When the shop is slow, ‘build your bench’: California’s El Camino College looking for shops to hire apprentices

Now that El Camino College in California is part of the Collision Engineering Program (CEP), with its first semester underway this fall, it’s asking collision repair shops to participate because the need for apprenticeships is high.

The Collision Engineering Program is 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. Students earn an income while completing their training.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Labor recognized the Collision Engineering Career Alliance (Collision Engineering) apprenticeship model as the standard for collision repair technician training and certification.

While attendance has been good at information sessions the school has held for shops, El Camino’s CEP lead instructor, Pati Fairchild, says shop owners have voiced reservations about participating in the apprenticeship side of the program. She often hears shops say that it would be a challenge to hire apprentices when work is slow, or that they’ve hired apprentices before and it didn’t work out.

“When the shop is slow, this is the smartest time to build your bench,” she said. “You do not want to wait until you need someone to take on a new hire, a new apprentice. You want to build them ahead of time when things are a little slow, when people do have a few extra minutes to talk through it and make sure it’s good; let them try things and shadow, so that when things pick up again, now everybody is full speed ahead. And it sounds logical, but it’s really tough to convince someone who might be facing laying off some of their current people that they need to hire someone as an apprentice.”

Fairchild wants to reassure the industry there are incentives for participating.

“In addition to preparing for a positive future, there are multiple reimbursement programs and grants available to shops that want to take on an apprentice or who feel that they can expand their business in California,” she said. “Some of them are in the millions. If you are going to hire full-time, they will let you get a big tax write-off for it, and they will also let you get a tax write-off for any expansion as far as buildings, equipment, and new locations. There’s some big-deal programs that are now available to help shops feel better about taking on someone new.”

Fairchild shared two options as examples:

• • ASE Education Foundation: offers $3,500 per apprentice hired and retained for at least nine months in a Department of Labor-approved program. Collision Engineering notes that participating CEP shops wouldn’t have to build their own DOL-approved apprenticeship program through ASE because CEP is already DOL-approved.
  • CalCompetes Grant: $350 million available statewide to all industries. This five-year tax credit grant favors employers who hire full-time employees and can include expansion via property, equipment, or personnel. Round two applications due Jan. 2027. Collision Engineering says that offering an apprenticeship shows long-term commitment to expansion, and through CEP, apprentices work full-time during all the weeks they’re not in class.

El Camino College is one of only six in the area that teach auto collision repair, and many students have shown interest, Fairchild said. Seven schools across the country participate in the CEP.

“Collision Engineering has helped me through all of the different moving pieces that need to come together to make this happen from afar,” Fairchild said. “Some students found out about the program and were so excited to join Collision Engineering that they are going to go back to the beginning and take their whole college experience over again because they want to participate in this.”

Brandon French is one of those students. He completed his first year in El Camino’s collision repair program, then started over under CEP this semester because he found there was a disconnect between trying to find a job and school.

“The culture is different, the work ethic is completely different, and this is a good transition program to help with that,” he said.

Getting paid while training was a CEP perk that French said got his attention.

“This is a good opportunity to meet employers, to get my name out there because I go through college and I get the degree, but then that’s the easy part,” he said. “The hard part is trying to find somewhere stable that I can work and actually get roots down, or somewhere that will trust me… It’s a good challenge while also providing good benefits as well.”

French previously shadowed a collision repair technician for a couple of summers at a friend’s shop and learned a little about shop operations. However, while he was there, he didn’t feel he could make any mistakes. He said he likes that the CEP apprenticeship model allows some breathing room for errors.

Fairchild said she noticed the same disconnect, and that’s why she was excited for El Camino to begin offering the CEP.

“I saw there was this huge disconnect between students in a student-focused environment graduating after two years and then trying to not only find an employer who would take a chance on someone with no previous work experience, but then join their culture of full-speed-ahead, profit-centered body shop,” she said. “Students were not navigating that code-shifting well. This was a much better transition for everyone involved, including the shop owners and managers who now are supported by Collision Engineering, just like the school is, so that we can step a student through their learning and their ramp-up to full-time status permanently.”

Fairchild noted as a positive that CEP students aren’t assigned to a shop when they’re ready for an apprenticeship; the shops have a say on who’s hired.

“A student has to earn an interview with employers, and the employer has to say, ‘Yes, I want this one, or ‘Yes, I could take either of these two,'” she said. “That’s another benefit for shops — they get to choose if and who they hire. Nobody gets put with an employer.”

Shops that are interested in participating in the CEP can email Stephanie Nitz, a Collision Engineering Career Alliance workforce development manager, at [email protected].

Images

Featured and secondary images: El Camino College Collision Engineering Program students learn in the shop. (Provided by El Camino College)