Opinion: Creating Future Truck Drivers

By Jim Van Den Elzen

President

drivings-cool inc

This Opinion piece appears in the Sept. 26 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

Trucking today faces one of the worst driver shortages ever, a situation experts say will only get worse, while at the same time, national unemployment recently topped 15%.

That sounds contradictory, but bridging the gap between unemployed or under-employed workers and truck drivers in training is something trucking has struggled with historically.

And with the government’s new Compliance, Safety, Accountability program putting a premium on drivers with good, clean records, things aren’t getting any easier.

It’s time to look at these allied problems from a different perspective.

Instead of concentrating solely on adults as driver candidates — with the lifetime of baggage they bring along — we need to enlarge the pool not only to include potential drivers in high school vocational tracks but even upper-grade middle-school students.

Students in grades 7 through 12 are at the age when they are beginning to make decisions about their future careers. And if they are taught early that a good driving record with no history of drug or alcohol abuse is crucial to future employment, they are far more likely than adult driver candidates to have unblemished records.

No, I’m not suggesting that 13-year-old middle-school students should be given tractor-trailers to test drive. But there is a way to give them that experience without leaving the school parking lot, starting a truck’s engine or, for that matter, wasting a drop of fuel.

Five years ago, I started a mobile driving-simulator company that travels to fleet facilities throughout the Midwest and uses the simulator to train adult truck drivers. That work with adult drivers started me thinking about offering the same experience to school-age kids, the idea being that by the time they graduate from high school, they would be ready for hands-on training as commercial truck drivers — instead of heading for the unemployment office line to become statistics.

Following up on this idea, earlier this year we formed drivings-cool inc., a nonprofit 501(c)3 corporation designed to solve future employment problems and attract new people into a great career.

Our plan, scheduled for launch this fall, is to visit middle schools and high schools and use the driving simulator to teach interested students about the many and varied careers available in the transportation industry.

The visits will be prompted by invitations from the schools, and when they begin, we will bring to each school a fully self-contained mobile classroom equipped with a state-of-the-art driving simulator. During our visit, without ever leaving the mobile classroom, a student can “drive” almost any type of commercial vehicle, fully experiencing its size, weight and even how it handles in all types of weather and traffic, under a variety of road conditions.

The simulator offers a broad spectrum of realistic commercial driving experiences — not just over-the-road 18-wheelers, but also ambulances, fire trucks, garbage and recycling vehicles, snowplows, dump trucks, buses and more.

The program already has produced some unexpected — but very encouraging — results. For example, I’ve been contacted by a technical college in the Midwest and asked to serve on a committee putting together a Logistics and Driver Development Associates Degree.

Earning such an associates degree would fill the training gap from ages 18 to 21, and offer students who have experienced the simulator a chance to have trucking/logistics-related continuing education. And because the college sponsoring this effort is part of a national technical institution system that shares programs among members, its efforts — and ours — will multiply quickly.

Another post-high school vocational opportunity we’re planning will be a scholarship program dubbed “Commit to Commit.” Once it’s up and running, students who have participated in one of our school visits can, with parental permission, sign up for the program, which will help pay for the industry-related associate degree. And the scholarship will be available only to students with clean driving records.

Courses taken for the associate degree will include all aspects of transportation, covering the entire trucking/logistics process.

Upon receiving the associate degree, students applying for work in the trucking/logistics industry already will know about shipping, warehousing, dispatching and truck repair as well as driving and management. And in addition to understanding their own role in getting products from maker to store shelves, our new drivers will know how important what they do is for our country.

Researching the feasibility of these plans, we have contacted many school districts, and the response has been fantastic. We already have firm requests for more than 200 visits in multiple states.

Unfortunately, we haven’t yet been able to conduct or even commit to any of these visits because our fundraising — which has concentrated on winning foundation grants — has been slow, thanks to the recession and its aftermath.

But we are optimistic and have been setting up a national schedule that will take us to most parts of the country once we’re funded.

After e-mails, letters and phone calls to every trucking association in the United States, our research has convinced us that trucking needs programs like ours with the potential to introduce many thousands of prospective new drivers to trucking as a career.

As the program develops, we are confident that the young men and women we train will be in a few years confident, competent new drivers eager to enter one of our country’s finest industries.

The author’s “day job” is head of Crossroads Safety Management Group, Green Bay, Wis. He has more than 25 years’ experience in trucking and has taught traffic safety for more than 15 years.