Taking the wheel: TCC students begin internships at Autobahn

Land Rover intern Shay Wiltshire and mentor technician Zach Williams peered into the engine of an SUV, eyeing the source of the leak.

“You see how it’s dripping from the coolant connector itself?” Williams asked.

“Yeah,” Wiltshire responded. 

“With the coolant connector being higher up, this is definitely the source.”

Wiltshire, 24, did not talk much, instead listening intently to what Williams was teaching her. She is two weeks into a paid, two-year internship at the Land Rover service center on the corner of University and Westside drives in Fort Worth. The internship is the product of a partnership between Tarrant County College and Autobahn Fort Worth.

The program, in its first year, is intended to help Autobahn meet a need for technicians while providing a pipeline to a lucrative career for the community college’s students. If Wiltshire does well during her internship — and her attitude has already impressed the Land Rover team, a supervisor said — the Mansfield High School graduate will have a job as a full-time technician waiting for her when the two years are up.

Wiltshire’s introduction to automotive work came from a troublesome 2005 Chevy Impala. 

Once, the hood flew up while she was driving down the highway. Another time, the power steering pump needed to be replaced.

“Every single problem you could have on a car, that car had,” she said. “After that, I was like, you know what? I’m going to start doing it myself. And then when I started doing it, I was like, I actually love this. I could do this for the rest of my life.”

She began taking courses at TCC’s South Campus in January and was offered the Autobahn-funded scholarship and internship this fall along with nine other students.

Although Wiltshire has worked on cars before, prior experience is not necessary for someone to participate in the program, said Jason Baisden, service director for Land Rover Fort Worth. 

What is required is accountability, a good work ethic and a willingness to learn.

“The biggest and best thing they could do is just be a sponge and absorb everything,” he said.

Thinking of an auto repair shop might conjure up mental images of mechanics doing greasy, dirty work in a hot garage — but those are the ways of the past, Baisden said.

“These guys are probably 60% computer engineers to 40% mechanical,” he said. “When you go in our shops, they are clean. They are climate-controlled.”

The field offers a way to make a good living without much college, Baisden said. A technician hired after an internship starts out earning $24 to $30 per hour, based on their performance, and the wage grows as skills do — highly skilled technicians can make as much as $250,000 to $300,000 per year, he said. 

The auto industry has a high demand for technicians with more than 65,000 openings for such jobs across the country, Baisden said, adding that Autobahn Fort Worth will need at least 20 new technicians next year.

This demand is why Autobahn works to communicate the reality of the work and the pay to young prospective technicians — and their parents — before they graduate high school, encouraging them to attend TCC.

For its part, TCC fills its automotive classes to capacity, said Tony Edwards, an automotive instructor at the South Campus who served on the scholarship’s selection committee. TCC offers three automotive associate degrees and seven certificates stackable toward those degrees.

“We have waiting lists every semester. People trying to get into classes,” he said, adding that demand has grown since he first began working at the school 12 years ago.

Job openings and interests are not the only aspects of the field that are growing — so is the number of women in the male-dominated careers, said Angela Adams, parts director at Land Rover Fort Worth.

She began working in the industry in 1987 and said she has seen more women take jobs in the automotive field in the last 10 to 15 years.

“Sometimes, you felt like you had to work twice as hard just to get half the recognition, and you had to prove yourself,” she said. “But it’s changed a lot, and it’s a breath of fresh air, let me tell you.”

Looking to the future, Edwards is hopeful that the program will be successful in training skilled workers for Autobahn.

As for Wiltshire, she still has two years to go. In the meantime, she is excited about spending more time doing something she loves.

“I’m just looking forward to actually being able to work on cars all day, being able to learn all the knowledge that entails in it, just to be able to really get my feet wet and start doing it,” she said.

McKinnon Rice is the higher education reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact her at mckinnon.rice@fortworthreport.org. 

Autobahn is a financial support of the Fort Worth Report. The Fort Worth Report also partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage. At the Fort Worth Report, news decisions are made independently of our board members and financial supporters. Read more about our editorial independence policy here.

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