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By Mark O'Connell
Editor

Help Wanted

Is the online job marketplace the solution to the technician shortage? The resumes may look good, but do the candidates have the right core values?

Jason Derby and Bill Christel of Advanced Waste Services

maintenance crew working on a Peterbilt truck

The sparse maintenance crew is busy getting older lease trucks ready to leave the fleet, and prepping 13 new leased Peterbilts.

"We'd rather build an elite maintenance group, and create an environment where people will call us and say, �I've heard about you guys and I want to check you out. I hear you've got some really great things going on,'" he says. "I think that's the way for any fleet maintenance manager to solve their technician shortage problems: build a better maintenance facility that's a beacon of light that all the best technicians gravitate towards."

A National Perspective

Is the technician shortage changing the way fleets meet their maintenance needs? Third-party vendors certainly see a shift.

"As fleets have difficulty filing technician positions, they look to us for repair services. We have 1,600 technicians of our own, a network of nearly 160 repair garages, and about 580 bays across that network," says Tom Liutkes, director of communications for TravelCenters of America (TA). "We're the largest non-OEM repair network in the country."

"We're the emergency room of the fleet maintenance world," says Kevin Kuhn, fleet sales for TA. "We don't do major hospital work. We want to get people in and out, with a solid repair, so they can get back out on the road and ship products."

"There are fewer and fewer companies out there that can recruit technicians on a national level, which is what you need if you're a trucking company that has multiple terminals across the country," Kuhn says. "So, that is causing some fleets to review the amount of terminals they have, how much they want to invest in non-truck capital, so they are starting to push more business to third-parties such as TA."

But of course, the technician shortage affects national chains just as it affects local shops.

Jim Reed, manager of shop staffing for TA, is responsible for keeping those 160 shops fully staffed, and it's not without its challenges.

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