Small auto shops often find themselves facing a persistent challenge: finding and retaining skilled employees. First, there’s a need for technicians who can adapt to the complexities of modern vehicles, and salespeople who understand the latest product lines and models.
Read: Small Shops, Big Impact: Driving Loyalty in the Auto Aftermarket
There’s also the issue of Occupational Separation—finding skilled replacements for people leaving the workforce. This is rising in importance across a number of industries as a wave of experienced workers from the Baby Boomer generation get set to retire.
But whatever the cause, more and more of these auto aftermarket businesses are being stretched thin from a lack of skilled labor. Just look at some of these figures from the past few years:
- Between 2021-2022, the number of graduates from post-secondary programs in the automotive sector dropped by nearly 12%. More than just a blip, these figures have been trending downward since 2012. (TechForce Foundation)
- Automotive industry leaders are predicting a shortage of more than 2 million skilled workers in 2025, with the number expected to rise over the next decade. (SurgeStaffing)
- In Q1 2024, 76% of organizations in the transport, logistics, and automotive industries reported challenges with finding and retaining the talent they need (ManpowerGroup)
These challenges are exacerbated for smaller auto shops and dealers. An employee training program and other in-depth retention strategies would be nice to have, but at this level of the channel, nice-to-haves are a luxury that these business owners’ limited bandwidth often doesn’t allow for.
What We’ve Found
With a daily crunch on time and resources, investing in employee development can feel like a tall task. Your dealers are often simply too busy meeting business needs and keeping the day-to-day operations of their shop afloat and profitable. This isn’t just conjecture. These sentiments were echoed in a report we recently put out titled, “Small Shops, Big Impact: Driving Loyalty in the Auto Aftermarket”.
The report highlights firsthand survey data from hundreds of repair shop owners, smaller aftermarket dealer managers, and automotive technicians. Throughout the survey, a key theme that cropped up was the importance of better employee training. Specifically:
- Respondents cited “finding and retaining skilled labor” as their #1 business challenge
- More than three-quarters (76%) felt that training and certification programs were an effective means of achieving their business goals
The Opportunity
For upstream channel members—OEMs, parts manufacturers, and distributors—this presents a unique opportunity to build stronger relationships with your smaller down-channel shop owners—and gain a competitive edge with your end-consumers in the process.
The key is to develop corporate eLearning solutions and incentives that are tailored to the needs of these smaller auto shops and dealers. The data tells us that not only do your dealers need this support; they also truly value it and believe in its efficacy. This provides the perfect backdrop for a channel incentive value-add like training and certification.
As technology continues to evolve exponentially, employees need to stay current with the latest products and technologies. We may not have reached the level of the Jetsons and flying cars—but we’re also not that far off. The most recent vehicle models have sophisticated software and systems that are being consistently updated. So, it’s vital that your dealer’s employees keep up with this product knowledge if they’re going to communicate effectively with end-user customers.
When these dealers’ sales teams and technicians are well-versed in your latest products, technologies, and industry best practices, they’re better equipped to meet customer demands, reduce errors, and upsell/cross-sell effectively. This translates directly into increased customer satisfaction, improved loyalty, and ultimately, higher revenue.
Why is this important? Along with the gap in employee training, our report also found that the top emerging trend in the auto aftermarket industry was “enhanced customer expectations for service and convenience.” It doesn’t take a huge leap to connect the dots. A more knowledgeable workforce is going to be more capable of addressing rising customer expectations and demands.
On the one hand, incentivized training programs and digital learning courses will provide these employees with more “tools in their toolbox”, improving operational efficiency and knowledge transfer among teams. On the other hand, these solutions can motivate employees and bolster their overall engagement—supporting existing SPIFF or other dealer/shop retention strategies.
By giving your dealers’ employees a reason to stay engaged, and a powerful tool to grow professionally, you’re likely to produce happier—and more loyal— dealers. In other words: what’s good for them, is good for you.
The Solution
So, what might these sorts of eLearning platforms include? Again, these smaller shop owners have limited bandwidth, so keeping any employee training programs or certification strategies as simple as possible is a must. Some ways to achieve this are:
- Make your corporate training and certification mobile-friendly
- Break the training down into “bite-sized” modules to improve knowledge retention
- Create personalized learning paths with the training materials wherever possible
- Offer more videos and less text
- Provide tangible rewards for module completion
- Give refresher courses to keep employees’ new skills updated
- Gamify the digital learning process
We’ve seen these strategies succeed in areas such as IT, where product complexity is nothing new. Even on a global scale, with the right corporate eLearning platform and properly designed incentives, effective dealer training is absolutely achievable and can supplement any business strategy.
A dealer network that’s unmotivated and time-constrained also isn’t uncommon. For manufacturers in the power management and automotive systems space, for example, inspiring rewards and a strategic overall rewards structure were able to overcome the apathy typically associated with a professional certification course.
Conclusion
Ultimately, our report highlights what we’ve already learned through our decades of experience. Corporate eLearning, training, and certification can not only address the skills gap within the automotive channel but also position your business as a trusted ally to your smaller auto-shop owners. From boosting employee confidence to driving sales and loyalty, a purposeful and well-designed training strategy can deliver win-win results for everyone in the supply chain.
