Capricorn State of the Nation Special Report: The Skills Shortage

Finding good staff is a challenge for more than half of all Capricorn Members — up 12 percentage points in the past year. That’s the big take-out from the State of the Nation Special Report 2023: The Skills Shortage.

Our last State of the Nation report revealed that attracting and retaining qualified staff were major challenges industry wide. We also know from our conversations with Members that staff have been hard to find. We hear and share your struggles every single day. Research by our friends over at the Australian Automotive Aftermarket Association, released earlier this year, suggests there’s a shortfall of 25,000 to 30,000 technicians across the Australian automotive industry alone.

That’s why we chose to research and prepare this special report - to delve more deeply into the issue. We wanted to develop a better understanding of the nature of the skills shortage in the automotive industry. We also wanted to better understand how it’s impacting our Members and provide some analysis and advice on how to deal with the challenges that it presents.

Our sense was that the situation has been getting steadily more difficult — and this report backs that up. Across Australia and New Zealand, it’s taking an average of almost seven months to fill a vacancy for a qualified mechanic, almost nine for a panel beater or spray painter and closer to 10 for a qualified electrician in NZ. By a significant margin, Members said the lack of qualified staff was the biggest challenge facing the industry as a whole (61 per cent, up from 50 per cent in 2022). Just 44 per cent of Members said they were adequately staffed, a third were looking for staff and a quarter said they had unfilled positions.

Next on the list of challenges was attracting young people to the industry (45 per cent, up from 36 per cent in 2022).

And here, we have some positive news to report: the industry has responded to the skills crisis by taking on more apprentices. Almost threequarters of Members said they had employed an apprentice, up from less than two-thirds in 2022. That’s a big leap and it’s good news for the industry’s pipeline of talent. However, there’s still work to be done: 57 per cent of Members also reported having lost an apprentice before they completed their trades qualification.

State of the Nation Special Report: The Skills Shortage also investigated another major opportunity, sponsored immigration. Only a third of Members had considered importing qualified technicians from overseas, with large businesses and panel and paint shops most likely to consider the idea. The main barrier to entry is the sense the process is likely to be complex.

Overall, despite the skills shortage, Members were very confident about the future of their businesses—which reflects the passion and resilience we see every single day.

Want to learn more? State of the Nation Special Report: The Skills Shortage will be released on Wednesday 11 October 2023.