PMM visited the IMI recently to chat to Emma Carrigy, head of research, careers and inclusion. Emma is behind the organisation’s statistical reports and in this episode she goes into great depths about what the automotive aftermarket looks like currently and what it needs to look like in the future.
Let’s start with what looks like a simple question: How many garages are there in the aftermarket?
It’s much more complicated than simply looking at a number on a page. However, adding things together and making certain assumptions, if we were to take maintenance and repair as a sector, there are currently 269,000 individuals registered to that industry. That equates to just over 52,000 businesses. It’s really hard to how many of those are garages, per se, but you would assume a significant proportion. What that figure doesn’t include, however, is dealerships and fast-fits. It will be independent garages and bodyshops. Overall that sector contributes £8.5 billion to the UK economy.
Comparing ten years ago to now, how has the sector changed?
Well, for automotive as a whole, we’ve actually added 40,000 jobs over the last 10 years. So that’s a growth rate of about 5.6 per cent. That growth in particular has been in the retail side and not the aftermarket, I should say. And because actually manufacturing in terms of jobs has actually slightly declined over that 10 years, not massively, but it has declined, all of that 5.6 per cent growth has come from the retail and aftermarket side of things.
Would that be in line with population growth in that time?
Yeah, I would say it’s probably slightly ahead of the curve. One interesting fact is actually if you look at maintenance and repair specifically, in the last two years, it’s grown by 16 per cent. So there’s been real rapid change in the last two years.
What’s behind that growth?
Well, there are multiple things, but one clear indicator is the size of the UK car parc. If you take the most recent figures by the SMMT, the current UK car parc as of the end of 2024 was at around 36 million. Petrol is still the vast majority at 58 per cent, diesel 32 per cent. But interestingly, BEVs are now at around 3.7 per cent of that total.
More cars equals more work for the aftermarket?
100 per cent. Also, the type of people that need to work on those vehicles and the skills needed are changing. So, for example EV, at the moment we estimate about a quarter of technicians are qualified to work with electric vehicles, about 64,000 people, which is really good.
However, we need to have 175,000 trained technicians in order to meet the demand if EVs are going to continue as they are.
So the work is more technically challenging than before. Are wages keeping pace?
They are! So yes, if you look at advertised salaries, so this is, you know, looking at average job postings for technicians, etc. The average salary – and there will be significant regional differences, of course – for a vehicle technician is £38,300 at the moment. That has increased by 2 per cent in the last year.
Vehicles are changing, will we be able to keep up? What the future look like for the aftermarket?
So I’d like to say that the future is bright. We’ve done some forecasting on looking at the size, how many jobs and what those jobs will look like. Overall, we’re predicting that the whole sector will grow by about 3 per cent by 2032, which, okay, that’s growth. And in particular, service and maintenance will be increasing to around 4 per cent, which is around another 12,000 jobs. That doesn’t really paint the picture, however. I think where the big change is going to be is in the change in roles, occupations and skills within that. That’s where we are going to see the biggest change.
The increase of different vehicle trains and the skills needed to work on those different vehicles, but also vehicle autonomy. So one of the things we predict is that by 2032, nearly half of all the UK vehicles will have some form of level two autonomy within them.
So would I be right in thinking that the technicians of the future are going to have to be a lot more computer literate?
100 per cent, yes. And not only computer literate but data savvy, especially in the world of technicians. One of the things we’ve been talking about at the IMI is the need to be – and I’m going to throw out a nice word that we’ve invented here – omni-competent. Which is the ability to be able to work on multiple different vehicle trains, multiple different systems, multiple different technology and have that multi-skilled approach to being a technician.
