Charlie Barron considers himself a “late millennial.” He was born in 1996 and has grown up with video games, technology and social media. He’s now vice president of technology and is part of the third generation of his family to work at Chabill’s Tire & Auto Service.
He’s well aware of the national trends when it comes to staffing needs and generations of young people who were never introduced to automotive, or any other trades for that matter.
Amidst all the negative talk, he noticed a trend in the Chabill’s Tire workforce. In the stores that are run by younger managers, there’s less turnover amongst the young staff members — even in the entry level general service tech (GST) roles.
He looked at Bradley Schefferstein’s store as an example.
Schefferstein is 30 years old and manages a team of eight people. “The average age in his shop is very young — 30, maybe,” Charlie Barron says.
He happened to notice the trend because some of his work is related to job listings and filling holes where the business is short-handed.
“The place we have turnover is the GST position or the service advisor position, which is typically (filled) by younger people. When I looked at the managers, it was the younger managers who were having the least turnover. They were holding onto GSTs for three to five years and having GSTs (move up) into technicians.”
Charlie Barron notes “it’s not that the older generation is doing anything wrong, but there’s obviously an affinity of people coming out of high school falling in line behind someone who is closer in age to them.
“We have kids who work for us who don’t remember September 11th. You’ve got people that remember the way things were done when gas was two bucks a gallon, or a buck-50, and you’ve got kids who have only known it to be over $3 a gallon their whole life.”
Those life experiences and perspectives add up. And it might just be conversational — things like social media and everyday slang. It can help a young employee feel seen “and can be more like themselves because they’re relating to someone and communicating with someone who gets it.”
Charlie Barron says this realization has given him some hope, though it’s not a quick or automatic solution to replace the experienced technicians who are leaving and retiring from the industry.
“We really need to be hungry for new talent because if we have young talent come up through our ranks, that’s just going to allow even younger talent to come up and flourish,” he says.
“We have people who are five years or less to retirement in a handful of our stores. What are we doing to replace those people? Young people aren’t just walking in and saying ‘I want to work on cars.’ They can’t afford to go to trade schools, so we’ve done a ton of work in trying to get young people trained up (and) to show them the light of how much money they can make working on cars, and show you don’t have to work offshore and in the oil and gas industry which you traditionally had to do in Southern Louisiana. You can work on cars and go home to your wife and kid at 5 o’clock and have your weekends to yourself. All of those things mean a lot to young people.”
