Painting a New Future
Natalie Hodder has explored a wide range of jobs, from working in a fish and chip shop to cleaning hotel rooms and even traveling with a circus. Each experience brought its own lessons, but the one that truly captured her passion was painting—and not the kind you’d find in an art gallery, but the kind that arrives at an automotive workshop battered, scratched, and in desperate need of a second life.
“Watching something come in smashed and making it beautiful again—to know that you can fix something like that—it’s quite cool,” Natalie says.
Now, Natalie is a qualified automotive refinisher, having completed MITO’s New Zealand Certificate in Automotive Refinishing (Level 3 and 4) at Masterton Auto Body Repairs.
On any given day, she can paint two or three cars, but her skillset extends far beyond just vehicles. “Mostly I just do insurance work these days, but I have painted camper vans, tennis courts, farm equipment, trucks. I’ve worked on everything.”
Her journey to this point wasn’t always easy. She didn’t learn to read until later in life and was diagnosed with dyslexia as she started her MITO programme. “Once MITO found out, they gave me a mentor, Emma—she was absolutely amazing, very skilled at what she does. I also had my MITO Training Advisor, Anton, who’s just as good.”
With their guidance, she slowly began to realise that the Automotive Refinishing programme was not only manageable but designed to support learners like her. The process, she found, was refreshingly straightforward—submit work, receive feedback, and keep moving forward. There was always another opportunity to refine her skills and complete each assessment.
“You can’t get stuck for too long because it’s such a simple process,” she explains. “It did take me a bit longer than others, but you can’t really fail at it because you’re given the chance to try again.”
She hadn’t even realised how close she was to completing the programme until Anton told her she only had five assessments left.
Now, with her qualification in hand and years of experience under her belt, Natalie has become an advocate for the industry. “There are several people that I've managed to talk into doing it,” she says. “Two of them are too young right now, but they will be starting very shortly. Even my son's hoping to start an apprenticeship.”
For Natalie, having a trade qualification behind her has given her a sense of pride and purpose.
“Once you have [a qualification] behind you, you just feel a little more confident,” she reflects. “It makes it easy to get out of bed in the morning, because you’re not doing it for the money. You’re doing it because you love it.”
