As many as 73,500 new heavy equipment technicians will be needed in the next five years in the U.S. and Canada, according to the Associated Equipment Distributors Foundation.
“That’s a big gap,” said foundation chairman Jeffrey Scott.
The estimate is based on numbers extrapolated from a 2019 survey of AED members conducted as part of a study by researchers from the College of William & Mary.
The survey of 131 AED dealer members, or 29 percent of the total membership, indicated that “AED distributor members collectively are seeking to fill approximately 3,300 technician positions annually,” noted the executive summary of the research project report. “We estimate, when including non-AED member dealers, the range could be anywhere from 9,000 to 14,700 unfilled technician positions annually.”
Over five years, the higher end of that range would add up to 73,500 positions. While that figure isn’t explicitly mentioned in the report, an accompanying AED Foundation backgrounder does cite it. Scott also referred to that figure this March in a speech at the ConExpo-Con/Agg trade show in Las Vegas where the foundation announced the report and its findings.
95% of firms cite skills gap
“Ninety-five percent of the AED member respondents agreed that there is a skills gap in the industry,” Scott said. “And 89 percent reported that shortage is of those skilled technical workers.”
Nearly 90 percent of AED survey respondents have a job opening, Scott said. That’s three times the national average. “And those are almost all technicians,” Scott said.
On the other hand, 61 percent in the survey “don’t believe that local educational institutions understand their company’s workforce needs,” the report’s executive summary noted.
The report didn’t offer an estimate of what proportion of the technicians shortfall is in the mobile repair category. However, Scott said in an interview that “a big chunk” would be field service technicians.
At his dealership — Intermountain Bobcat of Salt Lake City — “about 20 percent of our service calls are field service,” he said. “Of that 73,000 there would be a percentage that would be service techs.”
AED president Brian P. McGuire said field service techs are important to the industry, something that is reflected in their higher page grade.
“What I like to talk about the service truck guy is that technician makes more money than the guy that’s in the shop,” McGuire said. “He is a troubleshooter. He’s out in the field, working on that equipment, driving great revenue for a dealership, but also making good money himself.”
The most recent William & Mary report follows up on earlier ones in 2016 and 2017. The first examined the economic impact of the technicians shortage and estimated it was costing the industry $2.4 billion a year. The second report, by a different group of researchers, took a state-by-state look at measures to help AED members close the gap in their own localities. One of its findings was that in the previous two decades high school career and technical education programs had collapsed across the country, largely because of “difficulty of attracting qualified teachers.” From 1994 to 2004, for example, 2.7 million teachers left the CTE field but only 2.25 million were hired to replace them.
More school programs planned
Instead of focusing on the economic impact, the latest study looked at “how many technicians industry needs,” McGuire said. The AED aims to formulate a plan to address that shortage.
To that end, the AED is reviving a program that recognizes high school technical programs. “So our goal by 2024 is to be able to stand here and say that we have recognized 50 new high school programs,” McGuire said. At present, the U.S. has five AED-recognized high school programs, according to the 2020 William & Mary report.
That Vision 2024 initiative also aims for 100 accredited college programs and 10,000 skilled technicians entering the workforce, as well as “500 certified managers, 10,000 tests administered, and 5,000 certified technicians,” Scott wrote in the introduction to the report.
The goal is to develop a high school feeder program “as well as developing some collateral to help parents understand that this is really a career track,” McGuire said. “It’s not a dead-end career, that this is real earning potential.”
The Caterpillar Foundation meanwhile announced a $300,000 scholarship grant to the AED to work on a partnership to start a pipeline to recruit, train and develop industry talent and address the workforce shortages.
“It’s not unique to one dealer, one company. It’s something that’s felt broadly,” said Brian Colgan, chief strategy officer for the Caterpillar Foundation.
The most recent William & Mary report noted that AED partnerships with high schools haven’t always worked out as hoped. Virginia company James River Equipment discovered that its donation of equipment and technical advice to a local high school resulted in too few students pursuing careers in the industry. A company vice-president attributed the failure to “social misperception of the industry,” the report said. The program’s high cost forced the company to abandon it. However, the vice-president has proposed a “shadow program” instead in which prospective students shadow shop technicians to “not only gain hands-on experience but will also understand the environment of the workplace.”
Manufacturing vital, survey finds
The report also pointed to surveys that show while eight in 10 Americans think manufacturing is a vital industry only half “believe manufacturing jobs to be more interesting and rewarding, clean and safe, and stable and secure than in the past.” And less than 30 percent of those surveyed would encourage their children to pursue careers in manufacturing. “Yet respondents familiar with the industry are nearly two times more likely to encourage children to pursue a manufacturing career than others,” the report said, citing a 2018 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends study.
That same Deloitte study found a “notable shift” in manufacturers’ perceptions of what is contributing to the talent shortage. “In 2015, the retirement of baby boomers topped the list, followed by strength of the economy,” the most recent AED-commissioned report said. “However, Deloitte’s current study reveals that most manufacturers believe that the leading cause of the skills shortage is ‘shifting skill set due to the introduction of new advanced technology and automation,’ followed by ‘negative perception of students/their parents toward the manufacturing industry.’ Baby boomer retirement is the third cause of today’s skills shortages, according to manufacturing executives.”
Half of the manufacturers cited in the Deloitte study were already using robots, cobots, machine learning and other technologies in 2018.
More “doing” recommended
Among the new recommendations in the latest AED report are the following:
• Emphasize hands-on learning that involve the motor-related areas of the brain — more “doing.”
• Promote the technological component of technician training to promote interest among students.
• Plan for effective grant usage and program sustainability of the 1994 School-to-Work Opportunities Act given that its investments are only intended to cover one-time costs.
• Conduct data analysis on the distribution of funds through the recently updated Perkins Act — a 2006 law to provide federal money to state and local governments for career and technical education — regarding the education of technicians.
In 2019, Perkins funding totalled $1.3 million. That’s about $3 billion less than in 2004 in inflation-adjusted dollars, although more than the $1.1 billion in 2017.
Buried in the report is good news, though. “Overall, despite wider literature and national trends indicating a worsening skills gap, for the heavy equipment industry and AED membership in particular, the survey data shows that such predictions seem to be less extreme than anticipated, or at the very least seem to be holding steady,” the report states on page 8.
Yet that same page had a graph showing “the vast majority of AED dealerships indicate difficulty in recruiting technicians.” And half of them have “great difficulty,” the graph show.
“The most important reason for this difficulty is a lack of hard (technical) skills among applicants. A lack of soft skills is the second most important. Industry pay was reported to be the third most important factor. This is consistent with findings among AED members in 2016,” the report said.
Service techs combine skills
From what McGuire said, a field service technician combines those hard and soft skills with experience.
“The important aspect of this is the role the technician plays in keeping that equipment functioning for the end user,” McGuire said. “We know that contractors, road builders, the one thing that they cannot deal with is downtime. When that equipment goes down, they got to get it repaired. And part of that is being able to get a technician out there to do that.”
Scott McPherson, public relations manager with the AED Foundation, added: “It’s especially critical in rural areas. We’ve got large distances in the northern plains of the United States and all through Canada. You send these guys out, they have to be self starters. And that’s why they get paid the kind of money they do. It’s a great career. They’re always in demand.”
“Well, he’s got to be more of a troubleshooter,” McGuire elaborated. “The parts counter isn’t out on in the field.”
He described the mobile service technician as “a vital component of our industry.” It’s so vital that some AED dealers “have instituted intensive onsite training programs for their existing technicians to get them out to the truck faster.”
— Keith Norbury