There's a Maintenance Talent Shortage. But There Doesn't Have to Be One in Your Shop.

Every plant manager I talk to says the same thing: "We can't find good techs."

They're not wrong. The skilled trades pipeline has been shrinking for decades and the guys who came up through apprenticeships in the 80s and 90s are retiring faster than anyone is replacing them.

But here's what I've figured out: the shortage is a market condition, not a sentence. 

Some shops never feel it. They're the ones who are paying fair-to-good and who do the following things well.

1. Stop Hiring the Wrong Person

Most interviews for maintenance techs are a conversation. Somebody asks, "tell me about your experience with pneumatics," the candidate says, "oh yeah, I'm real strong there," and everyone nods and moves on to the next question. 

That's not an interview, that's a confidence check that rewards lying.  If you hire a hack who can't be trusted to do anything, you're going to lose labor and brainpower instead of gain it.

Here's what I do instead: I bring a box of components pulled straight off the machines on my floor: actual cylinders, actual sensors, actual contactors, actual worn bearings, into the interview room.

When a candidate lists knowledge on their resume, I hand them the matching part and ask them to show me or explain. 

I once had a guy tell me, with total confidence, that he was an expert in pneumatics. I handed him a Bimbo pneumatic cylinder. He couldn't tell me what it did. Not how to size it, not how to troubleshoot it, what it did. 

I also had a ladder logic expert once who couldn't identify the components or function of a 3 rung program I wrote for him.

It's important to deliver direct, functional questions tied to their claimed experience level.  The basics are fine:

• "Walk me through how you'd PM this cylinder."

• "How do you test a three-phase motor with a meter?"

• "You've told me you've been running multi-craft for ten years... walk me through changing this motor."

If someone can't answer basic, seniority-appropriate questions about the trade they claim to have mastered, one of two things is true.

1) They have the seniority or training they claim to have and somehow don't have the skills you would expect.  Suppose a guy who was an electrical technician doesn't know what an overload is or does.  I think it's worth asking about.  Where was that guy when overloads were popping?  How did he miss it?

2) They're lying about what they know... which is a sure sign that they'll keep lying once they're being relied upon.  This is far worse than a lack of knowledge because it destroys the ability to trust them to do work correctly and safely.

The goal isn't to embarrass anyone.  I've never intentionally embarrassed someone in an interview.  However, it's worth evaluating before day one, whether their stated knowledge matches their actual hands-on competence. 

If you're already struggling, you just can't afford a tech who is lying about his knowledge or work.  Reality is hard enough to see anyways.

Pick an honest kid, even with no knowledge, over someone who lies about what they know.  Honest kids grow into good techs and, if they're willing to listen and absorb a little criticism, they won't generate a bunch of other unnecessary drama and pain.

2. Build a Training Program And Run It Every Shift

Most shops treat training as an event: a class, a certification, a one-time thing that happens when someone is onboarding or when OSHA makes you. Then it stops.

The shops that never feel the talent shortage treat training as a daily habit, not an event. Every shift change, something gets presented. It doesn't have to be complicated:

• How to properly check a fuse in both power-on and power-off configurations

• How to test a motor for grounds, shorts, and continuity

• How to check an encoder signal with an O-scope

Fifteen minutes. Sometimes five. You're just explaining one concept or task.  Then take questions or let people actually do the task. 

It's not hard to bring a meter and a motor and let people test it.

Some days, maybe just put up a YouTube video.

There is an enormous amount of free, high-quality material on YouTube covering exactly these fundamentals.  You don't need to build a curriculum from scratch; you need to curate one and show up with it consistently.

And the problems that cause you pain, they're a good place to start when selecting what to train. 

Someone checked a fuse incorrectly and caused 6 hours of downtime?  There is definitely a video on YouTube to train that. 

The reason this matters isn't just skill-building, although that happens too. It's a signal. Every technician who walks through your door today, in this labor market, expects to be developed. 

When you invest in them visibly and repeatedly, two things happen: they get better at the job, and they notice you're the kind of employer who invests in people. Both of those things make them harder to poach and more engaged in the shop and job.

As training becomes normal, exchanging information openly becomes normal.  They'll start training each other even outside the classes.

3. Assign Work, Hold Standards, Do It Kindly

This is the one that compounds the other two.

Assign work every day.  This ensures the machines keep moving forward and getting better which makes the job easier. 

Deliver accountability, real accountability where you account for how they used their time, what they got done daily, how they kept the shop and whether they followed standards with work orders or passdown - but do it kindly. Uphold your standards consistently, so people know exactly where the line is and that it doesn't move based on your mood or the day of the week.

Do that daily and quality of life in your shop goes up. Not just because the work gets easier (though it does if you use your labor well), but also because the ambiguity goes away. People aren't guessing what's expected of them, and they're not carrying someone else's slack because standards are actually enforced.

Here's what happens next, and it's the part most people don't expect: technicians all know each other. They all like the same barbecue and hobbies... so they go the same places and meet each other.

It's a small world, even across competing plants in the same town. If your people are

happy, they stop leaving. And once a shop stops bleeding good people, word travels, not through official channels, through the exact same grapevine that used to work against you.

A few years ago, I ran a shop that developed a reputation around town. Every time we posted an opening, we could count on top techs from a couple of the other local factories applying. We enjoyed that benefit for years because they heard, from someone who knew someone, that life was good in our shop. 

We weren't recruiting them. They were recruiting themselves.

The Flywheel

Put these three together and you get a flywheel, not three separate initiatives:

You screen out the mismatches at the door.  This saves a ton of time.

You train daily, so the people you do hire get better and know it.  And information becomes something to share. 

You run the floor with fair, consistent accountability, so the people you have stop leaving... and the job doesn't seem unfair.

And once you're not losing people, the market starts sending you its best talent for free. 

Technicians who are already competent, already disciplined, and already primed to succeed want to work in a shop that runs the way yours does.

That's the compounding advantage. The shortage everyone else is fighting-over stops being your problem, because you've stopped competing in the same pool. 

Build a shop good technicians want to be in and that's no longer a hiring strategy. It's an operating strategy that happens to solve your hiring problem as a side effect.