Machines and vehicles
What does a Vehicle Technician do?
Finding out why something has stopped working, and putting it right.
What the day is like
- Indoors, under a roof.
- Tools, materials, your body.
- Largely on your own.
- Right or wrong, to a standard.
- Answerable for your own work.
The facts
- Pay
- $50,620 a year, median
- Automotive Service Technicians and Mechanics, May 2025
- Usually needs
- Postsecondary nondegree award
- A year or two, often while earning something.
- Jobs
- +5% projected change in jobs, 2025-2035 projections
- Demand looks growing slowly
What is good about it
- You answer for your own work rather than for other people, which suits more people than admit it.
- You can see what you did at the end of the day.
What people find hard about it
- Dirty hands and awkward positions
- Flat-rate time pressure
- Customers who dispute the bill
Electric vehicles are changing the work, so the training never really stops.
Will machines take this job?
Hard for machines to take over. Diagnostics increasingly come from software, but the repair itself and the judgement about what is safe do not.
How to find out whether it suits you
Spend a day in a workshop and follow one difficult fault to its cause.
Would this actually suit you?
CareerDNA works that out from what you choose rather than from what you say about yourself: two minutes of choosing between real jobs, a few puzzles, and some questions about what you are like. It is free, it saves as you go, and it will tell you plainly where the answer is thin.