I’ve been very interested in hgv driving for years, ever since I use to see lorries on the motorways in my parents car when I was a kid. You might eat me for this, but as you might have guessed, I don’t have a hgv licence and I sighned up to find information on this. I’m 22 and I’ve been driving cars for nearly 6 years now, the only thing I can imagine doing is driving, I love it. Anyway. How do I get my foot in the door? Are there many places that will train me up and get me a licence on the job? I cant afford to spend 2k for a licence and have no job at the end. How did you start out? Please help a lad out? I’m not cocky, I respect you older, eperienced people and I will actually listen. Any help on the matter? Info? Thank you. Lenny
Try Wiseman Dairies.
Thank you very much! Cheers mate.
It used to be very common to see larger companies with their own LGV training but, to be honest, I don’t see as many (if any) these days so maybe it is another example of cost cutting.
I’d have thought you need to look at companies that have a range of vehicles so you can start out with van driving and then hopefully, if you make a decent impression & they promote from within, then they may offer you training. I don’t think you’ll find any company willing to take someone on and train them straight up to LGV & I take it your current licence wouldn’t even cover 7.5 tonners?
lenny1990:
… You might eat me for this, …
Hi Lenny, 
I’ve moved your post to where the natives are a bit more newbie-friendly. 
You could try the Stobart young drivers academy?
http://www.stobartgroup.co.uk/careers/the-academy/apprenticeships/
WOW thank you so much everyone! Top website! I found it in truck and driver mag. Felt a bit silly buying it then jumping into a vauxhall corsa though. Your all stars! 
I’m only allowed to drive up to 3.5T on my car licence.
lenny1990:
I’ve been very interested in hgv driving for years, ever since I use to see lorries on the motorways in my parents car when I was a kid. You might eat me for this, but as you might have guessed, I don’t have a hgv licence and I sighned up to find information on this. I’m 22 and I’ve been driving cars for nearly 6 years now, the only thing I can imagine doing is driving, I love it. Anyway. How do I get my foot in the door? Are there many places that will train me up and get me a licence on the job? I cant afford to spend 2k for a licence and have no job at the end. How did you start out? Please help a lad out? I’m not cocky, I respect you older, eperienced people and I will actually listen. Any help on the matter? Info? Thank you. Lenny
Read some of the posts on here for 6 months, you may learn a lot.
Lorry Driving is not all about sitting on your arse on the motorway watching nubile & semi naked ladies drive past although I have made it a personal study for 38 years.
You will work twice the amount of hours as your friends and family for a little over their salary. Your friends will call you stupid and will think you are an ice road trucker, they may even advise you to apply for a company with green lorries as an apprentice, but that will only get you on TV showing the company and its idiots.
There are thousands of lorry drivers looking for a decent job, most of them already have a licence.
Well you did ask. 
If you still want to do do it, have a look for Sam Millars posts, he has recently passed his test and is driving a Scania for his sins
Wheel Nut:
lenny1990:
I’ve been very interested in hgv driving for years, ever since I use to see lorries on the motorways in my parents car when I was a kid. You might eat me for this, but as you might have guessed, I don’t have a hgv licence and I sighned up to find information on this. I’m 22 and I’ve been driving cars for nearly 6 years now, the only thing I can imagine doing is driving, I love it. Anyway. How do I get my foot in the door? Are there many places that will train me up and get me a licence on the job? I cant afford to spend 2k for a licence and have no job at the end. How did you start out? Please help a lad out? I’m not cocky, I respect you older, eperienced people and I will actually listen. Any help on the matter? Info? Thank you. LennyRead some of the posts on here for 6 months, you may learn a lot.
Lorry Driving is not all about sitting on your arse on the motorway watching nubile & semi naked ladies drive past although I have made it a personal study for 38 years.
You will work twice the amount of hours as your friends and family for a little over their salary. Your friends will call you stupid and will think you are an ice road trucker, they may even advise you to apply for a company with green lorries as an apprentice, but that will only get you on TV showing the company and its idiots.
There are thousands of lorry drivers looking for a decent job, most of them already have a licence.
Well you did ask.
If you still want to do do it, have a look for Sam Millars posts, he has recently passed his test and is driving a Scania for his sins
Really? What about the driver shortage? No such thing? Thanks for you input.
Hiya mateI recently passed my class 2 amd it is very hard work finding a job at the moment. Lots of knocking on doors and many phone calls and email for about 4 months eventually paid off though. Where abouts are you based??
hgvhgv:
Hiya mateI recently passed my class 2 amd it is very hard work finding a job at the moment. Lots of knocking on doors and many phone calls and email for about 4 months eventually paid off though. Where abouts are you based??
Hello, I’m just outside cambridge near royston, 4 months is a long time. I have a job at bp to drag me along for now. Thanks
Dunno if its your thing but joining th TA is not such a bad move joining the logistics corps could be a way of gaining your LGV just a thought
Young man/lady I think you need your head examining wanting to get into this trade. Transport as a whole at the moment is a gamble that’s not likely to pay off for a long time to come, so unless you know someone in the trade who can guarantee a job after training I wouldn’t bother if I were you. I’d aim to go to uni & study medicine, engineering or even be a google wiz kid like other youngsters & get a decent well paying job @ the government’s expense.
