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DETROIT — Jennifer Briggs has spent enough years running dealer fixed operations to watch dealerships burn money chasing the same small pool of technicians. As general manager of Volkswagen of Marion in southern Illinois and a former dean of the Auto Diesel Institute, she's trained technicians, hired them, and lost enough of them to know the difference between a hiring problem and a keeping problem. Her blunt assessment, delivered at the Digital Dealer Conference & Expo in September 2020, has only grown more relevant: what the industry faces "is not a recruiting war; it's a retention war." (Updated March 2025.)
The shortage, by the numbers
The demand side of the ledger is unforgiving. Dealerships and independent repair shops collectively need about 70,865 new technicians every year just to keep up with attrition and retirements. But the country added just 8,755 net new technicians in the year Briggs compiled her data — a ratio that makes the word "shortage" feel generous.
Worse, the training pipeline can't scale fast enough. Even at full output, Briggs said, trade schools and post-secondary programs produce roughly 59 percent of annual demand. That leaves a structural gap hovering around 29 percent every single year — a shortfall that no amount of cross-town recruiting can erase, because every tech who switches stores simply opens a hole somewhere else.
The official federal outlook is just as grim: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 69,000 openings for automotive service technicians and mechanics each year through the early 2030s, driven mostly by retirement and high turnover. The industry's problem isn't demand. It's retention.
Recruiting is a zero-sum game — and an expensive one
Here's how the current model works at most stores: a service manager gets desperate, calls a headhunter, and pays around $5,000 to pull an experienced technician away from a competing dealership. The new tech signs a 12- or 24-month employment agreement, pockets a signing bonus, and starts working. The moment the contract expires, another recruiter comes calling with a larger offer. Repeat.
Briggs describes that churn with a back-door metaphor: for every technician walked in through the showroom doors, another walks out the service entrance once the contract clock runs down. The dealership gains a warm body; the industry gains nothing.
She's seen the economics up close. A headhunter once dangled $5,000 per student to place Auto Diesel Institute graduates directly into dealership jobs. Briggs declined, reasoning that placement without a real support system just accelerates the same cycle — a rookie gets hired, gets discouraged, and jumps ship within a year, often leaving the trade entirely.
Build a real pipeline: school partnerships that last
If poaching can't fix the supply problem, Briggs argued, the only durable answer is to grow technicians — and that means treating local trade schools and community college automotive programs as true partners, not as temp agencies.
The biggest mistake dealers make is showing up only when a bay sits empty. "Schools notice the difference," Briggs said. Call it the fair-weather-friend problem: schools remember which employers appeared at career fairs every year, served on advisory boards, and offered feedback on curriculum, versus those who materialized only during a hiring emergency. She urged dealers to take advisory-board seats, track their involvement with concrete numbers, and stay visible year-round.
Creativity helps, too. Rather than wholesaling a wrecked 2019 Jeep Wrangler at a loss, Briggs donated the vehicle to a nearby ASE-accredited program. The dealership earned a tax write-off; students got a modern vehicle to tear down, diagnose, and rebuild — a welcome upgrade from the aging sedans most programs rely on.
Technology removes some of the guesswork. Briggs pointed dealers to Wrenchway.com, a free platform where schools post specific needs — tools, vehicles, guest instructors, advisory seats — and dealerships can browse and volunteer directly. Since the conference, Wrenchway has been absorbed by the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence (ASE), giving the platform an institutional home and a wider reach.
Apprenticeships only work when the work is real
A pipeline breaks the moment a student walks into the shop and has nothing meaningful to do. Briggs was blunt about the failure mode: interns parked in corners, handed a broom, and expected to be grateful.
At Volkswagen of Marion, she restructured the service workflow so that all tear-down work routes to a dedicated line. Apprentices now work through internal jobs — disassembly, inspection, part replacement — at their own pace without throttling the production technicians beside them. The change came after her service manager watched the used-car backlog crawl from 25 to 37 units, stalled for lack of staffed bays.
That kind of structure serves a double purpose. Apprentices learn on real work under real deadlines, and they leave at the end of the day knowing the shop actually needed them — a feeling that does more for retention than any signing bonus.
Flat-rate pay is the fastest way to lose Gen Z
Few things scare young technicians away from dealerships faster than flat-rate pay, Briggs said. The model compensates techs based on flagged hours rather than hours worked, which means a slower, careful newcomer absorbs the risk of a noisy shop, waiting parts, and comeback work. The incoming generation has no patience for it.
The fix spreading through the industry: base pay with a performance bonus, or a blend of hourly and incentive pay. Briggs first described the shift at a time when she was seeing apprentice pay from $13 to $17 an hour, with raises tied to every state, ASE, or OEM certification earned. In 2025, comparable Midwest dealership apprenticeship postings routinely start in the $16-to-$20 range — proof the market has moved, even if not every store has.
Federal money helps where budgets fall short. Briggs highlighted registered-apprenticeship incentive funding of $3,500 per apprentice, payable after nine months on the job for dealers who register their programs at the state or federal level. Since her presentation, the U.S. Department of Labor has expanded its apprenticeship infrastructure in transportation sectors — worth flagging for any dealer still running an informal, off-the-books intern program.
Career paths are the unglamorous retention fix
Pay gets attention, but structure is what keeps people. Briggs cited two sobering stats: the dealership net-promoter score sits at negative 73, and only 16 percent of technicians believe the industry is improving. Combine that with the 46 percent of techs who call a career path a must-have, and the roadmap is obvious.
She pointed to Lithia Motors' five-tier technician ladder — apprentice, technician, master technician, team lead, shop foreman — as a model worth copying. Defined competencies and pay bands turn a job into a career, and they answer the first question most young workers ask: where does this go?
The playbook has aged well
Time has been kind to Briggs's thesis. TechForce Foundation's "Mind the Gap" research projected that the U.S. needs roughly 1.2 million new automotive, diesel, and collision technicians between 2022 and 2026 — a figure that makes 2020's annual estimate of roughly 70,000 look modest. NADA's dealer workforce studies continue to peg technician turnover near 40 percent a year.
The dealers winning now are the ones who internalized the message: registered apprenticeship programs, structured pay plans, school partnerships that predate the hiring crisis, and careers instead of jobs. The technicians this industry needs are out there — in community colleges, in high school automotive programs, and in the ranks of current employees who might stay if someone bothered to give them a future. Briggs's parting advice to dealer audiences, unchanged since 2020: stop fighting over the same small pool of people, and start growing your own.
