‘Something is badly wrong with how we advise young people’ (Image: supplied)
Every August this country has a national conversation about young people, and every August it is more or less the same. Grades up, or grades down. Clearing, or not clearing. University, or failure.
If you had asked me at eighteen which careers were the secure ones, I would have given you exactly the answer my teachers, parents and careers advisers gave me: get the grades, get the degree, find a profession and build a career with your head rather than your hands.
For the early part of my working life, I believed that was broadly right.
But, having spent years in businesses with highly skilled workforces and today leading one of Britain’s largest automotive repair businesses, talking to technicians, apprentices and site leaders across the country, I have come to a different conclusion. Some of the careers we once assumed were secure are being reshaped by technology far faster than we expected, while many of the careers we overlooked have become some of the most resilient and valuable opportunities available to young people today.
Look honestly at what careers artificial intelligence is displacing. It is not the skilled, physical, judgement-heavy work. It is the entry-level desk work: administration, customer support, routine analysis, data processing. These were always the entry-level jobs of the professional career, the jobs a graduate did for three years while they learned the trade of thinking. Ask anyone hiring into a professional services firm this year how many of these roles still exist.
Now contrast that with the industry I work in today. It has been through every upheaval the last hundred years could throw at it, and through all of it one thing held: vehicles need repairing, and somebody skilled has to do it. It is not work that gets deferred to next quarter when budgets are tight, and it cannot be done from another country, because the car is here.
Despite this, only twelve per cent of the vehicle paint technicians in this country are under 25. Twelve per cent. That is less a recruitment problem and more a demographic cliff. Research published by the Institute of the Motor Industry also found that across accident and repair we lose about 4,700 skilled people a year to retirement and to other industries and attract only around 3,000 to replace them. In paint alone, more than 800 leave a year and 400 arrive.
And here is the part that should tell you something is badly wrong with how we advise young people. Advertised pay for paint technicians has risen twenty-eight per cent in two years, in an economy where almost nobody has had a rise like that, yet we still cannot fill the jobs. The IMI’s conclusion is blunt: employers are putting up wages instead of expanding training, and it is not working, because you cannot outbid your way to a workforce that nobody is producing. More than seventy per cent of repair employers report skills shortages.
And what is the work? Removing dents and creases in metal so they are literally as good as new, calibrating radar and camera systems that stop a car in traffic, bonding aluminium and composite structures that did not exist on a car ten years ago, working with manufacturer diagnostic software, on everything from a Tesla to a Lamborghini.
Just 11,518 technicians in the entire United Kingdom hold a qualification in those driver assistance systems, about four in every hundred. More than a quarter of the cars on our roads already have the technology fitted, and the IMI forecasts that we will need around 205,000 such technicians by 2030. The jobs of the future are not coming. They are already here, and they are already empty.
Look at what we are asking an eighteen-year-old to choose between. One route costs them more than £9,790 a year, takes three years, and ends with a debt that averages around £47,900, accrues interest and gives no guarantee of a job. The other pays them from their first day, teaches them a skill that no algorithm can perform and hands them a qualification that travels with them for the rest of their life.
One of those routes we celebrate on the front pages every August. The other we barely mention. And it shows: apprenticeship uptake in vehicle damage repair keeps falling, with the paint, panel and assessor routes all down again last year.
As the largest group in this sector, this shortage lands closest to people like me. However, I like to think of the scale of opportunity it represents. I meet talented young people every week who are looking for secure, meaningful careers, while at the same time our industry is searching for thousands of capable people to fill roles that offer exactly that. Somewhere between school, careers advice and public perception, those two groups are missing each other.
It is why we merged our two separate training programmes into one training academy, rather than waiting for the pipeline to produce specialists; why we now have around three hundred apprentices on the programme – roughly one in every fifteen people who work for us – and why the routes we run include paint and panel specifically as well as multi-skilled apprentices.
I am not going to tell you university is a waste of time. That would be disingenuous. I have a number of degrees myself, and some of the finest people I have worked with have spent years developing expertise through higher education. This country needs its engineers, its doctors, its scientists and its researchers as much as it ever did.
My argument is not that one route is right and the other wrong. It is that we currently present one route as the route, and the other as what happens if you fall short. That framing is doing real damage to the young people who internalise it, and to an economy that cannot find the people it needs.
So if you are opening an envelope this morning and it says what you hoped it would say, congratulations, genuinely. Go and enjoy it.
And if it does not – if today feels like a door closing – do one thing before you spend the afternoon on the clearing website. Look at the trades. Not the version you were sold in Year 9, but the actual work: technical, skilled, and desperately in need of your talent. My industry will train you, pay you while it does, and still be here in twenty years, because a damaged car in Doncaster cannot be repaired from a data centre in Devon.
We have spent a generation telling young people that the future is something you reach through a lecture theatre. For a great many of them, the future is a set of doors we forgot to mention were open. We are hiring through them right now.
Jana Siber is Chief Executive of Steer Automotive Group. The UK’s largest vehicle repair group of 200+ centres and 4,400 employees.