How the Right Training Can Help Promote Trucking as a Profession
What's the number one issue I hear from fleets when I ask them about their top concerns? It's not ELDs or hours of service. It's not even the high cost of maintenance, especially emissions, although that's a close second.
No, it's drivers. Even though turnover is (relatively) low at the moment, according to the American Trucking Associations, fleets want to know how to help attract and retain drivers.
One frequent topic of discussion is how to make truck driving a more attractive profession, desirable as a career rather than a job of last resort.
A key factor of this could be ongoing training. It's an important element of advancement in most professions. Yet all too often in our industry, truckers view training as punishment, according to Mark Murrell and Jane Jazrawy, the husband-and-wife owners and operators of CarriersEdge, which provides learning and development for the trucking industry (although you may be more aware of them, as I was, as the folks behind the Truckload Carriers Association's Best Fleets to Drive For program.)
The problem is that traditionally, truck drivers "only got trained if they did something wrong," Murrell told the Society for Human Resource Management for a recent article. "Getting people to see that training is about bettering yourself is a really big change-management issue" for this industry.
"Getting people to see that training is about bettering yourself is a really big change-management issue."
Obviously the nature of the driver's job makes training a bit of a logistical nightmare. It's a headache for fleets to get drivers in for classroom training or in person meetings, so they may do it only when they absolutely have to — which means outside of orientation, it's often only remedial training. Thus the feeling for drivers that the only reason for training is when they've done ...Read the rest of this story
