Recruiting, Retention Strategies Must Change to Attract New Drivers, ATRI’s Brewster Says

John Sommers/Transport Topics

This story appears in the Feb. 23 print edition of Transport Topics.

Trucking must change its recruiting and retention practices to attract  women and younger Americans to the industry and keep them employed there, to counter the trend of aging driver demographics, a top industry researcher said.

Rebecca Brewster, president of the American Transportation Research Institute, outlined the consequences of the demographics shift in a Feb. 13 webinar. She noted that 56% of drivers are older than 45, according to 2013 Census Bureau statistics, and just 20% were under 35. Twenty years earlier, 40% of drivers were under 35 and just 31% were older than 45.

“As we see a change in the demographic face of the trucking industry, we are going to have to make some changes,” she said. “The obvious question is . . . will there be enough 25- to 34-year-olds? We are going to have to figure out how to address this [demographic] cliff. There is no silver bullet.”

Brewster added, “If we are going to expand the labor pool, we have to figure out what [new drivers] want. What will make this more appealing so that [they] stay with it and not leave?”

Other federal statistics cited in a Transport Topics article (12-8, p. 1) signal changes in the makeup of the drivers entering the industry.

Statistics from the Census Bureau show that 73% of drivers are white males, but they represent just 51% of driving-school graduates, based on Education Department data.

Executives from Celadon Group Inc. and Werner Enterprises Inc. commented on the demographic shift earlier this month at the BB&T Capital Markets transport conference in Florida.

“The fleet is changing fairly rapidly,” Werner President Derek Leathers said, noting that student drivers are 55% of new hires and the percentage of drivers who are women has reached about 12%.

“That percentage [of women] will grow, and we will actively work to grow it,” Leathers said.

He identified one step that Werner is using to hire former military drivers, which has been advanced throughout the industry as the

“Hiring Our Heroes” program.

Werner, which ranks No. 14 on the Transport Topics Top 100 list of U.S. and Canadian for-hire carriers, has equipped more trucks with automatic transmissions, he said, because the former military drivers weren’t trained to use manual transmissions.

Paul Will, CEO of No. 44 Cel-adon, said that when the company opened driving schools, it discovered that the average age of enrollees was around 39, instead of the late 20s.

Brewster cited multiple hurdles to address the growing shortage of drivers outlined by American Trucking Associations, which has estimated the industry needs to find 100,000 new drivers annually. ATRI is the research arm of ATA.

Among the challenges she cited were the difficulty in a transition to a truck-driving lifestyle and the relative shortage of schools that offer truck-driving programs. For example, just 29% of high school vocational programs include truck driving, she said.

An increase in vocational learning would help, Brewster said, as well as efforts to attract high school graduates to trucking before they choose another career.

She noted there were potential avenues to explore, such as pairing younger drivers with experienced colleagues under tight supervision.

One possibility, she said, could be a graduated commercial driver license for younger drivers at a time when the nationwide minimum driving age is 21.

Another issue is a “Catch 22” situation, in which younger drivers, particularly men, have difficulty gaining the first year of driving experience that many fleets require before a younger driver is hired.