Slightly off topic, but it would seem that its not just the transport industry that has refused to invest in training over the years. On the radio I’m hearing we can’t manage without the higher skilled eastern Europeans in all areas of industry. How come they are so skilled? The bosses are reaping what they have sown I’m afraid.
Fruit picking BTW used to be a student thing. Our lot would go to France or Italy or wherever for the summer grape picking/holiday and our strawberries would be picked by similarly minded Frogs or whatever. Thing is…they all went home after the season finished. There was an understanding that the money wasn’t the driving factor.
Anyway, Lorry driving is a semi-skilled job, but usually with unskilled wages.
Jingle Jon:
I agree with Rjan, on this… I’d also like to see the source of your skills definition UKtramp?
An official definition is “workers who produce minimal economic value”. In other words, unskilled is simply a synonym for whatever is poorly paid at a particular moment in time.
And in our society, poorly paid simply reflects the popular availability of the skill and the resulting ability of businesses to bargain hard with masses of unorganised individuals who are selling those skills.
If schools taught children to become doctors or lawyers for free (and from a young age regardless of their intrinsic interest), you’d soon see law and medicine becoming “unskilled” (and poorly paid) occupations.
Schools are really just a factory for producing skills which children are expect to learn, parents expected to support, taxpayers expected to fund, but which bosses aren’t expected to pay for (or have respect for).
Workers themselves have adopted this ruling class ideology, that the real bulk of their skills are trivial and worthless and not worthy of remuneration. You see it on here sometimes, how some people scrabble around looking for reasons why their particular skill and experience ought to command the king’s ransom that nobody else is entitled to.
The ability to do most jobs consists of little more than a few weeks or months of extra training or experience for the majority of people, and a small occasional assistance from people in adjacent roles.
It’s basically how they ran the war economy - a handful of men in reserved occupations were more than capable of quickly training housewives to be just as competent as the men sent off to war, and even with the costs of war, swathes of the workforce missing or being killed, and rampant destruction of capital infrastructure, the standard of living improved appreciably for the working class at home, because suddenly their contribution was valued appropriately, and production was organised to maximise the country’s output, not the output of private profit (which often entails grotesquely inefficient organisation).
Consider the Grenfell tower disaster, in which the state has struggled to relocate a mere handful of people. In wartime, the state was coping with thousands of displaced people every day, because it was seen as important to do so.
Consider something closer to home, road transport efficiency and backloads. If the key to efficiency is making sure every leg of a journey carries a load, why isn’t there a centralised system of booking that planners have complete visibility over, instead of thousands of operators (of various sizes) having only their private bookings to optimise. That would vastly improve the productivity of drivers and planners, and it would enable improvements in wages and conditions, but because it becomes a central point of attack for organised labour (who will squeeze profits), the bosses prefer things as they are.
That’s why they’ve tried to break up the railways, the public utilities, and so on - as bills go up, fares go up, subsidies go up, and wages and pensions go down, while the amount of private profit extracted skyrockets.
For them, anything that improves the bargaining power of workers, and impairs their ability to exploit profits from workers, is an efficiency measure too far.
Personally I think being a competent lorry driver is very much a skill. More so than people realise I think because they’re either used to it or ignorant of the skills or lack imagination to plan for some of the emergencies they could be faced with and are riding on luck. There’s a lot of variables on the road and fast acting variables. Being a good lorry driver needs judgement, spatial awareness, hand eye coordination, prioritisation (How do you handle the inner chimp driving a petrol tanker when you suddenly have a wheel fire?). Dealing with effective rapid decision making and prioritisation under immediate pressure isn’t something anyone is good at. A lot of office based jobs are used to slow time, non jeopardy situations. I reckon my lorry days set me up well for my next job and taught me a lot of skills I still use to this day. So much so I used some of the examples I faced (I had a wheel fire on a container truck) and how I handled them in interviews and they went down well. A bad lorry driver not so much. It becomes more a chance game then 
How the working world views it probably different. They used the word skilled differently and attach it to various professions such as engineer. Induatries fight quite hard to get their workers off the skilled moniker as it saves them a lot in wages 
AndieHyde:
eagerbeaver:
Pat Hasler:
Although we all see ourselves as highly skilled it is not the case. From my knowledge I think British HGV drivers are more skilled than anywhere else in the world but the licence is not recognized in other countries outside the EU. I had to take my test all over again when I moved here, not that it is in any way difficult, in fact any idiot could pass a test here, this is why I say if you passed the test in the UK you are much more skilled, sadly according to US rules you have no skill.Incorrect.
