Service techs are the point of the spear. They’re the men and women who deal directly with business managers and homeowners and the ones everyone expects to quickly find and repair all types of comfort-related problems. Because service techs usually run several trouble calls every day, they have a huge influence on client satisfaction, social media referrals, and the online reputation of both contractors and manufacturers.
According to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 332,900 HVACR (mechanics) service technicians and installers were employed in 2016. If 50 percent of those were installation techs, that results in about 170,000 service techs currently working in our industry. Let’s be conservative and say 10 percent retire, change careers, move into management, or otherwise stop working as techs. That means the HVACR industry needs to add about 17,000 service techs per year to stay even. To grow we will need to add even more.