knowledge, whereas before I had one person with 100 percent and a body that just couldn’t physically do it.”

New-vehicle dealerships face a critical shortage of qualified technicians in the next five to 10 years, as more baby boomers retire and community colleges and technical schools scramble to produce enough trained replacements.

The industry not only is going to lose thousands of experienced techs, but also will suffer a major brain drain, says Lee Harkins, CEO of M5 Management Services Inc., a dealership consulting firm that specializes in fixed operations. Most of the know-how, tricks and shortcuts that older techs have accumulated isn’t written down for the next generation, Harkins notes.

“We’ve only seen the nose of the camel so far, but it’s fixing to hit us soon,” he says. “Without [mentoring], we’re going to continue to muddle along just like we are right now and continue to piss customers off because we can’t take care of them.”

Harkins says dealerships can accelerate the training and development of younger technicians by tapping into the stored knowledge of older techs whose production has dropped because of physical limitations.

By contrast, a typical dealership training approach is to have students or recent graduates of auto tech programs start on the lube rack. They wait for an opportunity in the main shop, where Wright says initially they often are “parts chasers and parts replacers,” doing easy jobs and little or no diagnostic work.

“Fixing the car is the easy part,” Wright says. “Finding what the hell broke and what needs to be fixed is the hard part. That’s how they progress from C techs to Bs and As — by figuring out what’s wrong.”

Most shops have informal mentoring programs in which older techs advise and help younger ones. But that approach typically works only to a point, Harkins says.

“There’s a hierarchy in the shop,” he says. “You’ve got your go-to guys, and they’re usually the guys who have a lot of experience.

“When younger techs come in, if they’re not trained correctly, they’ll make that older, experienced journeyman tech a victim,” Harkins adds. “They’ll continually be going over to them and saying, ‘Hey, how do you do this, did I do this right, what should I do now?’ They pester them, and the older techs just throw up their hands because they’re not getting compensated to help the guy.”

A structured mentoring program, in which apprentices do the work and an older mentor acts as a coach and trainer, develops productive line techs faster, Harkins says.

The mentor is the team leader who oversees five or six apprentices, he says. “His responsibility is to make them journeymen technicians. The mentor’s incentive is that his pay is based on how many hours his apprentices produce and the measurable progress they make towards becoming line techs.”

Harkins acknowledges that the concept has been hard to sell to many dealerships because it initially reduces production and raises costs. Instead of generating his own flat-rate hours, the experienced tech is mentoring green apprentices, who might produce only three or four hours a day at first.

But Wright says the higher initial cost is an investment. He used advice from Harkins and others to shape Shaheen Chevrolet’s mentoring program. It pays mentors so they make at least as much as they did wrenching.

“This isn’t a fast fix for anything, it’s a long-term program,” Wright says. “You have to have the owner’s backing to do something like this, because the initial cost of sale for this mentor program is probably 35 to 40 percent higher than for a normal A tech.”

Once C-level apprentices become B or A techs working on their own, Wright sees the investment paying off.

“As the apprentices become more productive and more knowledgeable, the mentor’s piece of this becomes less,” he adds. “That raises the capacity in my shop and drives down my cost of sale. In a shop with 60 technicians, if [initially] I’m paying two of them considerably higher to train five, I can live with that.”  

Other dealerships and dealership groups, such as Ganley Automotive Group, headquartered in northeast Ohio, and West Herr Auto Group in suburban Buffalo, N.Y., have developed sophisticated mentoring programs for service technicians.

At Todd Wenzel Buick-GMC in Davison, Mich., fixed operations director Scott Kohagen started a program about seven years ago, when one of his best techs developed multiple sclerosis at age 40 and could not turn wrenches.

“We tried to think of every option we could and turn every stone over on how we could possibly still allow him to continue his career and utilize his skills,” Kohagen says. As a mentor, he says, the tech “was physically forced to coach these guys through all of the hands-on portion of it, because he literally couldn’t do it. He became a very good coach.”

Requiring the apprentices to perform diagnoses and repairs under the guidance of the master technician built their confidence and sped up their learning process because they knew they couldn’t rely on the ailing tech to bail them out, Kohagen says.

“If you want the mentored technicians to become good and put them on a timeline that’s quicker, you have to restrict the lead technician from performing repairs, so they have to coach them through it,” he says. “Then the apprentice gets the repetition and all the processes and tricks, all the things that the technician has learned over a long period of time.”

When the older tech with MS had to retire, Kohagen had another mentor who left the dealership to return to wrenching. Four of his 17 techs were trained in-house by mentors, and two others left to work for a General Motors supplier, Kohagen says. Currently, the dealership doesn’t have a mentor tech.

“I haven’t found the perfect candidate yet,” Kohagen says. “Also, that area in the shop where we had the mentor working is now housing the two most recent technicians who went through the program and are doing really well. This is a bit of a space constraint, and we need to figure that out when we put the program back in place.”

Kohagen says the mentoring period before his apprentices become line techs is roughly 12 to 18 months, “depending on how green they are when they come in.”

At Shaheen, Wright says, “We’re guessing from six to 10 months, but we’re in no hurry. If it takes a year and a half, that’s OK, because they can absorb a lot of knowledge in that time.”

Because it takes time to develop skilled technicians, Kohagen advises other fixed ops managers to look in their shops for older techs who could become mentors before they leave.

“I suggest they put them in a scenario where they’re pouring their knowledge into these younger technicians,” he says. “They’re extremely valuable, and they’re not going to be there forever.”