AUSTRALIA’S automotive industry is bracing for years of skills shortages as employers reduce apprentice numbers and the skilled workforce flow from overseas withers.

Earlier this month, the nation’s biggest automotive apprentice employer, the Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce (VACC), saw 200 auto apprentices handed back from businesses.

This represents more than one third of the apprentices the VACC has on its books.

National employment of automotive apprentices is in a similar downward trend, though nowhere near the numbers recorded in Victoria.

In Western Australia, for example, only nine apprentices have been handed back to the MTA of WA.

Now the VACC is calling for the federal government to run a national campaign to promote the benefits of trade apprenticeships and reinforce the high employability of trade apprentices.

VACC CEO Geoff Gwilym told GoAutoNews Premium that the message should go to parents and schoolteachers as well.

“This is critical. We will find out that the effect of not promoting trades over the past 10 years is going to leave Australia severely depleted in the skills we need to keep the automotive fleet on the road,” he said.

“We will pay the price of being high-education snobs. We need to urge caution about promoting higher education and see our children go to university to get double degrees and then pull coffee.

“We don’t need any more double-degree baristas. We need people who can fix our cars and build our houses.”

Mr Gwilym added that “what we know in the automotive trades is that if you get a big gap in skills uptake in apprentices, it takes about seven years to fill that gap up again”.

“Even though an apprenticeship is a four-year period, you have to factor in that about 45 per cent don’t complete their apprenticeships – and when they finish they have a base skill level and it takes about three years to get that skill level up to the highly skilled level,” he said.

“So when you start from scratch with a big base removed, it takes seven years to fill that gap. That’s a big journey.”

Mr Gwilym said employers traditionally look for apprentices in their home city or state, then look for labour interstate if it cannot be found closer to base.

“The last call is to look for labour through brokers and migration programs,” he said.

“That market will be depleted and it will be harder for those brokers to get that labour here because of the nervousness of people overseas travelling to Australia with no assurance that they will be supported.

“People with 457 and later TSS visas are not entitled to money from JobKeeper and are not covered under the apprenticeship and traineeship grants.

“That has given us a problem in some companies that have to source highly skilled international tradespeople.

“It sends a message to potential skilled migrants who come to Australia on a temporary work visa that they will probably not be covered under programs of this nature.

“In the future, because they won’t be covered, there will be a reluctance for people to come here.

“This is important because Australia has had a critical skills shortage in most automotive occupations – most particularly in body repair (panel and paint), light- and heavy-vehicle mechanics and auto electrics – and we have been in a skill shortage in some cases for more than two decades.

“We already know we can’t fill that skill shortage domestically – we have been trying for years.

“What COVID-19 will do, whether we like it or not, will further slow the automotive business which means that many employers will look to shed labour. In some cases that will be apprenticeship labour and group training companies – labour hire – which will bear the brunt of that because employers will pass that labour back to them.

“That’s not being critical of them, that’s their role.”

Mr Gwilym said that “what it does do, in the long term, is create a better environment for the skilled workers we have now and the apprentices who stay with their employer”.

He urged apprentices that are now in JobKeeper to be patient because the industry will come back.

“They should work with their employer and stay in the industry. History will show we need them,” he said.

“Employers should work as hard as possible to retain their apprentices and apprentices should be as flexible as they can to maintain their employment.”

By Neil Dowling