Commentary: Can Autonomous Trucks Help You Attract Fresh Talent?
Deborah Lockridge
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Deborah Lockridge
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Those of us in the trucking press tend to shake our heads and roll our eyes at the breathless coverage in the mainstream and tech media about “driverless trucks” and “Uber for trucking.” We know trucking is a lot more complicated than piloting a truck down the road and getting one-off loads.
But there’s one good thing about all this coverage: It’s helping to make trucking look “cool” to young people who may never have thought about transportation and logistics as a career.
Brett Mowers with River Valley Foods in New York was one of HDT’s Emerging Leaders last year — a new award we started to highlight some of trucking’s rising stars. He agrees that technology can help make transportation and logistics seem a little more glamorous. “The thought of some driverless trucks are a little scary, but it’s also a little exciting to someone like me.”
And we need to capitalize on that, because from the truck cab to the shop to the corner office, our industry is graying. We need to bring in fresh talent and new ideas to ensure the continued success of our companies. But in addition to piquing their interest in our industry, we need programs to enhance their development, their knowledge of trucking and of the company they’re working for.
A Gallup poll of 1,700 U.S. workers asked Baby Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Xers to rate which factors were “extremely important” in their jobs. For Millennials, the opportunity to learn and grow was rated highly far more than for Baby Boomers or for their younger GenX counterparts. Another area that scored high for all three groups was the quality of the manager or management above them. (Interestingly, factors such as “fun place to work” and “informal work environment” earned much lower scores from all …Read the rest of this story
