More insight came from Joe Dykes, who retired from the North American Equipment Dealers Assn. (NAEDA) in early August. He reflected on the organization’s wide-ranging initiatives in support of ag equipment dealers and the next generation of workers.
“The bottom line is that when you’re comparing wages and trying to be competitive, a dealer’s sales volume doesn’t matter. You still have to compete for the same people, especially on the technician side,” says Dykes.
“Primarily and fundamentally, our dealers need to benchmark how they stack up, where they may need to be, as you said, to be competitive,” he adds, It’s about competing for talent, who has more career opportunities than ever before.
Technicians for Tomorrow
“The whole purpose of the Technicians for Tomorrow program was to create awareness for the industry and its dealers, but to students in middle school, early high school, along with their teachers and their parents as primary influencers. This includes FFA advisors and conferences where we found out that a lot of kids, and especially their parents or teachers, were not even aware of the career opportunities in our industry,” he adds.
“Our first goal was to help create awareness. That’s being done through social media marketing and campaigns targeted to teachers and to parents, because they’re the most influential ones for kids at that age to get them thinking about it in junior high or freshman in high school. By the time they get to be a senior, they’ve already probably made up their mind.”
There are resources on the Technicians for Tomorrow website for teachers to utilize in their classwork, for parents to utilize that show career paths and wage opportunities for students looking to develop their interests and careers.
“It’s not unusual for technicians fairly early on, if good and very efficient, to be making six digits,” he says.
NAEDA has expanded the program to include recruiting. “Right now, we are incorporating sophisticated means to collect people who are interested in becoming their technician or interested in jobs and so forth,” he says. “We collect that information, review it and then forward it to NAEDA members who are in that person’s area.”
“We do have precision technician and precision specialist data in our report and they tend to be paid a little higher generally than the regular technicians,” Dykes says. “If you review the research, you’ll see we are promoting it as a high tech and that’s an important distinction.”
More from this Report
Earning Power of Precision Ag Careers
NAEDA Compensation Report Reveals Options & Opportunities
Case Studies in Precision Career Success
Behind-the-Scenes Background on Ag Leader Precision Pair
Add Depth Through Recruiting, Retention & Advancement
Who’s Teaching & Training on Precision Sales & Service?
Emerging Tech Curriculum Paves Pathway Way to Digital Precision Careers
Associations Rise to the Challenge
Industry Leader Insights on Compensation & Career-Building
