Trucking’s other labour shortage

The trucking industry’s labour conversation has been dominated for years by one question: Where are the drivers going to come from? It’s a real and pressing issue, and Canada’s own Trucking HR Canada data makes clear how demographically strained that workforce has become. But there’s a second labour shortage running in parallel that gets far less attention from shippers, brokers and supply chain planners, and it may be doing more damage to capacity and delivery reliability than most people realize.

Without enough diesel technicians to keep the fleet moving, it doesn’t matter how many drivers are available. A truck that can’t be repaired doesn’t haul freight, no matter who’s sitting in the cab waiting for it.

Key takeaways

• 65.5 per cent of North American diesel repair shops report being understaffed, with an average of 19.3 per cent of technical positions unfilled.
• Truck driver positions grew 30 per cent between 2014 and 2024, while diesel technician roles grew only 23 per cent — a structural gap that compounds every year.
• The technician shortage isn’t just a shop problem — it directly threatens fleet uptime, delivery reliability and customer capacity commitments.
• Fleets and shops adapting successfully are shifting from constant recruiting toward retention and outsourcing strategies.
• Losing a single senior technician doesn’t just create a staffing gap — it erodes institutional troubleshooting knowledge that takes years to rebuild.

A second shortage hiding behind the driver headlines

For more than a decade, trucking’s labour conversation has centred almost entirely on driver recruitment and retention — and for good reason. But diesel technicians represent a distinct, equally critical workforce that has been growing far more slowly than the fleets and freight volumes they support. Between 2014 and 2024, truck driver positions in North America grew by roughly 30 per cent, while diesel technician roles increased by only about 23 per cent over the same period. That seven-percentage-point gap doesn’t close on its own; it compounds year over year, and the industry is now living with the accumulated result.

The numbers on the ground reflect that imbalance directly. Roughly two-thirds of diesel repair shops report being understaffed, with close to one in five technical positions sitting empty on average. This isn’t a temporary post-pandemic blip; it reflects years of retirements outpacing new entrants into the trade, alongside training pipelines that simply aren’t producing enough qualified technicians to keep pace with demand.

Why this is a supply chain problem, not just a shop problem

It’s easy for anyone outside the maintenance bay to treat the technician shortage as an HR issue for repair shops to solve on their own. But the operational reality is that every hour a truck sits waiting for an available technician is an hour of capacity the supply chain doesn’t have. A detailed breakdown of the diesel technician shortage’s labour market impact found that technicians entering without formal training — now the majority of new hires — require an average of 357 hours and thousands of dollars in trainee wages before becoming fully productive, a ramp-up period during which shop capacity remains constrained even as new hires are technically on the payroll.

For shippers and logistics planners, the consequence shows up indirectly but persistently: longer repair backlogs, more equipment pulled from service for extended periods, and fleets that are more cautious about the capacity commitments they’re willing to make. A carrier’s on-time performance is only as reliable as its ability to keep trucks in service, and that ability is now directly constrained by whether it can find and keep qualified technicians — a dependency that rarely shows up in a rate negotiation but increasingly shapes what capacity is actually available.

How the most resilient fleets are adapting

The fleets holding steady through this shortage have largely stopped treating it as a hiring problem to be solved through recruitment alone and started treating it as a retention and structural problem instead. Losing an experienced technician doesn’t just leave an open position; it erodes years of accumulated troubleshooting knowledge that a new hire, however capable, hasn’t yet developed. That knowledge loss disrupts preventive maintenance schedules and shop efficiency almost immediately, well before a replacement technician reaches full productivity.

One structural response gaining traction is a more deliberate approach to the in-house versus outsourced maintenance decision. Rather than defaulting to whichever model a fleet has always used, more operators are reassessing that decision specifically in light of technician availability in their region. A comparison of in-house versus outsourced fleet maintenance economics walks through how that decision shifts once technician scarcity, not just cost, becomes a primary input — a calculation that looks different today than it did five years ago in most Canadian markets.

What this means for logistics and supply chain planning

• Treat maintenance capacity as a genuine supply chain risk factor, not purely an internal operations concern for carriers to manage alone.
• Ask carriers and 3PL partners directly about technician staffing levels and average repair turnaround times as part of capacity risk assessments.
• Recognize that fleets investing in technician retention — competitive pay, mentorship and career pathing — are making a capacity reliability investment, not just an HR decision.
• Factor regional technician availability into carrier selection for lanes where equipment downtime would create the most severe capacity disruption.
• Expect the in-house versus outsourced maintenance mix among carrier partners to keep shifting as technician scarcity persists regionally.

The bottom line

The trucking industry has spent years focused on where the next generation of drivers will come from, and that focus is warranted. But a truck without a technician available to fix it is just as immobile as a truck without a driver to operate it — and that second labour shortage has been building quietly for years, largely out of view of the shippers and supply chain planners who ultimately depend on the capacity it constrains.

Fleets that are adapting successfully aren’t waiting for the labour market to fix itself; they’re rethinking retention, training investment and the in-house versus outsourced maintenance mix as the actual levers available to protect uptime. Supply chain planners who start asking their carrier partners about technician staffing, not just driver capacity, will have a clearer picture of where the real reliability risk lies going into next year.