Australia needs you: there has never been a better time to pick up the spanners
Every workshop in the country is looking for the next good mechanic. The work is there, the vehicles are there, and the demand for skilled hands has never been higher. Here is the honest state of play, and why a trade under the bonnet is one of the surest careers in Australia today.
Walk into almost any workshop in Australia and ask the boss what keeps him awake at night. It won't be the price of parts. It will be finding people. The numbers back him up. Industry research commissioned by the Australian Automotive Aftermarket Association put the national gap at more than 40,000 workers, roughly 27,000 qualified technicians and 13,500 apprentices, and trade bodies have called the skills shortage the industry's most pressing issue ever since. The Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce reported that one in three automotive businesses has a technician vacancy that has stayed open for more than six months, and that only about 37 per cent of advertised technician jobs are ever filled. In plain terms: for every ten workshops advertising, six or seven are still looking half a year later.
That is a problem for the industry. For a young person choosing a career, it is the opposite. Scarcity is leverage. A qualified technician today can choose the workshop, choose the town, and negotiate.
"Scarcity is leverage. A qualified technician today can choose the workshop, choose the town, and negotiate."
The work is not going anywhere, even as the market shifts
The latest VFACTS/Electric Vehicle Council figures for September 2026 put EVs at about 24 per cent of new-car sales, now outselling petrol (23.9%) and diesel (23.1%) individually, with petrol and diesel combined still around 47 per cent. Every diesel ute, every farm tractor, every truck, boat and generator already on Australian roads is a job waiting for someone with the skills, for the next fifteen to twenty years at least. And the EVs need people too: high-voltage systems, battery diagnostics and software-heavy vehicles are creating a second career path that barely existed a decade ago. Whichever way the market turns, the mechanic wins.
The pipeline needs help, and it's worth saying why
Official NCVER figures show that about 62 per cent of automotive and engineering apprentices finish their trade within six years, the best result in more than a decade, but it still means close to four in ten never get their ticket. When apprentices are asked why, the answers are consistent: low first-year wages while the cost of living climbs, thin mentoring, and long, expensive commutes to training. In an AAAA survey of 600 automotive apprentices, 69 per cent named living costs as their biggest challenge. Then, on 1 January this year, the Federal Government halved the two main apprenticeship payments for trades on its Priority List: the employer's Priority Hiring Incentive and the apprentice's Training Support Payment each dropped from $5,000 to $2,500. A new $5,000 Key Apprenticeship Program incentive was created at the same time, but it covers clean-energy and housing trades, not motor mechanics. The Motor Trades Association of Australia said plainly that cutting the incentives that make apprenticeships viable will only compound the crisis.
So what does a good future look like?
It looks like a small family workshop that has been fixing diesels on the same highway for seventy years and is now teaching the third generation. It looks like a first-year apprentice who is scared of a common-rail injector in March and pulling and testing one unsupervised by Christmas. It looks like a trade that cannot be sent offshore, cannot be replaced by an app, and gets more valuable every year the shortage continues. If you are a school leaver, a parent, a career adviser, or someone in their thirties wondering whether it is too late, it isn't. Australia needs you. Help keep Australia moving.
This Month in the Trade
- 21-year-old automotive technology apprentice Edie Thurtell, from mycar Tweed Heads, is representing Australia at WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 (22-27 September) after winning gold at the WorldSkills Australia nationals, a great example of where the trade can take a young apprentice.
- VACC marked World EV Day in September by spotlighting the technicians and workshops, 5,000 member businesses across Victoria and Tasmania, who've retrained and reinvested to service EVs alongside their traditional work, framed as a people story, not a tech story.
- New FCAI VFACTS figures published this month confirm EVs, petrol and diesel are now running close together in new-car sales, meaning the workshops of tomorrow will need both traditional and high-voltage skills, good news for anyone starting a trade now.
