Hi everyone,
I’m new to the forum, however been following some of the very interesting topics in the last few months and believe me or not but some people here do make a lot of sense.
I’m about to become an owner driver and at the moment I’m calculating the costs. I’ve found out that I’ll need a CPC operator licence. Does it count against my driver CPC training and is there any way round it? If there is what is the best option from your experience?
Kind regards
Hi, I am pretty new to this forum but it has been quite helpful.
The Operator CPC will not count towards the DCPC. There is no way round it. If you don’t want to do the qualification yourself you can always employ an external transport manager. You may find that it would be easier to use an external TM to start with then do the qualification yourself. Good luck
Operator’s CPC doesn’t count towards driver’s CPC and vice-versa. I had to take my DCPC less than six months after passing my OCPC.
OCPC will cost around £1,250, less if you do home study, employing an external TM will cost £250+ a month for a one-vehicle operation. Do the maths. Additionally the OCPC isn’t just a useless tick-box exercise, you’ll learn a hell of a lot from doing it yourself.
Cheers Guys, I’ll do it myself then as the bloke from the add on Gumtree wanted £300 per month from the day when I submit the O’ licence application which will put me at least £900 behind before I even be able to buy a truck.
If you take your transport manager cpc course and exams, depending on with who you do it with, you WILL get 35 hours which count towards your drivers cpc.
Did mine last november with the RHA. Including 35 which counted towards my drivers cpc.
Cheers Jim, it’s obviously changed since I did mine (late 2011).
Out of interest, does anyone know if TCs still require an external TM to be located in the same geographical area as the operator? It seems to me that most, if not all of a TMs duties can be carried out electronically nowadays.
Harry Monk:
Cheers Jim, it’s obviously changed since I did mine (late 2011).Out of interest, does anyone know if TCs still require an external TM to be located in the same geographical area as the operator? It seems to me that most, if not all of a TMs duties can be carried out electronically nowadays.
Afaik it is not required, for pretty much exactly why you have stated.
I know of a PI case with a operator midlands ish based and scotland based TM.
(edit) As harry said, the OCPC is imo a good and informative course and you will learn a lot and it will ansewr a lot of questions youll have.
£300 a month for a grey operator is cheap imo, specially if your going to get all his compliance stuff set up and then hes going to do it himself once hes qualified.
I did mine last year
If you are doing the classroom course don’t expect to turn up, get killed by PowerPoint and then pass the course. It’s called certificate of competence for a reason. Not certificate of completion.
I went overboard with it because I’m not great with classroom based stuff, I forked out for a home study pack (worth every penny!), and I did a 2 and a half week classroom course with the exams on the last day. I was fairly switched on and I scraped a pass, but you might be different!
In other words prepare like mad. There are three guaranteed subjects on the case studies: drivers hours and records
Scheduling
Licensing
(I think, someone might correct me though)
So brush up on those parts and you’ll stand a good chance of a pass. A good practise is to download all the past case studies and go through them, even though they are all different they do give you an idea of what to expect and what to brush up on.
Go to the OCR website for all those.
And please…for the love of all that’s diesel… do not listen to all the morbid/given up on life/failed when they tried/old divorced people on here who are about to come crawling out of the woodwork very soon to tell you how it’s a waste of time and too much stress. This is one of the easiest games there is, you just have to know how to play it
Good luck pal.
Hinton:
I did mine last yearIf you are doing the classroom course don’t expect to turn up, get killed by PowerPoint and then pass the course. It’s called certificate of competence for a reason. Not certificate of completion.
I went overboard with it because I’m not great with classroom based stuff, I forked out for a home study pack (worth every penny!), and I did a 2 and a half week classroom course with the exams on the last day. I was fairly switched on and I scraped a pass, but you might be different!
In other words prepare like mad. There are three guaranteed subjects on the case studies: drivers hours and records
Scheduling
Licensing
(I think, someone might correct me though)
So brush up on those parts and you’ll stand a good chance of a pass. A good practise is to download all the past case studies and go through them, even though they are all different they do give you an idea of what to expect and what to brush up on.
Go to the OCR website for all those.And please…for the love of all that’s diesel… do not listen to all the morbid/given up on life/failed when they tried/old divorced people on here who are about to come crawling out of the woodwork very soon to tell you how it’s a waste of time and too much stress. This is one of the easiest games there is, you just have to know how to play it
Good luck pal.
Thank you very much. you and Harry would make a great motivators
The absolute very best thing for anybody thinking of taking the OCPC course to do is to look through some past exam papers to see what kind of questions you will be required to answer, there’s a typical example here.
Harry Monk:
Cheers Jim, it’s obviously changed since I did mine (late 2011).Out of interest, does anyone know if TCs still require an external TM to be located in the same geographical area as the operator? It seems to me that most, if not all of a TMs duties can be carried out electronically nowadays.
The TC is not as fussy about this as he used to be but travelling time needs to be taken into consideration with the time involved in managing the licence.
[quote=“Driver Pete”[/quote]
There is some good info on this other thread that I started, if you have not seen it. Most of the providers seem to do the 35 hours DCPC although one guy did say that JAUPT (?) were “clamping down” a bit and taking the certification off some. It does not save you a lot of money but it obviously saves you up to 35 hours, which I am sure is very valuable to you.
Oh and good luck. To be fair it looks a lot more “thorough” than when I did mine under the old system, 2 multiple choice exams and I think the first one only had about 20 questions 