Auto motives
by Vincent Ciccarello
For
decades, public opinion polls have regarded car salesmen as the least
trusted professionals. And yet many people wouldn’t realise there is
much more to a retail vehicle dealership than simply
selling cars.
To begin with, repairs and maintenance form an integral part of after sales customer service, so that means carrying a wide range of often very expensive spare parts in inventory.
Secondly where large scale city dealerships often engage the services of professional consultants to take care of marketing, country dealerships usually do the marketing themselves.
Thirdly most car dealerships are family businesses passed down from generation to generation and because the specialised knowledge needed to manage and grow the firms can be missing, about half of these fail within 12 months of being passed on.
And while vehicle dealerships tend to employ many people, staffing issues are often not fully understood.
Seeing a need to professionalise the sector, the Automotive Exhibitors’ Association and the Motor Trade Association supported UniSA’s School of Management in launching the Graduate Certificate and Graduate Diploma in Automotive Dealership Management Programs in 1998.
Since then, some 60 men and women have graduated with the world’s only
university-level management qualifications designed specifically for the
automotive retail sector. And from next year, UniSA will
offer the program at masters degree level.
Program Director Dr Luke Faulkner said the programs are tailored to specialist areas of interest and the needs of individuals and their employers.
"In developing the programs, I personally interviewed 62 dealer principals
across the metropolitan and inner-country areas and asked them to tell me what
particular business-related fields they wanted their present and future
senior-level
managers to gain to optimise the benefit to their businesses," Dr Faulkner said.
General Manager of Jarvis Ford, David Upton, was in the first student intake.
"I saw it as an opportunity to formalise a lot of the on-the-job training that I’d done over the years," he said. "It was mainstream university but it had an automotive focus.
Upton commends the program to anyone working in the sector.
"If you were considering doing one thing to develop your own career and to add something of value to your resume, then you couldn’t go past this program." he said.