Those so-called schools

Here’s a self-evident truth: driving schools are a mixed bag of good and bad. Some schools are honest, some are otherwise. Some are effective and rigorous while others are simply colossal wastes of time.

The trouble is, half the folks with a commercial licence have come out of truck-driving schools, so we can’t afford to have that unpredictability. Not unless we have an awful lot of in-house training capacity. And we don’t.

So here’s another self-evident truth: We need a national accreditation system so we can be confident that when a graduate of ABC Driving Academy knocks on our door, he or she is up to the job.

It’s one thing when a rookie approaches a buttoned-down fleet with well-established and sensible intake routines. That carrier will ensure the driver can do the job, regardless of the quality of his schooling. It’s quite another when the newcomer approaches a carrier that wants nothing more than a body at the wheel. Like the one encountered recently by a young Atlantic newbie, Kelly Souva.

“Trucking is 10 per cent ability and 90 per cent attitude, or at least that’s what I was told by the dispatcher at my first tractor-trailer job,” she says. “Who was I to argue? I needed some experience and they were offering to give it to me.”

Her first run? Nova Scotia to the Bronx, solo, where she had bad guys hanging off her mirror arms until a few veteran drivers rescued her. She quit within days of that experience, to her credit, and has since signed on with one of the country’s best fleets.

Any carrier that would treat a rookie that way clearly isn’t concerned with who’s pulling its freight. Neither was it interested in furthering Souva’s training. Such a “school of hard knocks” approach might have worked decades ago and it might still be effective in some businesses, but for today’s truck drivers? It doesn’t even come close.

Good thing Souva was already a cut above. Imagine what happens when a lousy school graduates a lousy student who then passes an altogether-too-easy licence examination and shows up looking for a job at a place like Souva’s first employer. The application form is stamped “Hired’ and the first step on the road to chaos is taken.

The insurance industry appears to be working to prevent that lousy driver from being hired, and while that’s admirable in theory, I hear it’s producing a different sort of chaos in some quarters. The end result is that the qualified driver shortage continues and too many trucks are still sitting by the fence.

A report recently released by the Canadian Trucking Human Resources Council (CTHRC) confirms this. It surveyed the country’s 206 truck-driving schools and the picture it paints is unnerving.

Only a few schools pre-screen applicants and just one province–New Brunswick–demands it, though only for students coming off employment insurance. Some provinces, including Alberta and Ontario, have no standards for instructors. The number of hours of training ranges from 41 to 288. Almost half of the schools use empty trailers for on-the-road instruction. Many don’t have brake boards, only some use computers, most create their own curricula–the list of problems is lengthy.

Worst of all, there are no real standards by which to measure a school’s performance.
We need national standards and a national curriculum which the provinces could then adapt to suit local realities. With limited success, the CTHRC created a standard curriculum a few years ago, and some schools have adopted it, but the problem is, it makes for a relatively long and expensive course. Since half of all truck-school students fund themselves, a long and expensive training regime wouldn’t be terribly popular. Which means that either government or, preferably, the industry itself help pay. The cost of a driving course, by the way, is about $4,000 for 157 total hours of training, on average.

Meanwhile, what’s a carrier to do? For the vast majority of fleets, the only possible option is to keep tabs on the schools in their area and avoid graduates from those that don’t make the grade.

If the regulators won’t help us raise the training bar, we’ll have to do it ourselves. And that means boycotting the bad guys. Otherwise, the insurers will boycott us first.