Jaguar Land Rover and the dealership pay for each veteran’s training and absorb all but $1,000 of the cost of a toolbox provided by Snap-on Inc. Dealers often cover the remaining $1,000 expense as well, Melton says. JLR did not disclose the total cost of the toolbox.
James Yeagley, a service technician at Land Rover Palm Beach, graduated from the Veteran Careers Program course in Atlanta in 2016. Yeagley, 47, left active duty in the Army in 2001 after four years of service and is now in the National Guard. In the Army, he repaired M1 Abrams tanks.
“That is where I got the bug for working on things,” says Yeagley, who discovered the veteran program though an online job site. He calls the JLR veterans program a “win-win. Anything you could want to learn about these vehicles is there.”
Jaguar Land Rover has expanded the training capacity in Irvine from four to six classrooms “in the anticipation that demand will grow for veteran recruits,” Morgan says. Although the pool of potential candidates among veterans now numbers in the thousands, he adds, recruitment remains tough.
Starting pay for techs can be as low as $12 an hour, and Jaguar Land Rover must compete with attractive re-enlistment bonuses for veterans and other government jobs that pay as much as $30 an hour, Morgan notes.
He says, “The industry is going to have to deal with the technician pay issue.”
Be the first to comment