We welcome you to JobBank USA and hope your job hunting experience
is a pleasant one. We hope you find our resources useful.
Rome dealers say service jobs, for example, are getting more technical, which has its pros and cons
July 9, 2006
Sitting front and center in her college marketing class, Kim Smith took copious notes as a woman lectured about the importance of customer satisfaction and the lure of lucrative sales.
Porsche dealership owner Michelle Primm, the guest at Cuyahoga Community College near Cleveland, Ohio, wasn’t teaching. And she wasn’t selling cars, she was selling car careers.
“What you may have thought of as your local neighborhood car dealership is actually a huge industry,” Primm told the class at the college also known as Tri-C. “There are a ton of jobs: accounting, management, technical. It can be a lifelong, very rewarding career.”
Primm is a member of the Greater Cleveland Automobile Dealers Association, which has launched an internship program as part of a nationwide recruiting effort for an industry overflowing with job openings.
The National Automobile Dealers Association estimates there are more than 100,000 jobs available at 20,000 dealerships across the nation, chairman William Bradshaw said.
That figure was supported by a January survey of 657 new-car dealers commissioned by McLean, Va.-based Automotive Retailing Today, a coalition of major auto manufacturers and dealers. It found that there are an estimated 105,000 openings in various positions, including sales, management, administration and service, mostly in the South and Midwest.
In Rome, dealership owners aren’t seeing an unusually large number of job openings, but they are seeing dealership jobs becoming more technical and professional in nature — in some cases making them more appealing to job candidates and other times making them more difficult to fill with qualified people.
Bob Williams of Bob Williams Dodge-Chrysler-Jeep says the service department especially is getting harder to staff.
“The cars have gotten so technical with so many computers. It’s getting harder and harder to find people to work on these things,” he said, adding that his experienced mechanics sometimes struggle with the technology and that tech-savvy young people tend to be less interested in auto repair work.
“It’s getting tougher and tougher to find auto mechanics today who can keep up with the technology,” Williams said.
At Rome Ford Lincoln Mercury, a growing number of job applicants are people with degrees from four-year colleges or technical schools, said owner Duane Reid.
And Reid says the computerization of auto repair makes the service department a good career opportunity.
“A highly trained, skilled technician can pretty much write his or her own check as to what he or she will make in this industry,” Reid said. “It can be very lucrative.”
The National Automobile Dealers Association reports that a technician or painter can earn between $70,000 and $100,000 a year at a busy dealership. Sales jobs can bring in six figures depending on commission (the industry average for sales is $43,000 a year, according to the dealers association), and financing, accounting, marketing and other office jobs typically pay around $50,000 a year, Bradshaw said. However, wages in the South tend to be below national averages.
Riverside Toyota also tends to see a healthy supply of job candidates whenever it has openings, said Skip Welborn, the company’s vice president and general manager.
“We seldom advertise for a position. People tend to come to us,” he said. “Historically, we’ve always had a reasonably good pool of people to pick from.”
Nationwide, Bradshaw said dealerships have job openings for several reasons — sales have increased; mechanic work now requires more computer skills; financing auto loans has become an expected service; and larger dealerships open long hours seven days a week need more administrative and management employees.
Some positions, such as accounting or marketing, may require a college degree, but most, including sales and management, don’t. A high school diploma, some technical training and a desire to work from the bottom up are all that are required, dealers say.
Bradshaw’s 19,000-member group is expanding a program this fall in which high-school students and guidance counselors visit dealerships to learn about careers. The Cleveland association is focusing on marketing and other business students at community colleges. Dealers in Texas and Florida are spending this summer scouring shopping malls in search of women to bring into the business.
Breaking stereotypes is a major part of the industry’s effort, said Bradshaw, who owns several dealerships in South Carolina after starting as an office manager at a lot 35 years ago with no money and no experience.
“There’s a stigma that we’ve got to break through,” he said, “that mechanic stigma that it’s greasy or that it’s not a great career path.”
Business Editor Chris Marr contributed to this report.
Email This Page!