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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Take 5 Oil Change, the quick-service automotive brand with nearly 1,400 locations across North America, announces its WARRIOR program, a company-wide mentorship program connecting field and corporate employees with senior leaders for structured career development. The launch follows a 32% increase in the brand’s share of female District Managers over two years and marks the third leadership-development platform Take 5 has built from the ground up under VP of Operations Excellence, Amy Hine.

The mentorship program lands against a widening national gap. The TechForce Foundation’s 2026 Supply, Demand & Opportunity Report, which analyzes ten technician sectors using federal IPEDS and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, found the U.S. needs 241,842 new-entrant technicians each year while post-secondary programs graduate 101,743 — meeting roughly 42% of demand. The foundation estimates $7.42 billion in wage-based economic output is lost annually to unfilled technician positions.

At the same time, the industry has largely left half the labor pool untapped. The gap exists alongside a persistent gender imbalance in the field. Federal workforce data compiled by Data USA shows women made up approximately 2.1% of the 782,128-person automotive service technician and mechanic workforce in 2024.

“You cannot solve a shortage this size by recruiting harder from the same 2% of the population you’ve always recruited from,” said Amy Hine, VP of Operations Excellence at Take 5 Oil Change. “Bringing more women into this field stopped being a nice-to-have a long time ago. It’s a workforce sustainability issue. If the industry doesn’t fix it, the industry doesn’t staff its bays.”

Building the pipeline, then measuring it

Since joining Take 5 in January 2025, Hine has led the operational modernization of a brand scaling toward 1,400 locations across company-owned and franchised channels. Her team built the Driver and Accelerate leadership-development programs from scratch, creating a defined path from shop floor to district leadership.

The results are measurable. Female District Managers at Take 5 grew from 8.33% of the role in 2024 to 8.75% in 2025 to 11% year-to-date in 2026 — a roughly 32% increase in under two years, in a role that sits several rungs above the technician positions where women are scarcest.

WARRIOR, which Hine is co-leading with Regional Director, Tiffany Eldreth, extends that infrastructure. Rather than a recruiting campaign, the program targets the retention side of the equation: giving employees across field and corporate functions a dedicated forum for guidance, sponsorship and long-term career planning at the company.

Retention as the other half of the math

Take 5’s pipeline work runs alongside a broader operational thesis Hine has advanced since her arrival: that staffing is an investment to defend, not a cost line to cut.

Using time studies, efficiency data and AI-informed scheduling through Workday, her team moved shops off minimum-only staffing models, lifting compliance with an improved labor model. This resulted in Take 5 reducing average customer wait time outside the bay by 41%, or more than three minutes per visit.

“This number traces back to having the right people, properly trained, in the bay,” Hine said. “Technology told us where the gaps were. People closed them. If you’re not building the pipeline and keeping the people already in it, none of the rest of it holds.”

As the industry works to fill a technician gap that outpaces the number of graduates entering the field, the WARRIOR program Hine’s team has built is aimed at a labor pool where women currently hold about 2.1% of technician jobs.

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