When is a Crisis Not a Crisis?

One of the things the trucking industry needs to ask itself, especially when talking about the drastic skills shortage across the industry is when is a crisis not a crisis? 

We have been talking about it for years and still the position gets worse, for just about every road transport operator, warehouse operator, mechanical workshop the list goes on. As an industry, we cannot continue to keep our heads in the sand, and there are no easy or palatable solutions to this crisis, and it is a crisis.

People are just not interested in working in the trucking industry. Kids coming out of school do not say to their careers advisor, ‘I fancy going into the trucking industry’, unless of course they already have some connection with the industry and are embedded in the culture already. 

As someone who has been working with trucks and trucking since 1977, I myself also have a problem and that is that I can’t understand what it is they don’t like about the trucking industry. It is an industry which has given me a career and made me good money over the years, although it never seemed to be enough at the time. 

It is also an industry which has given me the chance to see most of Australia and quite a bit of Western Europe, an opportunity that many school leavers this year may not have in their working life. I’ve also met some fantastic people, some real characters, people who it’s a pleasure to know and from whom I have learned a lot, not only about the trucking industry but also about life. 

Most of us who have worked in the industry would not openly profess that we truly love the trucking industry, but we still keep coming back for more. So there is an attraction to the trucking industry. It’s just that we struggle to identify it even within ourselves. 

If this is the case, then how can we expect young people leaving school and looking for work to identify the road transport industry as something which would be an attractive option for them for the future? 

I am not coming up with a solution in this article. I am simply asking that people smarter than me who are involved with the trucking industry should get together and work on some sort of initiative or a campaign which would attract funding and would actually get bums on seats in trucks and on forklifts.

The time for action is now, the whole economy is suffering from a shortage of skilled labour and new entrants into their industries as well. However, for the trucking industry, we are already on the back foot. Even when there were plenty of young keen students looking for new challenges after they left school, trucking was not anywhere near the top of their preference list. 

We need to do something now to drive it back up that list to a point where our industry can survive and thrive with an influx of smart young minds changing the paradigm for the trucking industry and making it more attractive into the future.