2026 Automotive Training Trends Every Professional Shop Owner Needs to Know [RR 1096]

0:00This is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. Hey everybody, Carm Capriato, Remarkable Results Radio. Good to have you here in our 11th year. We are going to do something very interesting here today. We're going to cover an ASE survey, the 2026 benchmark survey from the Training Managers Council. And yeah, very important part of ASE. We're going to introduce you to the ASE Training Manager Council President here in just a moment.

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1:41Look at— I've got, as I said, the president of the ASE Training Managers Council and the VP of Credential Testing Programs, Matt Shepanek, good to have you here. The ASE Training Managers Council, an important thing. I remember attending some of the sessions you guys have at APEX a few years back. It's so cool to see all the trainers involved in moving our industry forward.

2:04And you do a survey every year. We do. Before I jump into that though, can I just talk a little bit about the ATMC? So the ATMC started back in 1984, so it's been around for over 40 years and it was really started to kind of promote the advancement of training and professional development in the automotive industry. Actually, I became a member probably back in 2005 or so.

2:28I was a new training manager at an OE. My boss at the time had asked me to go down the street. I was in Michigan at the time. At the time, it was Daimler Chrysler, to their training center. And I walked into this room, and I didn't know a single person in there. But by the end of the day, I had 30 new best friends that were all training managers from different OEs, you know, across the industry..

2:49And it was super helpful to me because they would share information. If I had an issue with something, I could pick up the phone, I could call one of these guys. So it was a fantastic organization. I feel honored to be leading this organization right now. So, but as you mentioned, one of the things that we do provide for our members and actually just to the industry, because we don't charge for this, our benchmark survey that we're going to go over today, it's all available on our website.

3:14At the end of this, we can talk a little bit about where you can find that as well. Um, that would be great. And we have the survey up on the screen. Let us bring it up and show you. I have it and I printed it and I went through it and I took notes and I was kind of mesmerized, Matt, by some of the results.

3:35And what I would like to say to our independent, because the majority of my listening audience is the independents, please pay attention to this. We talk about training and education all the time, and I think there's some results of how well we're doing in the industry to solve education learning curve problems, knowledge transfer. And so thank you for coming on and doing this.

4:00We cannot go through every slide. So what Matt is going to do is take some featured highlight slides and go over them with you. Let's start, my friend. Yeah, as Karm said, we don't have time to go through every slide, but you'll be able to download this from the website. So I'm just going to go through some key highlights here. The first one I wanted to show everybody is, you know, we track participation by every year of the survey.

4:24And this one's kind of interesting because you look and you can see back in, you know, 2020, 2021, the participation went way up. If you remember, this was during the pandemic. And so I always figured, well, There was a lot of people kind of sitting around stuck at the house or whatever, and people were taking surveys. And you could see once that ended, survey participation went down quite a bit.

4:47And then '24 and '25, we pretty much flattened out at right about 1,700. The good news is this year we picked up about 1,000 people. So a lot better participation. Typically, as long as we're getting right around 2,000, The survey information is pretty statistically sound, so we're going in the right direction and we just got to continue to get the word out there so that we get more people to participate.

5:12Thank you for that. And let us as an industry pay attention to when the survey comes out and you're seeing stuff on social media. Please share this stuff and get involved in it. If you're listening in audio, I think this is going to have value. If you're watching on our YouTube channel, you're going to have 10 times the value because you're actually going to see the actual survey results here in front of us.

5:34Okay. So one of the first questions that we ask is what best describes your job in the industry? And as you can see, you know, majority of the folks taking the test were automotive repair technicians, but we do have some instructors. We have collision repair technicians, service advisors, shop managers, but the bulk of the respondents are automotive technicians. Which is great. I did want to put this up here too, to explain what I do with the data that we get is we make it available to everybody, but for my slides, I filter it by just the technician responses so that we can just see what the techs are saying about this stuff.

6:10But we do capture the other data as well. Next slide is really important to me that 87% of the respondents from, were from OE dealers and only 11% came from aftermarket and independent. So from an independent's perspective, this is so interesting to be able to see what the automotive technician, the specialists, and the OE dealers are doing and saying as we get into the survey a little deeper.

6:36But my challenge to the industry is let's get in this survey as independents. Let's do that. And I think it's gonna be, I'm sure if we go back to when you had 6,800 from COVID era, there was a lot more independents that that played in this. Oh yeah. I'll take a little bit of the heat on this one though too, because, you know, we pass out the link to some of the OE partners and the aftermarket partners.

