Dinged by retirements, body shops looking for new workers - Dallas Morning News
Service King apprentice Horacio Frias works on a bumper at the northeast Dallas repair center. The one-year apprentice program, which pays an hourly wage, starts with repairs to lightly damaged vehicles and progresses to more demanding jobs. “I said, ‘I got two years left in me and I’m going to the house,’” said Gonzales, 57, a senior collision repair tech at Service King in Dallas. Like many big businesses nationwide, Richardson-based Service King has hundreds of baby boomer workers, and many of them are nearing retirement. But most collision repair shops contend with a second issue as well: Hot, hard body shop work doesn’t attract enough new young workers to fill the anticipated void, despite wages that can surpass $100,000 a year. So Service King initiated one of the industry’s first apprentice programs in June, recruiting young workers to be trained in a year for a fast-paced world of heavy metal. “If we have identified this as our greatest challenge, there are no excuses for doing nothing,” said Chris Abraham, CEO of Service King, which has 242 shops and about 5,000 U. S. employees. Privately held Service King declined to provide specific numbers on its retiring workers, job openings or people entering the business, citing company policy. “Working on cars was a cool thing to do 30 years ago,” he said. Source: www.dallasnews.com
