Pa. dealer pledges $1 million to bolster ranks of technicians

TREVOSE, Pa. — Faulkner Toyota's service department is spotless, brightly lit, wide, airy and about as big as a football field. It's a busy place these days. Counting internal work, the department is processing as many as 120 repair tickets a day.

Harry Faulkner, the fourth-generation president of family-owned Faulkner Automotive Group, with 28 rooftops in the Philadelphia area, watches the proceedings one recent weekday morning with a mixture of pride and concern.

He's proud because the Toyota store boasts an 80 percent retention rate and has the highest revenue in the company, his customers are happy and sales are booming. But he's also concerned because the aging technician work force at this store is a companywide issue.

Of the store's 14 technicians, two of the best each have 40 years on the job and are nearing retirement. Faulkner knows finding replacement technicians who are hardworking, polite and punctual team players who communicate clearly and consistently perform high-quality work under pressure will not be easy.

Multiply the tech situation at the Toyota store by 28, and Faulkner's concern is understandable.

Tom Joyce, Faulkner Automotive Group COO, says the company employs roughly 280 techs.

"We are heavy on techs 50-plus years old," he says. "The pending retirement of some of our senior techs is our biggest issue."

The persistent shortage of technicians affects nearly every dealership across the country. Fixed op directors have tried almost every strategy under the sun to solve it, from partnering with community colleges and vocational schools to hiring military vets to plucking young techno-geeks out of electronics stores. Nothing has closed the gap.

Although Harry Faulkner is not quite looking for divine intervention to solve this vexing problem, he is looking for help from an unusual source: a buttoned-down, 70-year-old inner-city all-boys Catholic high school 7.6 miles away called Father Judge.

In what may be a first, Faulkner has committed $1 million in cash, equipment and human resources to Father Judge to help create an $8 million, 20,000-square-foot automotive technician training school.

Vocational courses at Catholic high schools are rare. National Catholic Education Association spokeswoman Margaret Kaplow told Fixed Ops Journal the organization does not know of another Catholic high school in the country with an auto technician program.

Father Judge's campus looks and feels exactly how you think a Catholic school should. Its well-worn — but immaculate — tile floors lead you down white-walled halls with thick brown wooden doors and depictions of religious figures placed strategically at eye level. It's a serene campus, perhaps the last place one might expect to see cars on lifts and hear the sounds of students armed with pneumatic air wrenches removing rusty mufflers, repairing leaking transmissions and replacing broken axles. But if the school's plan is executed on time, approximately 20 trained techs a year will graduate with their Pennsylvania state certification starting in 2026.

Faulkner is one of the largest private contributors to Father Judge's Career Pathways Academy, where the techs will be trained. He views the donation as a philanthropic one that will help the school and community and create a pipeline that flows new techs into the Philadelphia area — even for his competitors.

"This is not about us," Faulkner says in a conference room in Brisson House, the former residence of the school's priests. "It's about the school trying to broaden students' opportunities. It's about the school being a significant part of the community. When this is up and running, there will be 20 students graduating every year.

"As much as we would like to take every single one, we won't have room for 20 new techs every single year."

Catholic high school enrollment peaked in 1960 at 5.2 million; today, it's less than 1.8 million. Father Judge once had 4,000 students; it has 800 now. The number of Catholic schools nationwide is roughly half of what it was in 1960.

In Philadelphia, two Catholic schools are closing this month because of declining enrollment. To combat that, in 2017, Brian Patrick King, Father's Judge's president, hired a research firm to identify vocational careers the school could offer to the roughly 20 percent of its graduates who don't go to college, join the military or take civil service jobs. The school's first two CTE — career and technical education — programs, one for painters and one for welders, have potential employers lining up to hire the Father Judge graduates.

Faulkner believes the newest program will be successful if his auto group and the school can effectively convey to potential students that a technician job in a dealership service department doesn't mean a life sentence shackled to the lube rack. Rather, it has a trajectory with goals, promotions and raises — along with a healthy paycheck.

"An incredible amount of our employees have come up through fixed operations and have built meaningful careers in our organization," Faulkner says. "If we could do a better job of telling the story of the opportunities high school students could have ... getting high-paying jobs, well, that's the car business."

The plan for the school's technician program is to broaden the education techs receive while at the same time reducing from four years to three the time it takes for a student to earn his Pennsylvania state-approved technician certificate. The first year of the course is book learning, followed by two years of hands-on experience paired with a mentor from a Faulkner dealership.

Younger techs coming to a Faulkner dealership from trade schools and elsewhere often don't work out because of their personality or education, says Joyce, a 1990 Father Judge graduate. That's why the auto group created its technician mentoring program that pairs promising new hires with some of the company's most experienced techs. That initial framework also will be used to help train Father Judge students, who in their second year of the program will begin working in service departments.

"We have some fantastic leaders who chose not to run departments, but who are fantastic career technicians, great leaders and good people," Joyce says. "If we can get these kids connected with them, it's a path forward."

The Father Judge graduates are expected to bring with them traits that fill many of the gaps Faulkner Automotive officials identified when they developed their internal mentoring program. Don Salmon, chairman of the school's Board of Specified Jurisdiction, explains the way souls are molded at Father Judge.

"These kids learn that in order to perform in the real world, you need to show up on time, do your job properly, be polite and be knowledgeable," he says. "You don't lie. You don't cheat. You don't steal. We try to develop what we call the Salesian Gentleman (after the school's patron saint, Francis de Sales). We teach these kids to be gentlemen every day, to respect women, to respect themselves and to work hard."

James Hozier, Father Judge's assistant principal for academic affairs, worked with Faulkner Automotive's two fixed ops directors, Greg Long and John Komar, to develop the curriculum the tech students will take in addition to the state-certified courses. The tech program does not replace regular high school courses, but rather is an addition to the standard curriculum and aims to produce a more capable technician than other schools' graduates. As envisioned, a Father Judge-trained technician will be safety conscious, capable of using the store's dealer management system to properly create accurate repair tickets and work well under pressure.

"We are going to teach them things you normally wouldn't know from school," Komar says. "The other day we were talking to one of the techs, who said, 'Can we just get someone who knows how to operate the lift?' We're like, what? We don't think about that; we just take it for granted."

Working with a Faulkner dealership mentor, says Joyce, will help ease the transition from the school's shop to a service department.

"At school, there are no customers watching you work on their car," he says. "At some of our dealerships today, they are right there watching you as you get in their car, and how you treat it, and what you do, and how you look and are you wasting time."

Two big, blue metal storage containers in front of Brisson House are being packed with the building's contents. A wrecking ball arrives this summer. Eighteen months after that, in time for the 2023-24 school year, the new facility is expected to open.

In three years' time, the first Father Judge-trained auto technicians will be reporting for work, armed with their Pennsylvania state certifications and experience working in dealership service departments alongside mentors.

The school's work area will look like a real dealership's service department, complete with lifts, tools, lube racks, tire-changing machines and a parts store.

Until the Father Judge cavalry arrives, Faulkner Automotive Group will continue recruiting techs the old-fashioned way. The company's technician shortage isn't critical — yet. But Harry Faulkner can see the future, and he knows his investment stands a chance at changing the situation in Philadelphia.

"I think we are expecting the Father Judge kids to take it to the next level," he says. "They are going to be great people and have the discipline and the initiative.

"I started thinking about the opportunities for employees and the development of technicians and the tangible business returns — which was never the driving factor, but nice to have as well — and the real investment is in the people."