Caliber’s Chief People Officer discusses the collision repair firm’s apprenticeship program, and how it benefits the company and its teammates.
As collision repair facility operators continue to face historic shortages of technicians, the industry is increasingly looking at formal apprenticeship programs to attract and train the next generation of staff. Caliber’s Technician Apprentice Program was launched with a commitment to bring in over a thousand apprentices to build their own capability and bring repair hours beyond pre-pandemic levels.
In our video interview embedded below, David Dart, Chief People Officer at Caliber, explains why the MSO launched its apprenticeship program, how the program aligns with the company’s current needs and future trends and the benefits to its teammates, their families and the company.
Following the pandemic, Caliber sought to increase its capacity to meet demand at the end of 2021 as people returned to driving and used car prices increased allowing more repair work before a vehicle was deemed a total loss. Part of the solution the company used was its Technician Apprenticeship Program to bring new people into the trade.
“We knew that we needed to get our repair hours back up to pre-pandemic levels. We knew that hiring wasn’t going to be the only way to do that, so we knew that we had to invest in building our own technicians, and made the commitment to say, hey, look, we’re going to put a big, hairy, audacious goal on the board and say we’re going to bring in well over a thousand apprentices over the course of the next couple years to help us build our own capability and bring our repair hours back to pre-pandemic level, so that was really the impetus for it,” said Dart. “We started it in earnest in very early 2022 and had great success right off the bat.”
Asked how the apprenticeship program compares to traditional technical education program, Dart explained they complement each other as apprentices that come into the program with training at a technical school or college build upon what they learned with experience in the collision center.
“We actually do partner well with trade schools. It’s different in that we have the capability to bring people in with little to no experience. They have to have mechanical aptitude obviously, and ideally, they would have been in a shop environment in some, way shape or form, but if they have passion for the car industry, the auto industry, this is a great place for them to come and we’ll teach them the business right from the start,” said Dart. “Trade schools are a great pipeline for our apprentice program, because they have an incredible foundation that they’ve learned within the trade school, and then they can accelerate through our program quite quickly because they already have that requisite foundation that they’ve achieved in their school program, and then they just become qualified body technicians at a faster rate.”
A key lesson learned was the need to have sufficient numbers of trained mentors to work with the apprentices.
“We were starting to put in quite a few apprentices, but you have to have the mentors there to make sure that you can deliver on the learning, and just because you’re an “A” technician, a five-star tech, doesn’t mean that you can transfer knowledge, or want to,” said Dart. “So we certainly had to do some effective recruiting, make sure incentives were in place to get our mentors ready, and then do some training for them so they could help to transfer knowledge. Some of them may have been not joining because they didn’t know if they could transfer knowledge, they didn’t have the requisite skills maybe to be a mentor, so we knew we had to put some effort into teaching folks how to do that.”
Commenting on how the program has worked, Dart explained that the program’s success goes far beyond its benefit to Caliber and its teammates.
“It’s rare to have a program that has an opportunity to have such huge positive. It’s a win-win-win-win-win. It’s a win for communities. It’s a win for the individuals who we are teaching a lifelong skill that pays incredibly well. It’s a win for the company. It’s a win for our carriers, and it’s a win for the customers, the drivers who need to have their rhythm in their lives restored because it’s so disruptive,” said Dart. “We have some really great stories about how our apprentices have come in, learned the skill, and after 12 to 18 months are graduating and become a standalone technician, and we celebrate that.”