Concerns About RV Technician Shortages

Sales of RVs are at 20-year highs and our industry is booming thanks to a large degree to the explosion of baby boomers entering the RV market in record numbers. 

In addition the industry is taking the positive message about the RV lifestyle to a targeted mass audience, through a highly successful market expansion program under the leadership of the Go RVing Coalition, so our future looks very bright.

Despite all this positive news we may be failing to provide the support after the sale to these new customers that they expect and deserve because we may have outpaced our ability to provide adequate professional service.  And the problem is going to get worse before it gets better unless the industry becomes aggressive about solving the problem.

Like most problems this one is multifaceted and there are no quick fixes.  But a major part of the problem is the shortage of skilled professional RV technicians.  As RV News talks to RV dealers around the country all too often we hear that dealers cannot recruit enough technicians and the ones they do have are being lured away by better paying jobs in other industries.

Now this problem didn’t just jump up in front of us without any warning.  We have known for a lot of years that our business was going to grow substantially when the baby boom generation spilled over into the demographic profiles of RV buyers.  And there have been some efforts by our national associations, RVIA and RVDA, to not only increase the number of technicians but also make them more professional.  Examples of these efforts include the RVIA-RVDA technician certification program, the Trouble Shooter’s Clinics and the vocational training programs through community colleges around the country under the NRVTI umbrella.

However, it’s like giving a party and nobody shows up. 

Some of the NRVTI programs are in trouble because of inadequate recruiting.  In other words we are not attracting applicants and high school students into these programs in the numbers required to fill the needs of our industry.

So what do you do when a plan is not working?  You come up with a new plan!

There has been some focus on a new plan.

Earlier this year RVIA and RVDA formed an ad hoc committee to look into the technician shortage problem and come up with ideas for finding solutions.

RV News is not privy to all the ideas discussed; however, the one idea that did come to light recently raised some questions in our minds about the kinds of solutions being addressed.

For example, the RVIA board, acting on a recommendation from its Industry Education Committee, approved a motion to ask the Go RVing Coalition to “immediately give the highest priority to assisting with service technician recruiting in order to help correct the dealer reported lack of dealership growth due to a technician shortage, and to help the enrollment at NRVTI schools."

It amazes us that the suggestion even got out of committee, much less that RVIA's board thought the recommendations were worthy enough to endorse it.

It may appear that the Go RVing Coalition is flush with funds and has a lot of discretionary dollars. I doubt if that is the case, but even if it were, those funds were allocated for one purpose only - market expansion. We have to resist any effort to divert the focus of the Go RVing Coalition -- they have a big enough job to do as it is.

RV News applauds the Go RVing Committee for rejecting the suggestion. They remember why the Go RVing committee was formed out of a coalition of many segments of the industry and the battles it went through to get the market expansion program off the ground. The Go Rving committee did agree to post some information about technician recruiting on the committee's web site but refused to clutter up the national media market expansion campaign with a completely unrelated plea.

Is this RVIA's problem? No more or less than it is a problem to any other industry segment.

In the final analysis, I suppose we should be happy that RVIA was willing to address the issue; however, we would have preferred that RVIA not make any recommendations at all rather than to make the one they made.

Trying to tag it onto the industry market expansion program is not the kind of creative thinking we have come to expect from RVIA.

This whole industry looks to RVIA for leadership, especially when there is a problem facing the industry as a whole. RVIA has proven time and again that it can solve the largest of problems. If there was a major threat from the government to tax RV ownership, I'm sure that RVIA would mount an effective all-out campaign to eradicate the problem, as they have done in the past, spending whatever time and money necessary.

If RVIA did mount an attack on the RV technician shortage problem and go at it with the same vigor that it has other issues, we are convinced that it could at worst minimize the problem and at best find a solution to to eliminate it.

Like we said in the beginning, this is a complex problem and certainly it is not completely up to RVIA or RVDA pr anyone else for that matter to do the whole job. To solve it is going to take a whole new approach by a lot of different decision makers.

For starters, RV dealers need to put as much emphasis on service after the sale as they do on getting the sale in the first place. And RV dealers are going to have to pay technicians in accordance with the value they bring to their businesses. That salary needs to be competitive with other businesses in their markets competing for these same technicians.

Then RV manufacturers may need to review their warranty programs to make sure that dealers offering warranty service don't lose money every time they repair a unit under warranty.

But maybe what we need to do is form a new industry coalition based on the successful model of the Go RVing Coalition.

The possibilities are staggering. Putting together a top-level team made up of RV manufacturers, RV dealers, suppliers, service technicians and distributors under one umbrella whose total focus is finding creative solutions to the total RV service problem would go a long way toward improving our customer care dilemma.

This new coalition would need to be funded of course, but it wouldn't require the level of funding that Go RVing requires.

The RV technician shortage issue is a solvable problem. The first step is to recognize the problem exists -- I think we do recognize that already. The next step is putting our heads together and coming up with creative solutions to the problem. And finally, there needs to be an aggressive implementation program to make those creative solutions become a reality.

Within this industry, we certainly have the brains to solve this problem; we also have the resources if we choose to use them; now all we have to do is to muster the will.

We are all benefiting from the market but we also bear a heavy burden of responsibility to take very good care of those people who have invested in the idea of the RV lifestyle.

RVN