Deadline fast approaching

It marks the deadline for the completion of the first five year cycle of periodic training for lorry drivers, designed to regularly supplement the qualifications necessary to obtain an HGV driving licence and the entitlement to drive large vehicles which comes with it – the Driver Certificate of Professional Competence (DCPC).

Managers could find themselves without drivers, and drivers could find themselves without a job, if the due date passes without the required qualification.

With the number of weeks almost down to a single digit before D-Day, or rather Driver CPC-Day, then clearly this summer marks something of a rush to get as many lorry drivers on the right side of the law as is possible. The combination of last minute trainees, summer holidays, Saturday training courses, week long cramming sessions, and some delicate planning and scheduling as drivers are taken off the road in order to complete the training amounts to, if not to the proverbial ‘logistics nightmare’, certainly a severe challenge for both transport managers and drivers.

Of course, the regulations themselves were actually designed to accommodate corporate and personal choice. Although the DCPC kicked off in 2009, the obligation was, and is, for the drivers to complete the necessary 35 hours of training before 10 September 2014 – there was no requirement to either stagger the process evenly over the five years. As far as the regulations are concerned the training hours could have been delayed until the last week before the deadline, then started and finished in one five day blitz. In fact no doubt some drivers will qualify in that way!

This provision was designed to provide managers and drivers with the maximum flexibility but, with the process coinciding with the first years of the economic slowdown, even the most positive and optimistic of forward looking planning managers could have been forgiven for taking a ‘wait awhile’ approach before getting on with it. At the same time there was also a need to balance the desire to keep the training plan on schedule whilst not necessarily wanting to train all drivers too soon and risk losing them to job-market competition who may have been paying slightly higher wages.

The good news seems to have been that although the need for another tranche of compulsory training was not welcomed by all operators and drivers there does seem to have been a triumph of perceived value over original scepticism by both groups.  Here again was a victory for the flexible regulations which allowed the construction of courses and subject matter specifically designed for the needs of specialist drivers and operators.

Although there have been some stand-out and obvious generic subject matters applicable to most if not all drivers – drivers’ hours; fuel economy; legal compliance; traffic law; customer relations etc, there has been the opportunity to create courses which apply to the perhaps unique, or at least more specialist, operations – ADR and dangerous goods; high security loads; maybe even fine arts, or perhaps carrying cash.

An ongoing management theme of mine has always been that the biggest and most successful companies in any business field actually achieve their elevated status by doing the right thing. As such, even in the darkest days of the recession, there remained a case for maintaining training levels and investing in skills and expertise. In fact there is a powerful argument for suggesting that it is especially in the down days of a recession, that the need for training and maximising skills is at its peak. The big guys, the sector leaders, the most efficient operators, got that way by insisting on the highest skills. So the imposition of a mandatory requirement to provide drivers with 35 hours’ worth of training over a five year period was no big deal. They were probably doing that, and a lot more, already.

For the others, seeking to achieve those improved and profitable operations, increased turnovers and higher levels of customer satisfaction, then the compulsory training requirement constituted a chance to make an investment and receive a payback.

Fuel economy represents such an opportunity with one notable vehicle manufacturer claiming that a drivers’ performance could be improved by up to 25 per cent – and with the price of fuel so high in recent years the payback on that example yielded far in excess of the investment. Similar rewards are available on other subjects – legal compliance and retention of the operator licence; advanced routing and scheduling reducing delivery times and maximising efficiency; advanced driving skills reducing accidents, repair bills and insurance premiums.

Driving an HGV is an expert job carried out by those with either a natural or acquired facility for safely negotiating a potentially dangerous vehicle with a weight of up to 44 tonnes and a length of 16.5 metres, or in some cases, even longer. The driver is responsible for the safe and sound movement of that vehicle, sharing the space with other road users, on motorways at high speed and in urban conditions alongside cyclists, pedestrians and other vulnerable road users. He is not only a driver – he is an engineer, a traffic law expert, a navigator and a can-do personality liable for the safe and sound delivery of his load and the reputation of his company.  He – or she – is smart and responsible and amongst the most highly skilled operatives in UK industry.

I suspect that, in future years, we will look back and laugh at the opposition we first saw regarding the introduction of the compulsory Driver CPC and the formalisation of ongoing and updating training requirements. Such an important job clearly must be accompanied by regular training updates.