Prospective mechanics look to the future with EV technician programs

 When Moses Xavier Garcia thought about his future, he knew a desk job wasn’t for him.

“ Yeah, grabbing tools, coming into this, learning through the labs, hands-on… A lot better than sitting behind a desk,” he said.

Garcia, originally from San Antonio, is a student at Universal Technical Institute in Austin. He’s part of the mechanics program and is learning about a relatively new addition to the curriculum: hybrid and electric vehicles.

“ On hybrids, it’s more computer-based. It’s more technical and electrician,” Garcia said. We have to be more electricians and mechanics with hybrids.”

Garcia works with his classmate Damon Lehman on a car in a garage-like classroom while other students bang away on the inner workings of other vehicles. They’ve got their safety goggles on and the hood of the car up.

But unlike a stereotypical car mechanic, Garcia and Lehman’s hands and clothes don’t have a smudge of grease or car soot. And they are staring intently not at the car, but at the computer screen connected to the hybrid vehicle.

It’s not easy work, Garcia says.

“ To anybody who comes into this thinking it’s easy, it’s not. It’s really not,” he said. “You’re gonna stay up most nights learning about this in homework. But it’s gonna be very rewarding”

Watching over the students is one person who knows exactly what it feels like to be in their shoes. Ted Bob is an automotive instructor and technical team lead overseeing the hybrid electric class.

“I’m not only an instructor, I’m a UTI graduate. I graduated almost 20 years ago,” Bob said.

Behind Bob is a hybrid car battery. It’s about 12 times the size of a regular car battery, extremely heavy, with a “danger high voltage” sign resting on top.

“ The biggest part about this class is learning the safety procedures, because this high voltage is very dangerous,” Bob said. “ So learning the safety procedures, what PPE to wear, how to disable the system so it’s safe to work on…”

Growing curriculums

UTI’s electric hybrid class curriculum is one of the first ones from a private for-profit trade school in Texas and is relatively new. Instructors like Bob flew to the UTI campus in Long Beach, Calif., for instruction.

Like a lot of trade programs, the curriculum is informed by industry partners. It’s a way to keep the knowledge up to date of what future employers are looking for in potential hires. 

Tess Dubois-Carey is the president of UTI in  Sacramento, Calif., where the program first launched in 2023.

“That’s why we have the partnerships that we do and employers that offer things like our tuition reimbursement incentive plan and things along those lines where they’re looking to attract our graduates to come and work for them,” Dubois-Carey said.

Back in Texas, there is another school where a focus on hybrid and EV learning has made its way into the curriculum.

Northeast Texas Community College in Mount Pleasant is just over an hour west of Texarkana and a couple hours east of Dallas. With just a population of over 16,000 in the city, its not the first place one thinks of when talking about EVs, but within the last few years the community college became the first in the nation to offer the EV certificate program.

Zachary Strawbridge is an instructor in the Carroll Shelby Automotive Program on campus.

“ We always try to strive to be on the cutting edge of what the industry is asking for as far as what the entry-level mechanics need to know,” Strawbridge said.

“And as the hybrid and EV market share of vehicles keeps getting larger and larger, we’ve been trying to introduce more and more of it so that our technicians that we’re training could come out of college in the best possible position to be successful in the industry.”

To help write the curriculum, the program partnered with LegacyEV, a company specializing in electric vehicle components and education out of Arizona.

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Strawbridge said despite their rural location and community college designation, the goal of the program isn’t confined to its city limits.

“ We have students who come from all over the state and even outside of the state,” he said. “So we’re trying to make sure that we give them the information they need to be successful whenever they do go back home to wherever they’re going to be working at.”

It’s no secret that a big issue hindering the electric vehicle market in Texas is the infrastructure, specifically a lack of charging stations. But with an EV charging station factory opening its doors in Fort Worth, the possibility of seeing more EVs and hybrids on the road outside of big cities seems plausible.

 ”Within the next 5 to 10 years, we should be seeing that more in our local areas,” Strawbridge said.

‘Everything’s starting to go electric’

Back in Austin, Damon Lehman is explaining more of what he’s learned about the hybrid and its battery.

“These [hybrid batteries] drive the motors on the wheels instead of using the transmission to go through and turn it itself,” he says.

This is his last class in the UTI program and once he graduates, he’s set on working for Mazda, hoping to set himself apart from other job candidates with this EV training, addition on his resume.

“If I can leverage it, it would be good because the way the world’s going, everything’s starting to go electric,” he says. “So it’s good to learn to work on them.”

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