Ford CEO Jim Farley is sounding the alarm on a “very serious” nationwide shortage of skilled tradesworkers, saying the company is struggling to fill 5,000 mechanic positions that pay $120,000 a year.
Appearing on this week’s episode of the “Office Hours: Business Edition” podcast, Farley said, “We are in trouble in our country. We are not talking about this enough.”
“We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen,” he said. “It’s a very serious thing.”
The $120,000 salary is nearly double the average U.S. income, the Social Security Administration says. However, it takes roughly five years to gain the skills needed for advanced mechanic work at Ford, Farley said, and the country isn’t training enough people to meet that demand.
“We do not have trade schools,” Farley said.
Ford launched a $4 million scholarship program earlier this year to help train new auto technicians, but Farley warned the nation still isn’t investing enough in developing future skilled workers.
He pointed to his grandfather, an early Ford employee who built a middle-class life through trade work, as an example of what’s at stake.
Ford’s mechanic shortage reflects a wider crisis in manufacturing and the skilled trades. The U.S. had more than 400,000 open manufacturing jobs as of August, despite low unemployment rates.
Industry surveys conducted last year by the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte found that hiring and retention are top challenges.
The automotive sector faces an annual shortfall of about 37,000 trained technicians, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects nearly 68,000 automotive mechanic openings each year through 2033.
Additionally, trade schools and community colleges that do offer training are failing to keep up with rapidly advancing technology, Rich Garrity, a board member of the National Association of Manufacturers, told the New York Post.
“The community colleges, the career tech programs do a solid job in providing foundational training, but we often see that they’re out of date when it comes to keeping up with how fast things are moving from a technology standpoint,” Garrity told the outlet.
“If we talk about additive manufacturing, robotics, automation, EV batteries, we see very few focus curriculums that can keep up with that.”
Still, there are signs of hope. Trade school enrolment jumped 16 percent last year, the highest on record since 2018. While four-year college enrollment has dipped 0.6 percent since 2020, trade programs have grown 4.9 percent over the same period, according to Validated Insights data.
Ford has tried to attract workers by eliminating its lowest-wage tier and offering 25 percent raises over four years, but higher salaries alone can’t fix the shortage without enough trained workers.
“There’s a different level of skill that’s needed, and frankly, we don’t have the pipeline of workers that are coming ready with those skills,” Garrity said.
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