The 37,000-Tech Shortage Hitting Oil Change Shops

Tyreese: Look, I want to talk about the one problem that can shut your whole week down faster than a busted pump or a supplier shorting your oil. It is not the price of oil this week. It is not a new competitor opening up down the street. It is that there is nobody left to turn the wrench.

Tyreese: Here is the thing. Yesterday, Sunday, a report out of Washington landed that put real numbers on something every operator I know has been feeling in their gut for months. Independent auto repair shops are pushing Congress to fund technician apprenticeship programs, and the reason they are pushing is simple. We do not have enough techs, and the pipeline is not keeping up.

Tyreese: Let me give you the numbers, because they are stark. According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, about thirty-nine thousand new service techs graduate from career technical colleges and training programs in this country every year. Sounds like a lot, right? Except the industry needs to replace nearly seventy-six thousand techs every year, just to keep up with retirements and new job demand. Do that math with me. Thirty-nine thousand coming in, seventy-six thousand needed. That leaves a shortfall of about thirty-seven thousand trained techs, every single year. Not once. Every year. Year after year, the gap just keeps compounding.

Tyreese: Now, the shops pushing this are asking Congress to make sure funding for fiscal twenty twenty-seven apprenticeship programs stays in the appropriations legislation they are working to finalize. The spokesman for the Automotive Service Association called it a big deal for them, and he is right. They also liked the small business provisions in the big tax and spending bill that became law, and they are watching to see if a third budget reconciliation package materializes. That is Washington talk, and I will translate it for you in a minute. But first, sit with that gap for a second, because it explains so much of what you are living right now.

Tyreese: Why can you not find a good tech? Why does every hire feel like a bidding war? Why does your best guy get poached by a dealership or a fleet shop with a bigger sign-on bonus? Because there are nearly twice as many chairs as there are people trained to sit in them. When the whole industry is short thirty-seven thousand people a year, your job posting is not competing with the shop across town. It is competing with every dealership, every fleet garage, every tire chain, and every independent in the country, all fishing in the same small pond.

Tyreese: Here is where it hits different depending on who you are. If you are a big chain, you have a training machine. You have a recruiting department. You have a brand name a kid recognizes, and you can move a tech from one store to another when somebody quits. A vacancy hurts, but it does not kill you. If you are an independent, and especially if you are mobile like me, one vacancy is a crisis. I do not have ten bays to absorb a no-show. I have a route. I have a truck. I have customers waiting in their driveways and fleet managers expecting us at their lot at eight in the morning. One tech calls out, one tech quits, and suddenly I am the one under the truck, or I am calling a customer to reschedule, and that customer does not always come back. For a chain, a tech shortage is a staffing problem. For an independent, a tech shortage is a revenue problem, the same day.

Tyreese: And mobile makes it even tighter, because the job is not just turning wrenches. A mobile tech has to drive the truck, talk to the customer, work clean in somebody's driveway, keep the paperwork straight, and handle whatever the day throws at them without a shop foreman ten feet away. That is a harder hire than a bay tech, and it means we cannot just grab anybody with a pulse and hope for the best. We need people who are reliable, presentable, and steady, and those people are exactly the ones everybody else wants too.

Tyreese: So what do we do about it? Let me be honest with you. Waiting on Congress is not a plan. Even if the funding comes through, that is fiscal twenty twenty-seven money, for programs that train people who will graduate down the road. That does not fill your truck this week. I am glad the associations are pushing, and I hope they get it, because the industry needs a bigger pipeline. But your business cannot wait for Washington to fix your hiring. You have to build your own pipeline, even if it is a small one.

Tyreese: Here is what that looks like for a shop our size, and it is not complicated. First, stop hiring only for experience. Experience is great, but in a market this tight, experience is the most expensive thing you can shop for, and everybody is shopping for it. Hire for attitude, reliability, and willingness to learn, and then train the skill yourself. A kid who shows up on time, treats customers right, and wants to learn is worth more to you than a journeyman who no-shows twice a month. You can teach an oil service. You cannot teach showing up.

Tyreese: Second, write down your training ladder. Not a binder, not a corporate manual. One page. Step one, what a helper does. Step two, what a tech does on their own. Step three, what a lead tech owns. When a new person can see the path, they stay longer, because they are not guessing whether this job goes anywhere. And when you can see the path, you stop throwing a new hire into the deep end and wondering why they drown.

Tyreese: Third, go meet your local career technical school before you need somebody. Not with a job posting. With a conversation. Tell the instructor what a mobile tech actually does, offer to let a student ride along for a day, and be the operator they think of when a good kid is about to graduate. Those thirty-nine thousand graduates a year are real people, and they go where somebody showed up and made the work sound real.

Tyreese: And here is a second thread that ties right into this, because it is happening next week. The industry's own association for preventative maintenance folks is bringing its fast-lube expo into the big aftermarket trade show in Las Vegas, November third through fifth. The whole point, in their president's words, is education, suppliers, technology, and business connections in one place. I am not telling you to fly to Vegas. I am telling you the industry itself is saying the same thing I am saying: training and connections are where the edge is now. If you cannot go, steal the idea. Spend one hour this week learning something about training, retention, or running a tighter route, the same way you would if you were walking that show floor.

Tyreese: Let me bring this home, because I do not want this to be one of those episodes where we all nod at a big scary number and then go back to the same week. The number is thirty-seven thousand techs short, every year. The chains will manage it with training departments and recruiting budgets. The independents who survive it will be the ones who stop waiting for a perfect hire to walk in the door and start growing their own. One good hire, trained right, kept right, is worth more than ten job postings.

Tyreese: So here is your takeaway for this week, and I want you to actually do it. Before Friday, write down your one-page training ladder. Just one page. Helper, tech, lead. What each level does, and what it takes to move up. Then show it to your team, or if it is just you right now, show it to the next person you interview. That piece of paper is the start of your pipeline, and it costs you nothing but an hour and some honesty about how your shop actually works.

Tyreese: That is it for today. Go check your bench strength before your route checks it for you. See you tomorrow.