6:58We were probably a little bit late this year getting it to everybody. So we might've just got more OE participation this year because the links went out on that side. So, but, but any help that we could get would be appreciated. We do post this on the ASC Facebook page and also on our LinkedIn. So as long as you're subscribed to those, you'll see them.

7:17And my point to the independent is that a lot of the results are skewed toward the OE dealership. And I think that helps you see what's going on over there. Right. We ask everybody how many years in the industry, and this is 2025 and 2026. You can see that here at the top, you know, people with 30 or more years, there was, you know, about a 6% drop this year.

7:40So people are, you know, they're retiring, you know, they're aging out of the industry, so they're moving on. But you can kind of see year over year, most of the indicators are kind of flat. But this kind of gives you an idea of the age groups of the folks in the— taking the survey. Carm and I were talking before the broadcast here, and we thought this would be a good one to cover.

8:02So, you know, who pays for training? And we asked this question and then we filter it out by fleet respondents, by aftermarket and independent respondents, and then OE. And then the green indicators are shared costs. So that's the technician and the shop owner or dealer paying for it. The employee is in red on all 3 of these, and then the employer is in blue.

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11:14Yes, a learning management system tailored to each role in your company. Simply put, Trax was designed and built for shop owners just like you. Visit us on the web at NapaTracs, that's N-A-P-A-T-R-A-C-S dot com. Thank you for the independence. 56% or more are paying for training. That's a good thing. And we got to get that up. We really do. If you look at your— and again, I'm not saying that the dealer is your competitor, but in this space of automotive repair, the dealers are paying it 85% of the time.

11:50It just seems logical to me. You can't argue with that number. That's what they're there for. They want to keep their people as current as possible. But I think we as independents need to do a better job. And technicians want the training, you know, for the most part, they want to go to training. It's a thing that helps with retention as well, you know, by giving them access to the training and not making them pay for it out of their pocket.

12:12I think that's the thing that can really help with that. Great question. So we ask a question, do you have access to the training you need? And we've been tracking this over the last 4 or 5 years. As you can see, it's been pretty flat between 2022 and 2025. It's always been about 60% saying, yeah, they have access to it. And, you know, about 40% saying no.

12:32But this year we saw a jump up of about 10% with people saying they have, you know, good access to the training that they're trying to get. So I thought this was one that was important to point out. Showing we're going in the right direction as an industry. Right. We asked them a question on top reasons for lack of access to training.

12:52And, you know, the number one thing with about 53% of them saying the right topics are not available. We have a slide here and a couple that we'll cover, and it actually asks them what topics they're looking for. So that's a wow to me. When I looked at this thing, I wrote wow next to the 53%. The right topics are not available.

13:12And I think we have to stop and ask ourselves a question. Well, where are we coming up with the topics? Why are the topics being offered? And I guess when we put one out for anyone, we have to ask ourselves a question. Is this a right topic for our industry at this current time? So I think it's a great question and a great result here that I think we need to think through.

13:33Okay. This is always an interesting one. So we ask a question on training methods. So what types of training are they getting? And so you can see we break it up by classroom instructor-led, lab hands-on. These kind of overlap because, you know, a lot of instructor-led training is a little bit in the classroom and a little bit in the shop. But then we have a question around virtual coaching and mentoring, video, self-paced e-learning.

13:59So we kind of go through, you know, all the different methods of training. And then on the next slide, we look at what they're getting versus what they want. The slide's a little cut off, you know, when the comparison, the overlap. But what we saw is the instructor-led, they want even more. That's really what they're looking for. And I think that, you know, having been in training and development for a good portion of my career and being a former technician, you know, technicians are tactile learners.

14:27So they learn by doing and touching and, you know, getting their hands on things. And that continues to be something that they want to get. You know, we made a big shift during the pandemic everything went virtual, you know, for a number of, you know, a year, a year and a half. The feedback back then wasn't great. They liked that they had access to some training.

14:45What they really want is they love the hands-on training that a lot of folks offer. It's a great slide. A lot of great stuff there. That classroom instructor-led and hands-on are a big want from the industry. This one kind of ties back into what we talked about a couple slides ago. I think that one was the top reasons for not participating in training.

