THE retail motor industry has reached a critical stage due to an ongoing skills shortage disaster.
The current demand for Vehicle Technicians, Panel Beaters and M.E.T. Technicians is higher than ever before. Currently, 68.4% of vacancies at Ingenia Resource and Recruitment are for people who can fix things, and 65.4% of those are for Vehicle Technicians.
This is a trend the company is seeing in dealerships, bodyshops and independent workshops across the North East of England.
These shortages can be traced back to dealers not recruiting enough apprentices for many years, which was always going to lead to the current situation.
Ingenia is seeing more CVs being submitted where people working in dealerships or bodyshops have questionable backgrounds. This is due to companies having to consider/recruit lower level skilled staff hoping they can be developed to a satisfactory level. Unfortunately, many of these recruits do not reach the required standards quickly enough before they are moved on.
The company has created a report using our extensive information resource, to show how recruitment in the retail North East motor industry has changed over the last 15 years.
As it stands, 68.4% of current vacancies are for productives. In 2020 this figure was 47.3%, 21.2% in 2011, and in 2006 they made up 24.9% of overall vacancies.
Reflecting on the demand for Vehicle Technicians, Ingenia looked at online website vacancies posted by motor dealers, bodyshops and specialist independents in the North East of England. Of the vacancies posted requiring productives on 29/04/21, 90.6% were for Vehicle Technicians.
Ingenia’s research traced the skills decline back to the 2008 recession when people were being made redundant and companies curtailed recruitment. As the economy started to recover, companies needed to replace their lost workforce, however many of those who were made redundant had left the industry due to not finding employment.
This is where employers should have recruited more apprentices, to bring in ‘fresh blood’ who would become fully experienced/qualified staff. Unfortunately, the focus was on recruiting fully experienced staff today, without much thought about the future.
Ingenia said that although it is still logging ‘Technicians’, it is interviewing fewer every year and is seeing a trend where the majority have questionable backgrounds and jump around in a short space of time.
Steve Shaw, Director of Ingenia Recruitment, said “We are in the midst of a dire situation, with no short term solution in sight. Recruiting apprentices now is the right things to do, and indeed must be done; but due to their very nature, will take years to achieve the skill level of those Technicians we are losing.
“Recruiting and training semi-skilled people could offer a partial solution, but once these people are recruited, they need a lot of training, mentoring, support and patience; things that we generally tend not to be very good at. Our current system of ‘giving them a chance’, throw them a service or pad and discs to replace and see how they get on, simply does not work. Most companies have resorted to increasing the wage for productives, but all this has resulted in is speeding up the merry-go-round with no net gain for the industry as a whole.
“Increasing the wage to attract apprentice applications will help, but as previously stated, the need for productives is immediate.
“Obviously our research and findings is our own and therefore North East based, but I am aware that these issues are not isolated to our region.”
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