What about a career ladder?

By Timothy D. Brady

Many older truckers are retiring from the road or leaving trucking altogether. According to industry number crunchers, there aren’t enough younger people entering the industry to replace them. Why not? 

This is a question without a simple answer; it’s actually one with three answers of equal importance: the younger drivers don’t want to be gone from home for long periods of time; the industry itself has suffered a real ‘black eye’ in public perception, and there’s no career ladder in place. 

Let’s look at these answers a little more closely. 

Older drivers are leaving because for some of them, the ‘old bones’ just can’t take it anymore, and too, they miss the freedom of the open road that today’s regulations are steadily reducing. 

A lot of younger people also don’t want a lot of government regulations determining their working lives. And many are very involved in the locavore movement. This is a nation-wide effort to eat, work and live within a small area – usually 50-100 miles. The theory behind this movement is that by reducing the number of miles your food has to travel to you, for example, you’re not using as much oil in your daily living. It reduces the oil consumption and the greenhouse gases – and even more so if you can live and work within the same smaller area. By not having so many trucks going ‘out of area,’ the younger truckers can still drive a truck, but by staying local, they can also be home every night with their families. Fewer of the younger truckers are interested in OTR – they want to be around when their kids are growing up and also be involved in their communities. Our younger generations are putting forth efforts to live more of a balanced life. Trucking, as least as we’ve always known it, may not offer the balance between career and home the younger drivers are wanting. 

As the driver shortage has mushroomed again, it seems a few major carriers are really kind of ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ to get drivers. (Some scuttlebutt claims the only requirement other than a piece of paper from a driving school is that the body in the left seat be breathing.) If you noticed during this economic downturn, many construction workers did not take a driving job to tide their families over until the housing industry can regroup. That’s an anomaly, in that for decades, many construction workers also had a CDL in their wallets as a hedge against hard times swinging a hammer or laying tile. Public perception of truck drivers has gradually started spiraling down again. People see one scruffy, dirty driver at a run-down truck stop and assume all truckers now look like that. We’ve got to figure out a way to get some pride back into our profession. 

Which leads me to my last point – there’s no ‘career ladder’ in place. If you follow my other columns as well as this blog, you’ll recall I wrote a column in the November 2011 issue of  Fleet Owner magazine about a progressive trucking advancement plan. In case you missed it, though, here’s a quick reprise: Set up a system so that as each new driver acquires experience on the road, he or she moves up through the ranks of trucking professionals and also accrues better pay and other considerations from the trucking company. http://fleetowner.com/management/creating_incentive_1101/index.html 

So there aren’t any easy answers as to why the truck drivers are retiring, working closer to home, or quitting because other industries do offer ways up and advancement, rather than logging twenty years on the road and still being ‘just a truck driver.’ 

But no problem exists without an answer. Think on it while you’re rolling through Wyoming during good weather – one thing truckers are extremely good at is using blocks of time to create solutions. If anything can rescue our industry from imploding, it’ll be us. 

Here’s to great loads and good roads. 

Timothy Brady © 2012     Contact Brady through  www.timothybrady.com/contactus 
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