Montsoreau:
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Slightly off topic: as my current dcpc is valid till September 2024 and I complete the 35hrs while off furloughed do I get a new card valid till September 2029?
You will get your new card 11 months before your old one expires. in your case October 2023.
What’s the most you can get ahead by if you’ve just had a new card presumably you can only get one full card’s worth ahead?
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Yes can only work towards your next card - but you can start as soon as your current card is valid so in effect could have 10 years entitlement if you did 35hrs straight after your card became valid.
edd1974:
May be of interest.
Had an email from enterprise manchester £49 per module
Advantages from choosing Remote Driver CPC Training:
Train in the comfort of your own home it will never be this cheap again If you are Furloughed you can make the best use of your timeSafest way - enjoy interactive courses without risking your health
If you are thinking your card has a long time to run, just remember those sunny days when you were sat in the classroom wishing you were somewhere else…
JAUPT have granted the remote option until 12th June.
Don’t miss out!
I have just put the phone down to VR. They couldn’t have been more helpful as I explained I needed to check my wife’s shifts as I doubt she will want to stay quiet that long.
However they said they had just had the go ahead from the Government to carry the online training indefinitely.
Courses run from 9am to 4pm and cost £175 all inclusive for a full chute.
Wheel Nut:
they had just had the go ahead from the Government to carry the online training indefinitely.
I had an inclination that might happen, as it’s a nice little earner for them and the online option widens the geographical coverage of customers they can serve.
It also means those who have the opportunity to do them midweek won’t have to do them on Saturdays
Sitting here on furlough I thought that I might as well do something useful with my time and it gave me an opportunity to avoid all the jobs that Mrs GeeBee has got lined up for me.
Did two courses a couple of weeks back, two the next week and final one last week so that’s me finished until 2029 (with any luck I shall have retired before then. although that depends upon this and future governments plans to make us pay for Covid-19). I did all the courses except fuel efficiency as I cannot see the point if you have no real control over an auto Volvo with all manual options disabled.
Things to like? Didn’t have to travel to a venue. The price was really good at £35 per session all in. Thought the trainer did a really good job, especially as there was no ‘live’ audience in the room with him. Got some new information and a relaxed atmosphere. The only sort of negative I came up with is that you can get a delay with Zoom which can make a conversation a bit disjointed.
Pierre said;
Slightly off topic: as my current dcpc is valid till September 2024 and I complete the 35hrs while off furloughed do I get a new card valid till September 2029
In answer to your question, the DVSA site tells me that I will get a renewed card issued on 26/05/2024, the last anniversary of completing 35 hours before my current DQC expires on 09/09/2024. The site also tells me that my dCPC now expires on 09/09/2029, I’m sure that’ll confuse folk if we ever get back to work
Wheel Nut:
they had just had the go ahead from the Government to carry the online training indefinitely.
I had an inclination that might happen, as it’s a nice little earner for them and the online option widens the geographical coverage of customers they can serve.
It also means those who have the opportunity to do them midweek won’t have to do them on Saturdays
I see it as an entirely positive thing for the driver!
No longer do you have to waste a saturday sitting in a classroom, with smelly truck drivers. You can now chill on any day of the week sipping whisky in your own home and keep qualified.
Not to mention the pricing. This is a race to the bottom in terms of price. £35 will be the new normal. And how long until someone comes in and does it for £25■■?
"However they said they had just had the go ahead from the Government to carry the online training indefinitely. "
I’ve heard that from another outfit too, but I’ve looked for the official confirmation and haven’t found it yet. However, two separate companies claiming the same extension exists seem unlikely to both be wrong. Now that it’s been shown online delivery works, it’s hard for JAUPT/DVSA to argue that it can’t run this way in future, better this way for all concerned.
Nice little earner? You’ve got to be joking! Not my view of what “nice little earner” means: Have a look at my calculations on the first page. I imagine most drivers think it’s a doddle delivering DCPC day after day, week after week. This is comparable to non-drivers who think all drivers do is turn a steering wheel here and there. Both views being equally wrong.
Companies who were already established doing physical-location DCPC before lockdown will still have significant overheads.
Yep, makes the market much more competitive for the benefit of drivers that have to fund their own who for really it’s just another tax on a low paid job when many get it laid on by their employers and pay no tax contribution for what’s clearly a benefit in kind.
The training companies definitely just charge as much as they can get away with if there’s no competition locally. I’ve booked with one in Leeds for about a third of the price down here in the south west and I don’t believe they’ve got three times the overheads down here.
Having seen prices for online delivery around here the £55 mark (Driverhire), £35 seems a bargain, and I doubt that it will be the lowest price when everyone else gets their act together and tries to get in on the action. I did detect a sense of burn out on the horizon with the only guy delivering the course at VR, especially if he’s doing 5x 7hrs every week.
They seem to have levelled out at 20 candidates on each day which is a good earner, but how long the gravy train is going to last no one knows
Online courses are the future. Despite what some old-timer CPC trainers think, no driver is interested in wasting a day sat in a classroom while some random (and usually clueless) guy/girl witters on about how to do the stuff we’ve been doing just fine for the past 20+ years. Relaxing at home whilst connected over webcam is the least painful way of having to endure this BS. If that means the old-timers all go out of business because they’re stuck in their ways and refuse to adapt and get with the times then that’s their loss.
trevorking1964:
The only internet connection i have is my phone, can the course be done over a phone?
I dare say I’m not alone in that…
Yes it can be done with a smartphone, seeing the PowerPoint images on the in class tv monitor might be challenging, as they don’t link the PowerPoint videos into Zoom, it’s just a webcam watching the guy in front of the classroom monitor.
Id definitely use it on WiFi as I doubt using it over the mobile data network would be Possible due to the amount of data required over the 7hr period, there maybe some fair share clause in your mobile contact that would stop you being online for that long.
I used my phone for a short period when my laptop lost connection when it decided to auto install updates, and to avoid being offscreen more than the 7min time limit I fired up the phone while I sorted my laptop
I reckon it will all go to being 3.5hour blocks in the evening or weekends as no-one’s going to want to lose a day off to it any more.
Truth is 35 hours if you do it all at once is too much time for a topic that’s too small to start with. Ok, you can just do seven hours every year but even then little to nothing changes in this industry and certainly not enough to provide a constant source of new worthwhile material to people who’ve been on DCPC courses before. Already I’ve seen the same Youtube clips I saw with a different training company 5 years ago with the new one in a differently named course.
Despite allegedly presenting different modules, if you do all five with VR you find the guy repeats a lot of the same stuff over and over, a kind a pet subject, and he does the the same modules each Monday, Tuesday etc.
That’s pretty standard in my experience, after all there is a limited amount of stuff you can talk to drivers about in DCPC, so some of it is bound to pop up in different modules, eg PPE gets done to death all over the place
Some drivers seem to think that the DVSA/JAUPT/etc create the courses and punt them out to the training providers, but it’s worth pointing out that each provider creates their own modules and submits them for approval, and different trainers may have completely different modules but using the same titles, eg SAFED (safe and fuel efficient driving) or Health & Safety.
BTW I’ve seen that DVSA are now “recommending” that all drivers should do Safe Urban Driving as one of their DCPCs.
I’m not 100% certain if FORS have the monopoly on that course title, if they do that might might mean this one is fairly similar across the board, but I don’t suppose anyone will be doing that anytime soon, given the social distancing issues.
