Some will make the point that the history of driver training might be better articulated by someone who has spent their entire life in the training industry rather than me. I cannot claim to understand or recount all the subtle nuances that have shaped driver training into what it is today. That said, I can speak to what I have personally experienced.
I recall, at a very young age, becoming aware of a new company in our area that was dedicated to the training of drivers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the time, this new service was intended to fill a growing need in trucking for new drivers, serving an industry that was expanding exponentially. Consumer demand for goods and services was no longer confined to local markets; it now included products and raw materials from across North America. Rail transportation could not keep pace with this surge in demand, and trucking was well positioned to fill the gap.
In local network operations, the demand for drivers was supplied primarily by rural communities—people who grew up on farms and in agricultural regions. These individuals generally had a solid understanding of mechanical equipment and possessed a work ethic rooted in seeing a job through to completion. This mindset was simply a daily norm of their lives.
I offer this snapshot of the past to set the stage for my own firsthand interaction with driver training. Fast forward a decade and a half. I had driven long-haul professionally for over a million accident-free miles across more than ten years and, through circumstances I won’t detail here, inherited a small trucking company consisting of three trucks. What mattered was that I suddenly found myself responsible for maintaining and occasionally hiring drivers. That was a real eye-opener for someone who had never employed anyone before. One quickly learns how a single hiring mistake can result in a mountain of pain.
Fast forward another decade. The company had grown to several hundred trucks and had developed a strong relationship with a local school offering a PTDI-certified course (Professional Truck Driver Institute). We hired both experienced drivers and new entrants, finishing the new drivers in our own training trucks with seasoned company drivers. The company was also actively involved with several transportation associations. I served as our liaison to the Truckload Carriers Association (TCA), based in Washington, D.C. In that capacity, I was later asked to chair TCA’s affiliate organization, PTDI, a role I held for six years.
At the time, PTDI had approximately 50-member training schools across the U.S. and Canada. Collectively, these schools assisted between 9,000 and 11,000 drivers annually in obtaining their tractor-trailer licenses through accredited training programs. The PTDI curriculum was rigid, thorough, and fully documented, with every element open to audit. It was time-based training, requiring a minimum of 160 hours, with explicit requirements for how much time was spent on every aspect of the job. PTDI employed independent auditors, and failure to adhere strictly to the standard resulted in a school losing its certification.
Here’s the rub.
If you’re a school that wants to place the best-qualified drivers into the industry, you are competing against a government minimum standard for entry-level drivers that amounts to little more than passing a short-written exam and a very limited road test. That road test was often administered by individuals who themselves lacked the qualifications necessary to properly evaluate a driver’s true capabilities behind the wheel of a tractor-trailer.
A licensing system originally designed for a time when demand for drivers was limited was allowed to persist far too long. It has lagged behind industry needs ever since. This reality—combined with the trucking industry’s lack of meaningful oversight and collaboration with the very system that supplies its labor force—has created the driver issues we continue to experience and read about daily.
For schools committed to producing the best drivers possible, the challenge has always been how to compete with schools whose sole mission is to train students to the bare minimum required to pass a road test. The cost differential between these two approaches runs into the many thousands of dollars. As a result, even schools that followed the PTDI curriculum or similarly rigorous programs were often forced to offer a lesser tier of training simply to remain financially viable.
Compounding the problem, I am not aware of any federal trucking association that has consistently championed minimum hours-based training standards before the FMCSA. I have stood on more than one bully pulpit attempting to convince my fellow trucking professionals that by failing to insist on high-quality training, we were guaranteeing our own future as substandard carriers with less-than-optimal returns.
Outrageously high turnover, nuclear verdicts, and a persistent image problem—one many have tried to rebrand from “job of last resort” to something aspirational—are just a few of the issues the industry has faced for decades due to its own short-sightedness. What a shame. Lives disrupted. Potential unrealized. All sacrificed to expediency and an inability to look beyond next month’s balance sheet.
Of course, there are companies that take a different path—those that engage in genuine strategic planning and place human capital at the center of their long-term vision. These companies are perennial winners of safety awards and “best fleets to drive for” recognitions. They often fly under the radar, seeking attention only through industry awards that showcase their people’s talents and efforts. They understand that investing in their workforce, supported by a thoughtful strategy and budget, is what truly differentiates them from the competition.
Regards
Rjh
