May 2021

T here’s a skills shortage in the automotive sector, but you already knew that. A combination of an ageing workforce retiring out, a tendency for younger professionals inside the sector to feel frustrated by a lack of progression and leave the industry, and a decreasing number of young people coming in at all, means the talent pool continues to shrink. This is something that requires action at the top, in the middle and at the base of the sector. All this is true, but when you’re running a workshop, you just want someone good, preferably today. We asked some garage owners how they have been finding recruitment at present. Mix Andrew Davison is the owner of North East Auto Tech in Stockton-on-Tees: “I’ve been trading for 15 years. As cars have become more complex, the situation has got worse. When I went into the trade as a Youth Trainee, and I went to college, there were probably 25 of us in the class. In 2019 at a time when we were looking at taking an apprentice on I spoke to a college tutor, and he told me they had only received six applications.” Andrew started on the franchised side with a Vauxhall dealer before transitioning into the independent sector. When it comes to initial recruitment, things are arguably a bit more structured on the dealer side. We asked him if he thought the problem stems back to a lack of an over-arching training and career path for technicians in the independent sector. He believes the dealer focus within training is actually a bigger issue: “The way a lot of the dealerships work, it is more remove- and-replace, rather than remove- repair-and-replace. The knowledge in the way things actually work seems to be taken out of the equation. I’d say at least a generation of kids coming into the trade have not received that knowledge.” Blunt If he is finding them, when he manages to find them, where is Andrew finding them? “To be brutally honest,” he replied, “we are not finding them at the moment.” Touché! He continued: “Our latest advert that we put out, I was fairly blunt in it, and I said I did not want any CVs because I am finding that these are often a copy-and-paste exercise for applicants. They all read very much the same, and they are all saying they can do X-Y-Z. I was on one of Andy Savva The Garage Inspector’s courses at the end of last year, and he hit the nail on the head. He said ‘there is no such thing as a fully qualified mechanic’. When I came back and I looked through CVs that we have had, the amount that were saying ‘fully qualified’ or ‘this- qualified’ and ‘that-qualified’, but you can’t be. If you were to spend all your time training, you would never be doing any work. “With regards to recruitment companies, we’ve used lots over time, and never had any success. We used a couple of sector-specific ones, but nothing came of it. There was a few where there were monthly fees, and a few where they took a percentage of the applicant’s wages that you took on, but there was no success there. I run an eight-bay workshop, and unfortunately there are only two of us in it. Because the vast majority of work we do is very specialised, that is the level of people I need. It’s not for want of offering very good money either. Within our region, the wages I was offering technicians was far above what other garages were paying.” Are the very particular circumstances we find ourselves exacerbating the problem? Andrew 8 AFTERMARKET MAY 2021 BIG ISSUE www.aftermarketonline.net RECRUITMENT: THE ONGOING CHALLENGE Finding the best people continues to be a challenge for garages, and COVID-19 has not made the recruitment process any easier