Finding Ways to Make This Industry Attractive to the Young

What is the hardest thing in this industry right now: trying to get young people to take this trade seriously.

There are a plenty of reasons for this. The first is many young people don’t see any economic benefit for getting involved in automotive maintenance and repair, certainly at the early stages of entering the field. To become a qualified mechanic there are a variety of up-front costs that a young man or woman will have to be willing to pay out-of-pocket, schooling and tools being the most obvious ones. You can’t start in this industry without getting some kind of basic classroom-based training, and no garage is going to take a young person seriously who not only lacks those basic educational skills but shows up looking for work with no tools.

Even if that person has been willing to pay for the schooling and getting the tools needed to begin his or her apprenticeship, things often do not get much better. Many find being a fresh-faced apprentice a rather financially under-rewarding experience. Sometimes, a young man or woman can get a better hourly wage at a local restaurant than being an automotive apprentice, and there are tips as well.

What does this mean for the industry as a whole? Well, from my experience I can tell you it makes it very hard to get qualified young people right now. I run a growing independent service shop specializing in foreign vehicles and recently moved to a larger facility in order to better handle the number of cars coming through the doors. When I put an ad in a local newspaper, I received less than a handful of responses, most from persons not having the qualifications needed to apprentice or lacking in tools. Posting a job opening on the Internet was no better.

I know I’m not the only one having this problem. Many other successful independent shops tell me the same thing.

So what can we do to fix this situation? The first thing is we have to start lobbying the government to find ways to ease the financial burden on young people trying to enter this industry. Perhaps we can encourage the government to partially subsidize the cost of schooling, giving students some form of financial benefit for taking the necessary courses and examinations. In this way, young persons will see some immediate benefit early on for taking up this trade, instead of a hit on their already thin wallets. We might also encourage the government to give independent service providers grants and other tax breaks that we can use to make it worthwhile for apprentices to work for us, instead of going to work for that restaurant down the street. It might be something like a yearly bonus that the government can make available for us to give the apprentice for each successfully competed year of their training, on top of the starting salary. This bonus could also help the apprentice get additional training, especially on the newest diagnostic equipment and tools.

No matter what we decide to do, we must to get more young people into this industry or we are all going to suffer in the long-term.