Pub. 6 2016 Issue 4

18 AUTOMOBILE DEALER NEWS ILLINOIS www.illinoisdealers.com n Dealerships Need More Young Technicians — continued on page 20 BY SUSAN MORGAN , THE NEWSLINK GROUP Dealerships NeedMore Young Technicians PromoTAG ™ Transform your dispatch tag into a marketing tool. Deliver your message 100% of the time. Dealership car repair shops are usually profitable. In fact, at some dealerships they are more profitable than the sales department. A good repair shop at a car dealership also matters because excellent service can persuade a customer to come back again later, not just for service but also maybe for another car from the same dealership. To make that happy cycle of profitability continue into the indefinite future, dealerships need one important resource: a ready supply of young technicians. But that is where the situ- ation becomes a little trickier. Young, qualified technicians are scarce and may need different handling than technicians from previous generations. Sometime during 2015, millennials will become the larg- est part of the workforce. However, hiring managers say it is hard to find them when a job needs to be filled, and it is also hard to keep them. They expect to move on to something new in three years or less. They tend to be creative, open to change, adaptable, and entrepreneurial … but they can also be narcissistic and they often have no clue about how to be a good team player. Many young people are directing their educational efforts toward science, math, and a college degree. That is largely thanks to the efforts of the educational system and their par- ents. In particular, No Child Left Behind emphasizes core subjects, not vocational subjects such as machining, shop, or welding. Schools cut or dropped vocational classes because they weren’t a good source of federal funding. What many ed- ucators and parents may not realize, however, is the amount of technical knowledge required by a technician today, how much a technician can earn, or how strong the demand is. High schools are often not as up-to-date as they need to be when it comes to teaching those who are interested in learning the necessary skills. As cars have become more so- phisticated, they’ve also gotten harder for an amateur to fix. Nobody can just walk up to a car with a bag of tools anymore