Cardenas, who nearly doubled her hourly pay to $43.50 per hour, said she plans to pursue more training, which will mean an even higher salary and more responsibility. It also means financial freedom.
“I was able to move out of my parents’ house,” she said. “I have my own apartment. I was able to get a car, and and I’m able to give more to my 401(k).”
McKinsey noted “the extraordinary rate of churn” could cost companies more than $5.3 billion every year in talent acquisition and training costs alone.
“While technology continues to evolve, it cannot replace plumbers, electricians, construction workers, maintenance and repair pros, or other tradespeople,” said Marvin Ellison, chairman and CEO of Lowe’s.
For its part, Lowe’s in 2022 started a 90-day online training program for employees who want to pursue jobs like carpentry and utility maintenance. Separately, its charitable arm has invested $43 million since 2023 to 60 organizations including technical colleges and non-profit groups to help recruit and train skilled tradespeople like maintenance technicians and plumbers.
Mervin Jebaraj of the University of Arkansas’s Walton College of Business in Fayetteville, Arkansas, noted these programs will help ease the shortages, but they won’t eliminate the gap, particularly given Trump’s clampdown on immigration.
“For as long as somebody physically needs to fix this, the shortage will persist, even though on the margins it’ll mitigate some of the shortage,” he said. “We don’t have enough people.”
“I think most Americans probably don’t know what a tech makes that helps take care of our stores and clubs and that we can help them learn how to be a tech,” he said. “So we have a need to get the word out so that people know there are some great jobs.”
Walmart revamped its training program in the spring of 2024, focusing on its own workers with a tuition-free training initiative in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. This year, it added new training sites in Vincennes, Indiana, and Jacksonville, Florida. The initiative combines hands-on instruction and classroom learning in fields like heating, ventilation, air conditioning, electrical work, and general maintenance.
As of mid-November, almost 400 employees had graduated from the program, Walmart said. With its first class of 108 associates who completed the Dallas/Fort Worth pilot program, every graduate secured a technician role, putting them on a path to earn an average of $32 per hour. Walmart said its goal is to put 4,000 workers through the training program by 2030.
R.J. Zanes, vice president of facility services for the U.S. divisions of Walmart and Sam’s Club, said Walmart was able to attract workers from all over the country with different backgrounds, including employees running cash registers.
Maintenance technician roles are crucial to keeping Walmart’s operations running smoothly, but especially so during the holiday season. For example, if a refrigeration system goes down within a Walmart store, it could cost up to $300,000 to $400,000 worth of lost product, according to Zanes.
“We’ve got to stay out in front of that,” he said. “We have to ensure that we’ve got the right skills there to do preventative maintenance, and when we do have a breakdown, to make sure that we get it back up as fast as possible to minimize that cost of downtime.”
