‘Learning to use your hands is in:’ Collision repair students share their perspectives about their new career
Two recent collision repair program graduates and industry entrants say safe repairs, hands-on work, and emerging vehicle technologies are trending.
David Avila, 30, a 2026 graduate of California’s Contra Costa College (CCC), said he decided to swap careers for collision repair after reading a 2023 Repairer Driven News article about the program. The article featured several students, now alumni, of CCC’s collision repair technology professor and automotive department chair Laura Lozano.
CCC is one of seven schools that offer the Collision Engineering Program (CEP), a two-year, hybrid/work-based learning associate degree program. Students rotate every eight weeks between classroom instruction and paid apprenticeships at trusted collision repair facilities. The model provides students with the opportunity to earn an income while completing their training.
Avila spoke at the college’s graduation ceremony on May 19.
A Berkeley graduate and San Francisco Bay resident, Avila saw an opportunity in the current blue-collar worker shortage and chose to leave the technology software industry.
CEP falls under the nonprofit Collision Engineering Career Alliance, which was founded last year as a collaborative effort to address the collision repair technician shortage and as the next step in growing the program.
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“In general, I feel like body shop blue-collar work has a general stigma of, ‘Oh, it’s hard labor,'” Avila recently told RDN. “With so much advancement in technology and development and artificial intelligence, not even two years ago, white-collar work was seen as safe and stable. And now with all these AIs coming out… in the Bay Area I saw the trend of, ‘I think blue-collar work is going to see a boom. There’s just generally fewer people interested in blue-collar work than white-collar work.’
“For me, I saw that as an opportunity of, if a market needs more body techs and needs more collision shops, because there’s only so many of us and people don’t want to learn the trade, there’s going to be only so few of us left that [we’re] probably going to be pretty well off.”
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He added that he wishes more people saw the opportunity that learning to use your hands is in.
“It’s important because for so long people thought, ‘Oh, I need to get a white-collar job.’ But look at what’s happening now. I wish more young people realized that, ‘Hey, even if you didn’t work in collision, if you just learned how to use your hands or be more in tune with how the world is changing,’ and that this industry — many industries — are looking for people to learn how to use their hands.”
It also motivated Avila to get into collision repair because his father, Tony Avila, who is approaching retirement, owns and runs a body shop.
“Instead of working for somebody else, I want to work for my Dad, or eventually this business will be my business,” he said. “With that train of thought, it was pretty much set in stone to work in collision.”
He said he then realized that running day-to-day operations and workload left his father and the technicians with little time to teach him. Plus, the shop’s fast-paced work environment makes it challenging to learn efficiently, he said.
“It’s a full-circle moment where I literally read [the RDN article] on the internet, I picked up my cell phone, and I cold-called the department head of Contra Costa College Automotive Collision,” Avila said, referring to Laura Lozano. “I think that’s a powerful story. And now two years later, I’m blueprinting for my Dad. I’ve made a real financial impact on the business, and now my Dad’s willing to hire another student to get into the collision industry from the program that I read about.”
Avila’s Dad opened the shop in 2003, which was small at the time. Now, it employs certified technicians specializing in aluminum repairs with around 4,000 square feet of shop space for 10-15 cars at full capacity, and David Avila is a blueprinter. He added that despite this year’s whirlwind in the industry, his family’s shop had a pretty good Q1 in terms of volume and is staying busy.
“For me, it was the coolest thing,” Avila said. “I vividly remember a big frame machine, a curtain where he would refinish, and he would have me sweep up. He didn’t have me do anything extensive. I was six or seven years old, but throughout my childhood, my teenage years, I would be around the shop mostly cleaning.”
Now, he assists with teardown and disassembly while writing nearly every estimate and supplement for each repair.
“It’s just been crazy how much I’ve learned from school because, honestly, it’s one thing to learn about what you could write, and then it’s another thing to know what the actual repair entails,” Avila said. “Going to school, it just opened my eyes up to, ‘Oh wow, we’re doing this operation, but it’s not reflected in the estimate, and we’re doing it on every vehicle. So why aren’t we putting this on the estimate?’ It’s been quite the journey learning more on the repair side and also the blueprinting side.”
The apprenticeship offered through CEP was key to his education, he added.
