Nearly 11,000 diesel students graduate post-secondary tech programs every year.
That doesn’t sound like an ingredient for a labor shortage, yet the fact that truck fleets coast-to-coast struggle daily to fill vacancies in the repair bay and retain their best technicians is indisputable.
That’s a problem George Arrants, ASE Education Alliance manager for medium/heavy duty trucks and the chairman of TMC’s Supertech competition, says is self-inflicted.
“For the last four decades, we’ve been telling kids ‘go to college,’” says Arrants, who delivered the opening address at Isuzu’s North American technician competition in Pittston, Pennsylvania. “We forgot to create the workforce that’s going to maintain the infrastructure of our country, but Career and Technical Education is on the move. We are a service oriented nation.”
Highly-skilled blue-collar labor is getting harder to find across practically every trade: from truck driving to truck fixing and from plumbers to welders. Students who 30 years ago may have graduated from a tech program are now walking around with four-year degrees.
