By John Yoswick
Yohanna Peet, who leads the “Technician Apprenticeship Program” (TAP) for Caliber Collision, believes collision repairers need to use a broader pool of potential candidates when looking for the employees they need. Speaking at the recent Women’s Industry Network conference, Peet said she watched technicians during the pandemic leaving not just Caliber but the industry.
“They found roles where they don’t have to put the wear-and-tear on their bodies anymore,” she said. “One of my painters is now working at a theme park, painting carousel horses. They found ways to make themselves more valuable and to bring purpose to what they’re doing and to themselves.”
In working to help replace that talent, she’s learned that “literally anybody is a candidate at this point,” even a waiter or waitress who clearly understands customer service.
“My selection pool is anybody who could potentially be an asset to the team,” she said. “In our industry, we’re teaching you how to do the work. I live by one motto: I can teach you how to do anything I know how to do, but I can’t teach you how to care. To care about people, to care about being at work on time, to care about your own learning and development.”
Caliber’s TAP is a paid, on-the-job apprenticeship program that graduated more than 250 new technicians in 2022. Overseeing the program has shown her that contrary to what some people think, young people do want to learn new skills, but how they want to learn has changed.
“They just want 45 seconds of learning or three minutes of learning,” she said, noting they are used to finding a YouTube video with whatever information — correct or otherwise — they are looking for. “They want to be taught what they need to do right then so they can take action right away and get a star on the board,” she said. “We have to find a way to give them the learning they need because when we don’t, they may find the wrong information online. So that’s one of the things we’re working on.”
Other speakers at the conference offered their own take on how the industry can find the new employees they need. Keith Schaefer of Universal Technical Institute said one potential “fuel line” of new technicians are the SkillsUSA competitions at the state and national levels.
“Those students are already involved and interested in collision repair,” Schaefer said. “That’s an excellent source.”
But Olivia Peterson, a technician with Gerber Collision and Glass who just became interested in the industry three years ago, said shops should look beyond those traditional sources. She learned early on in the pandemic that she didn’t want to work remotely.
“I needed to get back to a place where I needed to be at the work onsite, I needed to be using my hands,” Peterson said. “Try to find pools of people who have just those sort of hand skills but not necessarily automotive backgrounds. One of the things my instructors noted is that some of the most successful students are ones who came in knowing absolutely nothing about cars. So we need to really foster the development of people from non-traditional backgrounds, and finding ways to transform skills that may seem completely unrelated into something they can do in the collision repair field.”
Jennifer Mayer of the TechForce Foundation said the industry suffers because fewer than 3 percent of technicians are women.
“If you want to solve the tech shortage, welcome women,” Mayer said, drawing applause from the mostly female audience at the conference. “The No. 1 way to do that: Make sure if you have any women working for you that they are part of the interview process, that you’re pushing that out in your ads and marketing, getting them out in the community in order to inspire. People need to see it to be it.”
She said Gen Z is one of the most socially -conscious generations since World War II.
“That means they want to make the world a better place,” she said. “They want to have a positive impact. They want to know why what they are doing matters. You need to tell them. If they really believe they are keeping people safe and keeping families on the road and keeping people moving, they feel good about that. They see they are helping people. The more you as a business can connect to that social impact, the more it doesn’t feel like a job to them, but an impactful life. That matters to them.”
She said collision repair (and other automotive trades) has “done a horrible job” of showing young people the career path available to them.
“When you hire them, they often report back to me that they’re rotting,” she said. “They don’t know what’s next. They don’t see that future. And so they leave. So communication and information is absolutely paramount.”
The third thing younger workers are looking for, she said, is work-life balance.
“They have parents like me who were crazy workaholics, and they’re like, ‘I ain’t doing that; I want a work-life balance,’” Mayer said. “So at the end of the day, how do you get a competitive advantage by saying, ‘I know that, I recognize that. Let’s give that to you for your career.’”
She said young people in particular believe they are likely to have five or six careers in their lifetime, so it’s important to help them see how new skills they are learning are “stackable” and will help them “level up” much as they do when gaming. She said one of her own sons is “rolling tables and stacking chairs” for Marriott.
“Why? Because Marriott — and my other kid worked at Disney — has the best customer service training on the planet,” Mayer said. “You want to hire somebody for your front desk or counter? Steal somebody from a hotel. They have been trained. Now if I didn’t draw that connection for him, he’d say, ‘This job sucks, I want to quit.’ I told him you don’t always know what you’re learning, when you have to interact with guests and make sure their experience is perfect. So when employees are learning skills, help them understand how it all connects to help them ‘level up.’”
Caliber’s Peet agreed that employee retention is key to reducing the technician shortage. She said when she was running shop locations, her priority was to really get to know her team of technicians — their hobbies and interests, their goals and priorities, their families.
“I wanted to make sure I had something to talk to them about,” she said, noting that just looking at what’s plastered on technicians’ toolboxes can be a good way to see what’s important to them. “I wanted to be able to read their mood, so if something was wrong, we could talk about it. Once you make that connection with them, they won’t leave you. They won’t. Because they know that you care about them as a human being, not just a person who’s going to make money for the shop.”
She said the book, “The Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace” changed her life.
“I read it years ago, but I still go back and look at it any time I have somebody new on my team,” she said. “Because I know everybody likes to be recognized in a certain type of way. Some people don’t want to be recognized in public. Some people want the attention. Some people want the gifts or money.” •
