Dealers Can Ease Technician Shortage with Flexibility

Dealers who recruit service technicians may want to stress that opportunities abound in Fixed Ops and beyond if an employee’s life circumstances change.

Take Edna Pham, a tech at Cavender Automotive Group based in San Antonio, TX. She enjoys her job but likes knowing she can shift positions if needed.

“If you become pregnant, you can’t be in the shop” for safety reasons, she says.

She’s flexible but doesn’t want to leave the fixed-operations end of the business.

“I’d definitely stay in the field, if not as an auto technician, then maybe in the parts department or as a service adviser,” Pham says during an industry online conference called Ted Ings’ Back to the 80s Fixed Ops Roundtable.

“Family affects your career, but there’s always a way around,” Pham says. 

But transferring to a front-end dealership job doesn’t seem in her cards.

“I’m not too sure,” she says of taking, say, a showroom sales position. “I’m too valuable in the back. But maybe. We could work something out.”

She likes Cavender’s service-department work environment. “It never gets competitive. It’s not girls against guys.”

Women mechanics are in a definite minority, but their ranks are growing.

Nearly 180,000 automotive mechanics work in the U.S., and about 3.5% are women, according to Zippia, a job opportunity website.

As a female mechanic of Asian descent, Pham is in an even less common demographic.  

Zippia says the most common ethnicity of American automotive mechanics is white (60.2%), followed by Hispanic/Latino (20.1%), African American (9.7%) and Asian (5.0%). The other 5% is not identified.

Dealer associations have launched various initiatives to address an industrywide shortage of qualified auto technicians.   

One of the latest programs focuses on minorities. As Wards previously reported, it is a collaboration by the National Automobile Dealers Assn., National Urban League and Urban League of Louisiana to place aspiring technicians as apprentices at local dealerships.