It's nearly impossible to find young guys that want to work in the restoration shops. I'm 26 and don't know of anyone my age or younger that's working in any of the local shops.
The cars/trucks being restored are also getting older every year and needing more and more work to be restored properly- another reason that it cost so much to restore one these days. We're over 1400 hours in the '66 F100 in the shop now for a rotisserie restoration, and still have a ton of work left to finish it.
There are a few young guys around here that are into older cars but most are into modern muscle. No one doing full builds under 30 years old. There is one guy my age that has a '68 Camaro that's he's been slowly working on for the last few years. It costs so much that like posted earlier, it just takes longer to save up enough to finish it. I'll have atleast 25K in Goldilocks and that's without doing any paint/bodywork, and doing all the other work myself.
I will say that there is a ton of negativity that goes with choosing this line of work that can prevent kids/young guys away from doing restoration work for a living. I wanted to do this since I was a kid, and I caught a ton of grief about it while growing up from teachers and even family members. I was constantly told that it wasn't a "prominent" or white-collar job and "there's no future in it"... so I see that as one reason that there aren't as many younger people in the hobby. Society thinks that a four year degree automatically grants you a high paying/secure job and that's just not the case these days. It does guarantee years of student loans though, something I've never had since tech was relatively inexpensive.
As far as skill level goes, compare what the under 30-35 crowd was building back in the 40's/50's/60's to what's being built today by the same age group...
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