“It’s about going to school first — learning pretty much the principles, learning the foundation of what a repair entails, going step by step in a very slow-paced environment where the liberty to fail is there,” Avila said. “Unlike when you’re at a shop, the production [team] is expecting, ‘Hey, this has to be right, this has to go out tomorrow, this has to go out today.’ When you go to school, you learn, ‘OK, this is how things are done,’ and that way when you do go to a production shop, it’s like, ‘Oh, OK, at least I understand that I’m at point A, I need to get to point B.’
“With the experience from school, it just kind of alleviates a lot of the unknown because a lot of what I’ve heard and what I’ve found is that a lot of techs have learned from, ‘Oh, it’s done this way because it’s always been done that way.’ But when you learn, ‘Oh, you do A to get to B, to then get to C,’ it helps with the bigger picture of the repair. And keeps you more at ease that, ‘Oh, I know what I’m doing now. I have confidence in myself to do it well.'”
Avila told RDN that while there’s always pressure in a production shop or at any shop, he takes comfort in knowing that he has the education and skills to repair vehicles correctly.
“You’re not just blindly following an order,” Avila said. “I think one of the most impactful things I was able to bring from school to my Dad’s shop, as of late, was getting a better refinishing system. My dad bought a paint system about 10 years ago and never really understood the evolution of paint.”
From what he learned in school about finishing systems, Avila said he saw that the shop needed to upgrade its equipment, and made the suggestion.
“We got to get a new one, a more up-to-date one,” he said. “Because the technologies with clearcoat and primers, they’re getting better in the fact that cure times have been decreasing and that just helps with getting cars through faster. I never shot a [paint] gun in terms of finishing before, not even with my Dad having a shop here. It wasn’t until I went to school and I was spraying panels and learning so much about cure time, flash time, and prep time and how to prep properly so that your finish actually looks good.
“All the prep that goes into the refinish, that’s where all the magic really happens… and the steps you follow on TDS sheets. Even TDS sheets, I had no idea what those were, and going to school, finding all about that, it’s like, ‘Oh man, this is awesome. This is actually what the manufacturer says, and this is what is going to help you get a really good refinish.’ It just really blew my mind.”
Jesse de León, 23, who was featured in the 2023 RDN story, recently shared with us how he’s progressed in his career since becoming one of the college’s first CEP graduates the same year the story was published.
“The program really put me at an advantage compared to a normal school where you would receive the same type of training as opposed to CCC, where I actually had the chance to be in the shop and put that knowledge to work,” he said. “I’m still excelling in the shop. I’m still moving up. I’m still learning every single day. It’s been nothing but looking up ever since I graduated.”
When de León was in the program, he worked at Acura Autobody as an apprentice, and about a year before he graduated, was already employed there as a full-time bodyman.
“I wasn’t really even working with my mentor anymore; I was more or less just my own tech,” he said. “I started off as an apprentice, then I was a full-blown bodyman. I leveled up, and as of recently, about six/seven months ago, I left the original shop that I was at, and I came to a different shop in Vallejo where I’m still doing body work. It’s not per se a collision shop, but I am doing a lot of body work. I’m doing painting, anything paint- and body-related, when it comes to classic vehicles. I’m still in the industry.”
De León works at Kindred Borderworks, where he said the goal is reimagining vintage vehicles. Currently, the shop builds and sells remade classic Broncos and Volkswagen Buses.
“Basically, what they do is full-blown restorations,” he said. “They modernize the vehicle, and even fit the vehicle to be an EV if the customer would be willing to go that route. It’s a pretty cool startup. It’s not really the normal classic restoration shop. This is a full-blown factory where everything is taken into account, and there’s so much detail in every single vehicle. It’s been amazing working here.”
De León noted that he went from repairing vehicles that come out of the factory and sustain collision damage to helping build vehicles.
“These vehicles, they’re pretty much brand new when we’re done with them, so it’s a lot of work,” he said.
That career evolution goes hand in hand with the importance of learning about vehicle safety and emerging in-vehicle technology, De León said.
“For me, the biggest factor was definitely safety, and when I would be learning those things in school, I would be very, very mindful of what could go wrong if this is repaired wrong, whether it’s the smallest thing to the biggest thing, such as repairing a bumper and putting some type of filler over the sensor and then the sensor’s reading wrong,” he said.
