Content area
Full text
Offering a career path con help draw-and keep-drivers
Why extend only a job offer to truck drivers when you can offer them a career path worth following within your organization?
Quality employees are the ones most concerned about their future employment and the least interested in sticking with a dead-end job
Of course, this is not a new idea. Companies of all stripes in all types of industries routinely attract and keep qualified - and quality - employees by offering more than just good pay.
This recruitment/retention strategy is not unknown in trucking - UPS for one is famous for how it moves people up through its organization, benefiting them and the company. Indeed, fostering a career path for drivers is more likely practiced by fleets in segments other than truckload, where seeking and keeping drivers is a drag on growth and a significant operational cost.
Yet offering drivers some sort of defined career path and/or making it clear a fleet is open to advancing them beyond the driver's seat is no silver bullet to cure the driver shortage. Better to think of it as another arrow in the quiver of the savvy fleet manager committed to slaying this management beast.
LONG VIEW
But why would offering a career path to drivers matter and what is actually meant by such an approach?
Duff Swain, president of trucking consultancy Trincon Group, is experienced at aiding client fleets to improve their driver retention rates and recently designed a career-path approach he calls a professional driver career program.
"Drivers leave companies because they perceive a lack of communication and feel like they are not respected or valued," Swain contends. "It is not a pay issue. Equalize the pay and you will see the [turnover] problem still exists. In general, companies do not treat drivers well. At least that is what drivers say and their perception is the reality we have to face."
Swain calls it "unsettling" that by and large trucking has not created a "career conscious" driver. "Historically, drivers make a 'lifestyle' rather than a 'career' choice and so do not identify readily with opportunities for professional growth and self-improvement on the job."
In practice, a driver career path can follow two avenues but these need...