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Employer Quotes

The quotes below are from employers in this industry: Transportation

They are talking about this topic: Workforce Trends & Challenges

 

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The quotes below are about this issue:
Employers believe that the younger generation has less experience with (and therefore perhaps less interest in) auto mechanics from an early age. Young people are now less likely to have grown up working on cars with their parents, and many automotive programs have been cut from high schools.

Employer Quote Region
"I think that yeah, kids don't work in the garage with their dad on the cars anymore. They don't grow up with nuts and bolts in their hands and right now, and when they get to the technical colleges, they're starting from square one where they didn't used to be that way. I see that that's the gap with people, the kids that I hire?the natural skills aren't there." Metro
"Support the high schools. High schools love these programs. They're just under financial constraints. Are you going to get rid of math, or are you going to get rid of automotive? You're going to get rid of automotive. Right now, I feel like the general feeling about our business is that 'if you can't do anything else, then why don't you try automotive.' And it's been that way for many years. When the high school programs go away, I mean, what would the NFL be if the high school stopped having football programs? Well, we're the NFL. If there aren't high school programs to support us, then how are we going to survive, except for hiring people and just plain training them on our own, and that costs a lot of money." Metro
"And they're phasing that out. For some reason, they don't want to put the money into the automotive in high schools any more." Metro
"You don't start any of this in high school. I mean, a 20 and a 22-year-old who went to a metro high school never got a taste of anything. It's all college oriented. They got no automotive. I mean, if it wasn't for my high school auto shop, I wouldn't be sitting here today. I mean, that's what got me started. Everything is college directed. You got to go get your four-year degree and go to college. They never get any of that in high school. I mean, we had a machine shop, an auto shop, a printing shop in high school, none of these kids get that any more, they're all headed down the academic. They all got to go to the U. Oh, yeah, they get on their smart phones and computers, great. But they have no clue about a car." Metro
"I read an article about how we're such a throw-away society now and when your snow blower goes bad, it's cheaper to just go buy another one at Home Depot than it is to take it to the snow blower repair guy because he's going to charge you $180 bucks to fix it and for $250 you get a new one. My dad showed me how to grease the chain of my bike when I was a kid. Well, now, you're playing video games and stuff, so we have a real image problem in that." Metro
"You need that additional [automotive] training right from high school. They're not getting that in high school." Northwest
"So I always wonder about kids growing up...like my aged kids, there's a good likelihood that a lot of these guys in the industry, their parents were in the vehicles and they had worked on them themselves, and they had muscle cars and fun things, and they have a passion for automobiles because of that. And I think it's going to become more difficult to find someone who grows up with a deep understanding of automobiles, other than mom took them around in the minivan when they were little. You know what I mean? The parents aren't going to know about the vehicles. And so they're probably not going to have a passion for cars." Northwest
"The people that are in the 40-year-old age bracket now are work-hard people, they've worked on cars themselves, enjoyed cars, lived and breathed them. And that is changing. Now it's video games. It's a different world out there. It really is." Northwest
"There's less shop programs in high schools now so they don't really get that initial [exposure]." Southwest