School: Necessary or Not?
Written By: Ian Clayton
Edited By: Merielle Donaldson
Having finished up tech school two and a half years ago has given me time to think on its necessity at this point. There are a lot of benefits to going through tech school, especially in a manufacturer-sponsored program. I was fortunate to have attended a very good Toyota T-Ten program with some excellent instructors, but there was also a great deal of focus placed on topics that should have been modified to better fit an actual shop replication or removed from the course entirely. In this post I will go over some of the pros and cons of attending tech school, adjustments that I feel should be made to the programs, and how to make the best decision for yourself.
We’ll start with the reasons that you should go to tech school:
1) Electrical! Now while I cannot speak for Ford, GM, Honda, or any of the major tech schools (although I can’t imagine that they would go light on the subject), I can say that my program through Toyota focused very heavily on electrical knowledge, repair, and diagnosis. This will be incredibly important in your automotive career and school is a really good place to get this knowledge. Yes, getting hands-on experience in a shop is also valuable, but quite simply there is a lot of “book knowledge” that you will need to have in electrical systems. A tech program that provides a solid foundation for learning the complexities of electrical systems will be extremely helpful to anyone entering a shop environment in the future.
2) Book knowledge is extremely helpful in this industry. I will always say that repetition and experience are the best way to advance in this industry, but the truth is that having a background knowledge of systems and parts work is a huge advantage. This is especially true if you are someone like me who didn’t grow up with a wrench in his hand. School is a great place to learn how these things work, by doing things such as tearing down an engine, dismantling a transmission, removing a differential, and the list goes on.
3) It is a foot in the door (or at least it was when I began my career). When I started looking to change careers almost every job posting in the automotive industry required three to five years of experience. There was no option to go into a shop blind and learn on the job from scratch. Going through a school - and especially a manufacturer-sponsored program - will help with gaining that required experience; further, you will be matched up with a dealership for co-op training, which will help get your foot in the door for future job opportunities. Schooling and the associated co-ops allow you to start gaining that hands-on experience necessary to succeed in this industry. Of course the economy and job market plays a large part in what experience is considered a prerequisite for employment anywhere, and the auto tech industry is no exception. With the extreme shortage of technicians in today’s market, you could likely walk into just about any shop and so long as you know which end of the wrench to use, you would be hired on the spot.
4) It looks good on a resume. Employers will like that you have some schooling background. Even though many people enter this field hoping to get away from the strictly academic world and its funnel of employees to office jobs, education will always be attractive on a resume in any industry. Now like I said and will always say, experience is king in this field. But when you are applying for jobs, future employers will likely appreciate that you have some of that “background knowledge” that I mentioned earlier and that you gained it through a structured academic program. Which also somewhat connects to my next point…
5) You get to skip a few steps. Firstly, let me note that this isn’t necessarily a good thing because unfortunately those are steps that you get to skip can be critical to you learning as a technician. And some may call these steps a rite of passage or grunt work, but either way you’ll hopefully be too valuable to your company to being doing that kind of work. Finding and building your value as a technician and as an employee is vital, and it is something I will discuss further in a future post.
And now on to the down sides (once again I can only speak for the program I went through):
1) The curriculum is not always applicable. Because the curriculum is not always set by your instructors (or anyone who has actually worked in a shop in the last 10 years), it can sometimes be irrelevant or not applicable to what the job would actually be like in shop. For example, someone at Toyota corporate thought it was absolutely essential that we know how to turn rotors and drums, which I can confidently say is something that I have not done nor seen done since that day. That time could have been much better spent learning something that we would be doing on a day-to-day basis in the shop. There are many more examples of this throughout the time that I was there, but you get the point. The fact is that the people developing the curriculum more often than not are far removed from the reality of being an automotive technician in today’s industry. As in any academic program, truly useful knowledge is often discarded in favor of what the curriculum creator thinks is important.
2) There may be a disconnect between the school and your dealership. Have I mentioned that experience is king? Well, at the dealership where my classmates and I participated in the co-op portion of our programs, we received none! Zip, zero, zilch. While we were going over a certain subject in class, we should have been working with a mentor at the dealership to gain that same experience in practice. My dealership experience consisted of express maintenance and floor Zambonis. Therefore, a good portion of the knowledge and experience that was gained in the classroom was lost by not having the opportunity to apply it at the dealership. And with that in mind, time spent at the dealership was time simply wasted – we could have been spending that time back at the school covering additional topics and gaining experience in the classroom at the bare minimum since we certainly did not get it through the co-op. This does not speak for all programs and it is my hope that others have fruitful collaborations with their dealerships, but it is certainly a potential source of frustration and disappointment.
3) Maybe too much electrical. After two years in school, I could without a doubt say that I felt more comfortable with a multimeter in my hand than I did an air hammer. I realize this is quite contradictory to what I said earlier but the amount of time I spend on a weekly basis working on electrical problems does not correlate to the amount of time spent learning it in school. Electrical is important, but so is being able to remove the rear spark plugs on a 2GR out of a Sienna - you know, the ones that you have to remove the intake manifold to get at. This is something I should have struggled with in school, not in the shop. School should have provided the chance to try, fail, and learn new techniques and processes long before I arrived at a shop where the employer expects me to already have this knowledge in hand. A successful co-op may have helped with this aspect.
4) The cost. There’s no getting around that. I did not pursue an Associate’s Degree when I returned to school to become an automotive technician but rather just pursued the certificate program. (If you haven’t read my prior posts, I already have a Bachelor’s Degree; if you do not, I do recommend getting your Associate’s Degree.) Despite limiting myself to the certificate program, I still spent probably close to ten thousand dollars on school. That is a lot of money that could have otherwise been spent on tools while I was actually getting paid to work in a shop and getting good hands-on experience. With the technician shortage that our industry is experiencing at the moment, if you have the slightest amount of interest in working on automobiles you can pretty much get a job anywhere you want, no degree required.
So, what is the solution? In my opinion, it is schooling in conjunction with good mentorship and good hands-on experience.
The mistake I made that you can learn from: If you go through a manufacturer-specific program, it helps to stay with that manufacturer. The consistency and repetition with the same vehicles will help you become a very good and fast dealership technician. While there is some crossover, there is very little that a Toyota Camry has in common with a Ford F-250 or Chevy Express… All of those things my instructor said I would never need to know because Toyota doesn’t use those systems? Yup, I need to know them now that I do not work at a Toyota-specific shop.
My time in school is not something I regret in the slightest - I took a lot away from my two years in the classroom and apprenticing at the dealership, for better or worse. Toyota and Monroe Community College put a great program together and I would highly recommend that anyone thinking about getting into the automotive industry look into their closest Toyota T-Ten program. Toyota does an excellent job of funding and providing their classrooms with vehicles, engines, transmissions, and bench parts for their students to work on apart from the vehicle. The pressure of trying to learn while simultaneously being responsible for meeting a shop’s production demands was removed from the equation while in school. Believe me when I say that it is not easy to balance this as a novice technician in a shop. I would not discourage anyone thinking about going to school to become an automotive technician from doing so, I would just advise them of everything that I listed above so that they could best optimize their experience.
I am linking a podcast below that further discusses this topic. The thoughts of the hosts and the guests are very close to how I feel about my time in school and the education I received as it relates to industry standards.
https://changingtheindustrypodcast.com/