Originally Posted by
Panthers007
Working as an auto-mechanic will likely be a step-up in hiring you. Not all, but many places have only minimally skilled people to employ regards bike-shops. Where I am, you usually encounter buck-toothed kids who'd be more at home in dad's garage with a pair of pliers.
Good luck!
And the bikeshop staff often encounter bigoted jerkoffs with a dental fetish.
I was a heavy equiment mechanic when I decided I wanted to work on something less likely to cause ma a lethal injury while working on it at 10pm in the rain the day before a contract deadline.
Sangetsu siad you don't need much because bikes are simple. Are they simple? Yep, so simple that the same damn stupid questions keep getting asked over and over in the busiest forum at bikeforums. Take the front derailleur adjustment. Based on the mechanics forum it is a near impossible task to get one to work right. That is incorrect but it does take practice and the ability to see what is going on and make the proper change to get the desired result, in less than ten minutes, every time. Lots of people can build wheels, but a mechanic should be able to do it, right on the first try, in an hour, and have the wheel stay round and true when ridden(Not that you would need to know how to build a wheel to work in the repair shop, but the lead mechanic should be able to.
Being able to diagnose quickly is also key because in a bike shop, there is (usually) no service writer, you will write up your repairs.
And the biggest hurdle going from auto mechanic to bike mechanic is learning how to shift gears, constantly. Not only will you fix bikes but you will sell bikes, build bikes, write up orders, fit and sell clothing and shoes, play twenty questions to figure out the correct tube for someone, do the count, fit helmets on screaming children that do not want a helmet placed on them, deal with people that beleive because they had a flat repaired three months ago you should now fix their broken chain under "warranty", explain to people with no mechanical skill, over the phone, how to install a set of training wheels(or a car rack, replace a tube, install a handlebar/brakecable/shiftcable,etc), waste time on estimates that will NEVER become repairs, explain why the price of the bike is irrelevant to the cost of the repair, listen to people say it is stupid to own more than one bike(or a bike costing more than $300), remove a thousand broken ball needles from pump heads( supposed to be a free service apparantly), clean the toilet, install counters/slatwall/drywall/fixtures. It goes on.
On a given day, during a tuneup(hour job) you may have to stop talk about bikes, fit a guy for shoes(Who will then not buy them because he saw a better price on line and just needed the correct sizing), run the register a couple of times, install a kickstand, replace a tube, answer the phone a half dozen times, and install a trunk rack. If you can jump back and forth with out getting annoyed and/or forgetting where you are on the repair, then you should do fine.