Ford has been unable to fill some 5,000 openings for mechanics despite offering a salary of $120,000 a year — prompting the company's chief executive to warn of a dire shortage of skilled tradespeople in the US.

"We are in trouble in our country. We are not talking about this enough," Ford CEO Jim Farley said on an episode of the "Office Hours: Business Edition" podcast published earlier this week.

"We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen."

Farley added: "It's a very serious thing."

The $120,000 pay is nearly twice the average annual American salary, according to the Social Security Administration.

It takes about five years to learn the skills needed to pull a diesel engine out of a Ford Super Duty truck — and the country isn't training enough people to do it, Farley said.

"We do not have trade schools," he fumed.

Earlier this year, Ford rolled out a $4 million initiative to fund scholarship for auto technicians.

"We are not investing in educating a next generation of people like my grandfather who had nothing, who built a middle class life and a future for his family," Farley said.

His granddad was employee 389 at Ford and worked on the company's flagship Model T.

Rich Garrity, a board member of the National Association of Manufacturers, agreed with Farley's grim assessment.

"I think his comment was spot on," he told The Post.

"We're not just missing bodies, but we're really missing, I'd say, skill sets that can connect to 21st-century manufacturing needs," said Garrity, who's chief business unit officer at the additive manufacturing firm Stratasys.

The mechanic shortage at Ford is part of a broader crisis hitting manufacturing and the skilled trades.

As of August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted more than 400,000 open manufacturing positions — despite 4.3% unemployment.

Last year, the Manufacturing Institute and Deloitte surveyed 200 manufacturing firms and found recruiting and retention topped the list of challenges for more than half of them.