Ford has been unable to fill some 5,000 openings for mechanics despite offering a salary of $120,000 a year — prompting the company’s chief executive to warn of a dire shortage of skilled tradespeople in the US.
“We are in trouble in our country. We are not talking about this enough,” Ford CEO Jim Farley said on an episode of the “Office Hours: Business Edition” podcast published earlier this week.
“We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.”
Farley added: “It’s a very serious thing.”
The $120,000 pay is nearly twice the average annual American salary, according to the Social Security Administration.
It takes about five years to learn the skills needed to pull a diesel engine out of a Ford Super Duty truck — and the country isn’t training enough people to do it, Farley said.
“We do not have trade schools,” he fumed.
Earlier this year, Ford rolled out a $4 million initiative to fund scholarship for auto technicians.
“We are not investing in educating a next generation of people like my grandfather who had nothing, who built a middle class life and a future for his family,” Farley said.
His granddad was employee 389 at Ford and worked on the company’s flagship Model T.
Rich Garrity, a board member of the National Association of Manufacturers, agreed with Farley’s grim assessment.
“I think his comment was spot on,” he told The Post.
“We’re not just missing bodies, but we’re really missing, I’d say, skill sets that can connect to 21st-century manufacturing needs,” said Garrity, who’s chief business unit officer at the additive manufacturing firm Stratasys.
The mechanic shortage at Ford is part of a broader crisis hitting manufacturing and the skilled trades.
As of August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted more than 400,000 open manufacturing positions — despite 4.3% unemployment.
Last year, the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte surveyed 200 manufacturing firms and found recruiting and retention topped the list of challenges for more than half of them.
The automotive industry alone faces an annual shortfall of about 37,000 trained technicians, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association.
The BLS projects an average of 67,800 openings for automotive service technicians and mechanics each year through 2033.
Farley sounded incredulous about the dire shortage, adding: “A bay with a lift and tools and no one to work in it — are you kidding me? Nope.”
Part of the problem is demographics. Baby boomers are retiring from the trades faster than millennials and Gen Zers are entering them.
But it’s not just about numbers. The skills required to work in manufacturing have evolved, according to Garrity.
“A lot of the openings that we see today, it’s not just manual of days past, but combining manual and digital skill,” he said.
“That’s an area that we continue to see a real gap in.”
To make matters worse, trade schools and community colleges haven’t kept pace with the technology, according to Garrity.
“The community colleges, the career tech programs do a solid job in providing foundational training, but we often see that they’re out of date when it comes to keeping up with how fast things are moving from a technology standpoint,” he said.
“If we talk about additive manufacturing, robotics, automation, EV batteries, we see very few focus curriculums that can keep up with that.”
There are signs of change. Last year saw a 16% spike in trade school enrollment — a record high since the National Student Clearinghouse began collecting data in 2018.
Meanwhile, four-year college enrollment is down 0.6% from fall 2020 to fall 2023, and trade school enrollment grew 4.9% over the same period.
Garrity said the shift reflects a changing reality about education and career paths.
“For many years in the US, it was, you go to a four-year college and things are set up for you,” he noted.
“And the reality is, that path is not necessarily what it used to be. A more valuable path, in many cases, is getting a technical college or apprenticeship and starting to learn certain skills very early on.”
Ford has tried to make its jobs more attractive. The company ditched its lowest-wage tier and committed to 25% raises over four years in its latest contract with the United Auto Workers union.
But higher wages alone can’t solve the problem if there aren’t enough trained workers to hire.
“There’s a different level of skill that’s needed, and frankly, we don’t have the pipeline of workers that are coming ready with those skills,” Garrity said.
