This week Sean Kilcarr at Fleet Owner Magazine looked into the rising problem of truck technician shortages. It usually comes down to money for quality training, which seems to mirror the same problems the trucking industry faces when hiring new drivers; some CDL Schools are simply content to train students with the absolute bare minimum of knowledge before giving them tests and then stamping their shiny new CDLs on the way out the door.
The current state of CDL Training is woefully inadequate, and has been covered extensively. Now the same troubles are beginning to show up in the truck technician field.
What’s the root problem – too much reliance on For-Profit Schools, the so-called “Career Colleges” that sprout up in every strip mall? It’s possible. What Kilcarr found out also says that many companies have been hedging on investing in quality training because the cost is too high and the danger of that technician leaving his post in the company is always a factor.
Read more of Sean Kilcarr’s article —————-
SAN ANTONIO, TX – Mentoring, top-dollar investments in training, providing a long-term career path; those are but some examples of the “new thinking” being deployed in the trucking industry to help combat the still-acute shortage of technicians.
And such “new thinking” will be critical for helping bolster truck sales for the future as well, according to Mike Besson, VP-service operations for Rush Truck Centers (RTC); a division of Rush Enterprises.
“People buy trucks with the expectation of service to support them,” he told Fleet Owner here during the 2012 Rush Technician Skills Rodeo; an annual event Rush has funded with the help of suppliers such as Peterbilt, Eaton, Cummins, Hino, Isuzu, Navistar, Allison Transmission, and many others.
“The biggest piece in my mind to recruiting and more importantly retaining technicians today is training, because investing in training emphasizes to the technician how valuable a resource they are to our company,” Besson explained. “We spend $3.5 million to $4 million a year on training not just because it makes them [the technicians] better; it also improves the level service they can offer our customers.”
Yet it’s not just finding and keeping technicians that’s posing a perplexing problem for the industry, he said; it’s also about>>>