Caliber Collision is the largest collision repair MSO in the U.S., ending 2024 with 1,829 locations nationwide. To staff all those stores, Caliber has developed some of the most comprehensive and innovative workforce development programs in the industry.
David Dart, chief people officer at Caliber Collision, recently appeared on The Collision Vision podcast, driven by Autobody News and hosted by Cole Strandberg, to share how Caliber attracts new talent, builds world class technicians and creates career growth opportunities that keep employees engaged -- and what independent shop owners can learn from Caliber’s approach.
Caliber Technician Apprentice Program
In 2022, Caliber launched its Technician Apprentice Program (TAP), which provides paid, hands-on training designed to prepare apprentices for a career in collision repair. TAP recently achieved a major milestone with its 2,000th graduate.
Dart said graduates of the program are now contributing nearly 15% of Caliber’s repair hours.
A critical feature of TAP is mentorship provided by experienced techs, either one-on-one or as a “hub mentor” guiding four or five apprentices in the same location. Dart said techs serving as a “hub mentor” do that full time.
Both types of mentors “are there to make sure that we're moving those apprentices through, directing work, teaching them, transferring knowledge,” Dart said.
There is no shortage of people applying to be apprentices, Dart said. “If 15 people apply to the [apprentice] job, you want to make sure you're hiring the one or two or three best out of that talent pool.”
Dart said applicants take a mechanical aptitude test. Those who score high are then interviewed by mentor technicians to make sure they would be a good fit.
“They're going to spend the next 12 to 18 months together working side by side, five to six days a week,” Dart said.
Involving the mentors in the interview process also tends to lead to higher success rates among the applicants chosen, Dart added.
Caliber wants to have one of the best apprenticeship programs in the U.S., and is continuously working to improve TAP. Dart said the stigma that once surrounded going into a trade instead of getting a college degree has waned, as the cost to attend school has skyrocketed and people have figured out “there are other options where you can go earn immediately or earn very shortly.”
The Caliber Way
The Caliber Way is focused on improving service advisors and general managers’ quality of performance – the idea being if GMs and service advisors meet their full potential, so will the store they are working in.
A general manager’s leadership style and ability to manage shop flow has a strong effect on technician turnover. So does a service advisor’s relationship with technicians, and their ability to write accurate estimates.
Dart said Caliber noticed there were “pockets of excellence” across the country where they were training service advisors very well, so it wanted to figure out how to do that at scale.
The Caliber Way was developed to make sure new service advisors – whether hired or promoted – learned the best way to write estimates, and that existing ones who weren’t performing well had a chance to improve. It includes three weeks of online instructor-led learning and three weeks of in-person learning.
The initiative was just launched in late 2024, but “early returns are very good because our teammates feel taken care of,” Dart said. “They can reach their full potential. No one wakes up in the morning and says, ‘You know what? I want to do a crappy job at work today.’ I think it's been really well received.”
The Collision Repair Industry Talent Shortage
Dart said when he first joined Caliber a little more than two years ago, the goal was to “hire as many body technicians as you can.” However, work has fallen off as customers are raising deductibles to manage rising insurance premiums, and used car values have plummeted, increasing the rate of total losses.
In 2024, the company had to be more strategic about focusing hiring efforts only in stores that were seeing high demand, Dart said. For stores with lower demand, the company shifted to working to capture more keys.
“It was a pretty big shift, but hiring still remains one of the critical elements of whether or not we're going to reach our full potential as a company,” Dart said.
There is still a shortage of technicians overall, Dart added.
“Whether you're a small independent or you're a large MSO, body technicians are critical. We don't have enough,” he said.
To attract employees, Caliber works to make itself an employer of choice.
“There are things that we're providing that we think will be differentiating, and I think the industry will come along with some of those things,” Dart said.
Caliber already has outstanding benefits but is working to improve them, offering affordable health care and a concierge service to navigate the system, and a 3% 401(k) plan match on day one of employment along with retirement planning help.
The MSO also offers opportunities for personal growth in the form of management and leadership opportunities. “If someone's interested in a management career, you can find it here. And a degree is not required,” Dart said.
Partnerships Make a Difference
Technician training partnerships like the ones Caliber has with Axalta, Sherwin-Williams and 3M are also key.
“They want the whole industry to succeed,” Dart said. “They have incredible training and development programs for us to get a bird's eye view and say, ‘Hey, look, are there things that we can take from them that actually will make us better in our training programs?’”
Dart said Caliber is looking at similar partnerships with tech companies that can make some repetitive jobs easier using AI – for instance, enabling a service advisor writing an estimate to quickly find information, as opposed to manually searching through a massive DRP guide.
The U.S. military is another important partner. Caliber’s Changing Lanes program helps service members transitioning to civilian life by placing them in a technician apprenticeship.
“We're looking to expand that to other roles as well,” Dart said.
Snap-on also provides tool kits for graduates of TAP, and the TechForce Foundation supports workforce development for technicians.
Gauging Employee Satisfaction
Caliber keeps a close eye on several metrics, but Dart said first-year turnover for general managers and 90-day turnover for service advisors are “the two really big ones for me.”
“If we can get service advisors past 90 days, they stick around for quite a while. If we get GMs past a year, they stick around for quite a while and are successful,” he said.
The company also looks at its employee Net Promoter Score, and conducts quarterly pulse surveys of its repair centers “to make sure that we don't have something that's happening” that’s driving dissatisfaction among employees.
Advice for Collision Shop Operators
Dart advised independent shop owners and managers to “understand that people are the only true competitive advantage.”
That means making sure employees are effectively trained on how to order parts, write estimates and repair vehicles, and creating a great environment for them to grow.
He also recommended looking at other industries outside of collision repair to see what they are doing right to attract employees.
For instance, Dart said, before joining Caliber, he worked in the pest management industry, which offered tremendous growth opportunities.
“Not a lot of people want to go crawl under houses in the dark,” Dart said. His company emphasized the customer service aspect of the industry, and the chance to become a standalone technician in four months.
“[Collision repair is] a great industry,” Dart said. “We should make more of an effort together to make sure that we're marketing effectively and together, because we did that pretty well in my last industry, and we saw a real rise in the people who joined,” including women and minorities, which “yielded a lot of benefits to the [pest management] industry as a whole.”
Abby Andrews