adam277:
So long story short.
Cpc is crap and should be replaced by something effective.
It’s easy to blame a driver but it’s not always his fault because new drivers don’t always know better. Or are so out of their depth they just need a responsible employer to step in and train them I.e start putting more of the blame on the employer.
I agree. The basic principle of the CPC is sound, that there is enough complexity around haulage rules that every employer should every year set aside a day, or two afternoons on two sequential days (after a morning’s work has been done), to get guys together and have a conversation about things.
The idea, I imagine, is that the vast majority of firms would be large enough to employ a full-time staff for the purpose of delivering the training, and that the larger firms would use any slack capacity amongst their staff to provide the smaller firms (who can’t justify a full-time trainer) with an out-of-house training service. The employers would make all of the arrangements and meet all of the costs as part of their normal operations. Drivers just turn up for work every day as usual. The employers have a five-year window over which to carry out the full training, so there’s plenty of slack.
The problem is that the British haulage industry has been allowed to become so fragmented and casualised (if it wasn’t always so) that it hasn’t happened in an organised fashion like this.
Half the trainers in the industry are just chancers and carpetbaggers who have set up on their own and hired a classroom somewhere, or (if they are staff) they’re ex- or part-time drivers who have kissed enough ■■■ to get put on a course upped into a cushy training position (i.e. they’re cronies and bootlicks, not people especially suited to training others). There are exceptions of course.
And then on the drivers’ side, half of them are casuals, part-timers, or job-hoppers, who belong to nobody and nobody wants to take responsibility for providing training to. So they end up having to arrange it themselves, and because it’s money out of their pocket (as well as lost wages) and they’ve got to faff around putting aside time for it, they just end up finding the cheapest course by any old provider, and get the whole training done in one bloc to get it over with for another 5 years (usually at the last minute before they’d have to stop driving).
So what we have is instead of firms using the 7 hours a year to polish the skills and culture of their steady workforce and resolve any issues that have been identified during the previous 12 months (or identify new issues and then take action within the organisation to resolve them), you just have both employers and drivers all resenting the fact that they have to slam money on the table to some two-bit trainer, who may have no knowledge of the driver’s particular job or firm or working practices (and no clout with the managers, if there is a problem with the management), just so they can drive on for another 5 years.
It’s not really the CPC that needs to change. Is every other aspect of how the haulage industry currently works.