UK licence is valid in New Zealand. Needs swapping over and a theory test completed.
Car licence yes.
Truck licence, no.
Bike licence also no.I have all 3 in the UK and the only thing I can drive here is a car.
When I owned a 360 excavator, I occasionally moved it between job sites with a mates artic and lowloader, but if I had been caught, probably a small fine. Friends O licence, big problem.On a side note, truck driver was removed from the occupational shortage list here a couple of years ago and is not classed as a skilled job. Having been a UK and european driver myself for enough years, I would term the profession as Semi-skilled.
I took me 3 years to complete an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering.
It took 3 days to gain a class 1. Yes you need some skill to do the job but you dont need that much.You come accross them most days, would you consider the forklift driver skilled■■?
Ok mate 
Considering I am registered with Immigration NZ and have looked into it in some depth, it surprises me that you wish to argue. Class 4 & 5 are equivalent to our Class 2 & 1. (Heavy rigid & articulated). As I already said, you need to pass a theory once the licence has been changed over. There are jobs available in the Christchurch area and the occupation is listed as an essential skill on the CSSL (Canterbury Skilled Shortage List). Do a quick Google search on the subject and you will find it’s not difficult 
(Unless I have made that up too)
Ive looked for an explanation for the terms Skilled, Semi Skilled and I’m unable to find where HGV Drivers sit, I found this though ( yes it’s copy and pasted ), it’s an explanation between Vocational and Professional, and it would seem HGV Drivers are Vocational as a our licences are an advancement allowing us to drive a particular class of vehicle, and we gain our Skills through experience or on site training and not through a required or acknowledged training body . ( ADR & DCPC the only exception ) .
Has the government over complicated things by saying Skilled , Semi Skilled and not Vocational or Professional.
A vocation is generally a job that requires a particular set of skills acquired through experience or through training but not necessarily dependent on a college degree. These would include plumbing, electrician, mechanic, etc.
A profession could be one of the above but generally references a doctor, lawyer, nurse or other skilled worker who was required to obtain college/university training.
Here are some points:
Though both vocation, as well as profession, indicates the career or the occupation through which an individual makes a livelihood, vocation is a broader term than profession.
Profession refers to the career that one opts for, getting extensive training and acquiring special skills to become eligible for a job in it.
Profession requires training and qualification whereas vocation is the innate ability in an individual towards a particular occupation.
I’m sure someone will be sat waiting to rip this apart
Grumpy Dad:
Ive looked for an explanation for the terms Skilled, Semi Skilled and I’m unable to find where HGV Drivers sit, I found this though ( yes it’s copy and pasted ), it’s an explanation between Vocational and Professional, and it would seem HGV Drivers are Vocational as a our licences are an advancement allowing us to drive a particular class of vehicle, and we gain our Skills through experience or on site training and not through a required or acknowledged training body . ( ADR & DCPC the only exception ) .
Has the government over complicated things by saying Skilled , Semi Skilled and not Vocational or Professional.A vocation is generally a job that requires a particular set of skills acquired through experience or through training but not necessarily dependent on a college degree. These would include plumbing, electrician, mechanic, etc.
A profession could be one of the above but generally references a doctor, lawyer, nurse or other skilled worker who was required to obtain college/university training.
Here are some points:
Though both vocation, as well as profession, indicates the career or the occupation through which an individual makes a livelihood, vocation is a broader term than profession.
Profession refers to the career that one opts for, getting extensive training and acquiring special skills to become eligible for a job in it.