“The milliseconds that it takes the sensor to pick up something could be the difference between hitting something and potentially getting into a fatal car crash. So for me, safety was the biggest factor, and that’s what kept my eyes peeled the most in class. I wanted to make sure every single thing went back to the OEM spec, or it was at least ready for the next accident if that were to ever occur.”
De León added that, as for advanced driver assistance systems, one really helpful thing was taking the ADAS classes at the SEMA Show.
“There they were able to really go in depth on how the radars work, how the smallest bit of degree can throw a radar off, and it can read everything completely wrong, to just even repainting a bumper and the mil thickness of the paint can be enough to mess up something,” he said.
Avila and De León also shared tips for current collision industry repair students, or younger people that aren’t sure what they want to do when they grow up.
“I think first and foremost, if you like anything about cars — if you like driving your car or if you’re in middle school and you like watching vlogs about YouTubers who own exotic cars — I’d say that should probably be something you to consider: work on vehicles,” Avila said.
“Because today we have cars that are being driven around autonomously, but people are going to want to learn more about these vehicles that are coming out in the future. If you like technology as well, if you’re interested in how things are changing so rapidly, the things we know as a car that has four wheels is going to dramatically change. And whether that means learning new methodologies of repair or learning more about calibrations, young people need to hear that this is a growing industry… It’s quite amazing what’s happened in the past 10 years with calibrations in general, and now, with autonomous vehicles. If you want to be part of the future, learning about vehicles, I think, is a great place.”
For CEP students specifically, De León’s advice is to soak up as much of the hands-on, in-shop experience as possible.
“The program not only lets you get your foot inside the door of a real shop, but the shop also mutually agrees to let you work there while being knowledgeable of the fact that you’re going to school,” he said. “To me, it was very, very, very important that I was able to go to school, and get a degree, …as well as getting my technical degree.
“Take advantage of the time that they’re in the program to learn, do their schooling, and apply themselves every day. Because if you go to work and you’re not learning, then what’s the point? You want to be able to go to work and learn something new every single day, whether it’s just a different way of doing something or something completely brand new.”
Avila said his education in collision repair was an eye-opener for his Dad when it comes to hiring technicians.
“From my view of how my father has hired folks, it’s always been people who had nothing to do with cars,” he said. “They’re just people looking for work, and eventually they get the hang of it. But now that my father has seen I’ve gone to school and learned a bunch of things, he was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that.’ I think he finally has his eyes open to finding young students at a trade school that’s local for us.
“My Dad, I think, has now shifted his mindset to like, ‘Oh, wow, there’s programs out there that are training young college students that are looking for work.’ My father has now really been open to that idea of hiring someone young and understanding they’re not coming out of school knowing how to pull and knowing how to do these big repairs, but at least they have a good foundation.”
He added that it’s been a relief to his father that he doesn’t have to be as concerned that, for example, his frameman’s planning to retire in five to 10 years.
“I encourage my Dad to really consider hiring someone else from the school, from the program,” Avila said. “I think it’s about also being eager to find a shop. I don’t think anything in life is really handed to you. You always have to go and work for it or put yourself out there. …as hard as it might sound, if you really want it, you go get it. That’s kind of how I’ve always seen my life and what I’ve seen other successful people say, so it’s all about how bad do you want it?”
De León said he was glad the program allowed him to focus on school while also learning as he worked in the shop without being worried about messing up and losing his job.
“Learning was the whole point of it,” he said. “For the students that are entering the program or thinking about doing something like that, I would say it’s definitely a great opportunity, especially if you like anything automotive-related. Me, I was more of a mechanical type of learner. I liked learning more about engines, but I took the chance of going to the school and learning about painting. I realized I love cars not only because of the engines, but I also love painting them, working on them, and taking them apart.
“The collision industry is very big. It’s not just limited to just repairing. There’s dent repair, there’s glass, there’s suspension. There’s a lot of different mini industries within the large industry. I would just encourage any student who has any general interest in cars, whether it’s the smallest to the biggest thing, to just apply and get in there.”
Images
Featured image: Contra Costa College Collision Engineering graduates David Avila and Jesse de León. (Credit: Contra Costa College)