Washington, D.C. – The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) today released new research on causes and solutions for the current gaps in diesel technician training, recruitment, and retention. Qualified techs are indispensable to a safe and efficient trucking industry, yet 65.5 percent of shops were understaffed in 2025 with an average of 19.3 percent of positions unfilled. The research synthesized findings from techs, shops, and training programs.
Most techs (61.8%) enter the career without any formal training, requiring an average of 357 training hours and $8,211 in trainee wages to prepare them. Even with formal training, more than 30 percent of training program graduates were unqualified in 20 core skill areas, according to diesel shops. In 7 of these core skill areas, each additional hour of training improved tech qualification by more than 16 percent, and as such additional training hours in these areas can improve outcomes. In 6 core skill areas, however, each additional hour of training improved tech qualification by less than 8 percent, highlighting the need for critical curricula upgrades.
The most common barrier reported by techs at the start of their career was the high cost of acquiring their own tools (29.0%), followed by a lack of prior tech knowledge (28.0%), insufficient pay (16.1%), and poor shop mentorship (10.8%). Though pay and schedules were the two aspects of employment that most attracted techs to the trucking industry, techs also ranked the pursuit of more interesting work (ranked 3rd) and greater variety of work (ranked 5th) as vitally important.
Forty-four percent of trucking techs were considering other tech jobs, with automotive and agriculture the most common alternative industries. Dissatisfaction with pay, interactions with management, and variety of work were the aspects of employment that had the most statistically significant association with techs choosing to look for a new job versus staying at their current job. The research also evaluated techs’ perspectives on other industries to identify how trucking’s comparative strengths and weaknesses match up to techs’ varying priorities.
“With a lack of qualified techs and stiff competition from other industries, tech employment in the trucking industry is not keeping up with demand, especially when it comes to retaining entry-level technicians just entering the workforce,” said Robert Braswell, Executive Director of ATA’s Technology & Maintenance Council. “ATRI’s report helps trucking shops identify not only where they and their training program partners can improve but also how to better leverage our industry’s existing strengths.”
The full report is available on ATRI’s website here.