Profession requires training and qualification whereas vocation is the innate ability in an individual towards a particular occupation.I’m sure someone will be sat waiting to rip this apart
So going by that, would I be right 8n saying that; making the DCPC a pass or fail course, we would go from being vocational to professional?
PS nowt wrong with a bit of copy and paste! 
Captain Caveman 76:
Grumpy Dad:
Ive looked for an explanation for the terms Skilled, Semi Skilled and I’m unable to find where HGV Drivers sit, I found this though ( yes it’s copy and pasted ), it’s an explanation between Vocational and Professional, and it would seem HGV Drivers are Vocational as a our licences are an advancement allowing us to drive a particular class of vehicle, and we gain our Skills through experience or on site training and not through a required or acknowledged training body . ( ADR & DCPC the only exception ) .
Has the government over complicated things by saying Skilled , Semi Skilled and not Vocational or Professional.A vocation is generally a job that requires a particular set of skills acquired through experience or through training but not necessarily dependent on a college degree. These would include plumbing, electrician, mechanic, etc.
A profession could be one of the above but generally references a doctor, lawyer, nurse or other skilled worker who was required to obtain college/university training.
Here are some points:
Though both vocation, as well as profession, indicates the career or the occupation through which an individual makes a livelihood, vocation is a broader term than profession.
Profession refers to the career that one opts for, getting extensive training and acquiring special skills to become eligible for a job in it.
Profession requires training and qualification whereas vocation is the innate ability in an individual towards a particular occupation.I’m sure someone will be sat waiting to rip this apart
So going by that, would I be right 8n saying that; making the DCPC a pass or fail course, we would go from being vocational to professional?
PS nowt wrong with a bit of copy and paste!
Possibly that would make the foundation of a professional career, then ADR an advancement, with specialised transport i.e. Heavy Haulage being sub skills but holding a recognised qualification, similar to the old “time served apprentice” for those of us that can remember
just pick a licence up when on holiday, 10 minute course, 3 ruppees. fully uk compliant
even covers using mobile safely
probably a bit over qualified as they are learning gears
As a +11 car transporter driver I would consider my job to be skilled.
Driving a rigid is just a big van and not skilled.
discoman:
Jingle Jon:
the nodding donkey:
Enter Juddian in 3…2…1…If you reduced the number of posts you make to ‘on subject’ you’d reduce the amount of spam & trolling on this site by unimaginable proportions… I realise your thinking capacity will struggle with this fact.
On the subject. Because hgv drivers are qualified & not just any jo blo can do the job, combined with the critical nature of the job… my guess would be they will be excluded from any proposals - should they become plans.
That said, given the effect Brexit is having on the economy, it could well be a non-issue.
Please, … anyone can do the job … it’s not hard to drive a truck … it’s hardly skilled is it. Critical nature of the job, you are deluded … you drive from A/B keeping the load as safe as possible … you wouldn’t know a critical job if it jumped up and hit u on the arris.
does that include you as well discoman,are you an HGV driver.
It’s nothing got to do with what category you come under its got to do with how good you are doing your job and how good you are at knowing what your doing
If they gave it a skill that would mean you would have people who don’t know how to dress themselves in the morning being paid for something that they don’t have a clue what there doing all they do is wing it every day and you can’t have people like that tarnish the professional driver and thats why we have bad pay and good pay and long may that last
They are the people that make it all great well paid job for the likes of myself and others
Keep it lit boys your doing a great job
If some of the videos we see are anything to go by, I’d have to say there are drivers out there who would struggle to reach low skill level 
Fortunately there are also drivers out there who deserve better than to be regarded as low skilled.
nightline:
It’s nothing got to do with what category you come under its got to do with how good you are doing your job and how good you are at knowing what your doing
If they gave it a skill that would mean you would have people who don’t know how to dress themselves in the morning being paid for something that they don’t have a clue what there doing all they do is wing it every day and you can’t have people like that tarnish the professional driver and thats why we have bad pay and good pay and long may that last
That would be the 650 scruffy get paid for nothing MPs in parliament then