15:06And they were saying, oh, the right topics aren't, aren't available. So this question kind of ties into that. So this is, you know, asking them what type of training content are you looking for? And so you can kind of see right here we've got, you know, the top two, hybrid and EV systems and then electrical electronics. And I can't say I'm really surprised by either of those, you know, Electrical is always something that's way up there.

15:31And then the hybrid and EV thing, you know, EVs are still very popular and they're going to continue to be popular. But, you know, there was a shift, you know, back here this last year to a lot of manufacturers going back into hybrids. There's probably some people out there feeling like they've got some work to do and a little bit of learning ahead of them.

15:48Hybrids have been around for, I think, 20 years, somewhere in that zone. And if we need more training in that, then the realization that owners haven't been paying enough attention to this, or they're missing out on a huge opportunity. Huge, huge opportunity. So electrical, that was a really shocking slide for me to see, and hopefully it's an eye-opener or a wake-up call.

16:12You know how complicated all the cars are getting and the electrical electronics that they're in, they're in everything, they're in every system. So, you know, you got to stay on top of this stuff for sure. It's scary to hear what they have planned that these vehicles are going to do. And my next question is, okay, it's software, but there's got to be devices that get hooked to that software that make some of these things happen.

16:38And we have got to pay attention to that. I hear you. This one is what we kind of always end on. We ask them, how many hours of structured training do you get in a year? There's some things that are kind of interesting here. You know, when you look, you got 7% of the respondents saying they don't get any. I just look at that and I'm like, how do you stay up on all the technology that's coming without going to anything?

17:04I always felt like as a technician, you got to be a lifelong learner because the systems are changing so quickly and you have to stay on top of it. And then you see like the 1 to 8 bracket, you know, you got 15% of the people saying that's what they get. And then it's kind of, you know, 9 to 16, we got 13, you know, 13 again, 17 to 24.

17:25And then it really spikes at the other end where we got 18% of the folks saying that they get more than 56 hours. So kind of a, you know, interesting slide to see it. You kind of got both ends of the scale there. I would love to do follow-up questions on these. It's too bad this wasn't a human-to-human thing. And say, so this none thing, can you explain to me why?

17:47Is it your choice? Is it your owner's choice? What's the reason that you get none? And that to me is the hit upside the head. But more than 56, 18%, the highest number, God bless you. To your point about being a perpetual student, there are people that they just want to learn something new every day and they'll invest the time to do it.

18:11So as we mentioned before, all this information is available. You can download the entire deck and kind of go through the whole thing that is available on our ATMC website, which is www.atmc.org. And if you go, I think up at the top, you go to events and you'll see 2026, you'll see our conference. We have all the presentations from the conference there, including this training benchmark survey.

18:36So I really encourage everybody to go take a look at it and You know, next year when the survey comes out, it usually, we post it in January and we close it out in March, and then we present the results usually in April at our conference. So, we'd love to get those participation numbers up. And to your point, please get there, download this.

18:55If you want to make sure that your company and your people are current, use the information from this survey to help guide some of your training educational strategies. We cannot get through and be successful. We can have all the great marketing in the world. We can have all the great equipment in the world, but if we don't know how to do any of it, if we don't know how to do anything with those great tools, we're gonna struggle.

19:19We're never gonna meet required times in order to be a profitable company. So I see this survey as being so valuable, and I also see the investment of our specialists/technicians in the industry. To invest in time to take this survey. Tell the world what's going on in your life as it relates to this. Matt, thank you so much. The ASC Training Manager Council President and VP of Credential Testing Programs.

19:50That's got to keep you busy too. Oh, we got a lot of stuff going on at ASC these days. Yeah, I know you do. Is Dave driving all this? He keeps us on our toes, that's for sure. I love it. I love it. Well, Thank you so much for coming on. Yes, we highlighted this. I get it. And this like a 40 or 50 page report downloaded, as Matt said.

20:11You know what we'll do? We'll make sure we put a link to ATMC in the show notes so people can just kind of hit it with their finger and see it. Matt Shepanek, oh, thank you for all that you do for ASE and the industry, sir. Thanks for being here. I appreciate it. Thanks, Carm. Thanks for being on board to listen and learn from the premier automotive repair business podcast, Remarkable Results radio.

20:34Get your episodic education on the ARPN listing app at automotive repair podcast network.com. Also enjoy the podcast on our Carm Capriato YouTube channel. Carm is all for advancing the professional automotive service industry. Until next time.