All the best with whatever you decide, at the end of the day always follow your heart…
Cheers BIG J that’s a good idea, I’ll have to think about that one. And PIMPDADDY I’m a young man haha! Thankyou for your view, its just that driving is the only job/career that I can see myself actualy enjoying. Maybe I should start out with a van as tallyman mentioned to me earlier. But what companies have all the different sized vehicles in order for me to work my way up? Thanks to everyone for all your help, much appreciated.
I passed my class 2 about 2 years ago and it had taken me 18 months to find a decent full time job. I had lots of 1-3 day weeks working for agencies in that time, but never nothing full-time until 18 months later.
Spent weeks and weeks phoning people and sending CV off and knocking on a few doors. It is a very bad time to be out of work and I don’t see it getting any better anytime soon.
Very grateful I got the job I now have, but if I had my time over again I don’t think I could go through all the struggle again for that long.
lenny1990:
Really? What about the driver shortage? No such thing? Thanks for you input.
Be careful believing the advertising hype, that is all
Wheel Nut:
lenny1990:
I’ve been very interested in hgv driving for years, ever since I use to see lorries on the motorways in my parents car when I was a kid. You might eat me for this, but as you might have guessed, I don’t have a hgv licence and I sighned up to find information on this. I’m 22 and I’ve been driving cars for nearly 6 years now, the only thing I can imagine doing is driving, I love it. Anyway. How do I get my foot in the door? Are there many places that will train me up and get me a licence on the job? I cant afford to spend 2k for a licence and have no job at the end. How did you start out? Please help a lad out? I’m not cocky, I respect you older, eperienced people and I will actually listen. Any help on the matter? Info? Thank you. LennyRead some of the posts on here for 6 months, you may learn a lot.
Lorry Driving is not all about sitting on your arse on the motorway watching nubile & semi naked ladies drive past although I have made it a personal study for 38 years.
You will work twice the amount of hours as your friends and family for less than their salary. Your friends will call you stupid and will think you are an ice road trucker, they may even advise you to apply for a company with green lorries as an apprentice, but that will only get you on TV showing the company and its idiots.
There are thousands of lorry drivers looking for a decent job, most of them already have a licence.
Well you did ask.
If you still want to do do it, have a look for Sam Millars posts, he has recently passed his test and is driving a Scania for his sins
Edited in red to read more accurately… 
Save up and try to get the license before you are 23 then get 2 yrs exp driving multidrop 75 T or any ■■■■■ frown at you then you can get a job anywhere. Personally I think it is worth it for me since I got my class 1 work keeps coming if you go and talk to people not email it is not hard to get a job. When you have it people KNOW you can drive
Wheel Nut:
lenny1990:
If you still want to do do it, have a look for Sam Millars posts, he has recently passed his test and is driving a Scania for his sins
Ranty Time
I’m 18, well 19. I just turned 19 today I passed my Class 1 at the beginning of the year. I grew up around lorries with my Father and Uncle being HGV driver’s, the size always amazed me as they used to tower above me, and still do.
Well it’s been an uphill struggle really, I signed on to the Job Centre to receive Job Seeker’s Allowance, which was £106.90 per fortnight. After 13 weeks on the dole someone told me I should ask if they would pay for my training, so I did. They told me that they would put me through my Class 2 and not Class 1, and to even get that far I must have a letter from someone saying that they would employ me.
Thankfully, an agency came to my rescue and even though it was practically a pack of lies, it was good enough for the funding resources team at the dole. Eventually, my training started in December last year and I sailed through the training itself but I feel I was failed wrongly for something outwith my control. I live in Scotland so when the snow falls here, it really falls. I was a roundabout that I had never been on before, and what was left of the BARELY visible white lines was covered in snow, my rear tyres crossed it and I caused someone to take ‘avoiding action’. Sounds serious right? Nah not at all, my instructor tried to speak to the examiner and ask him if there was anything he could do as otherwise I had an absolutely perfect test. But no, it wasn’t to be.
A week later I resat my Class 2 test and passed this time, again with the snow coming down like no tomorrow, and on the same roundabout just from a different direction. Thankfully I was finally through it and one step closer to being a real trucker on the biggies, the artics
Aside from the abuse on here from people telling me I was a lazy b, who sat on my bum all day and scrounged off benefits when I didn’t need to, I got laughed at and told that I’d be laughed out of every transport office I visited because of my age. I had the right attitude though, thankfully most on here knew that I was actually quite mature for my age, and that with the right guidance I should be more than capable of handling a 44t at 18.
Anyway, days past of searching the Job Centre website for vacancies, weeks, months… Eventually after 4 months I landed myself a start driving bin lorries for a local council ON AGENCY. Not going to lie, I did tell a few white lies by saying that I drove my Dad’s lorries but because work was quiet it was time to find something else. Not strictly true although there was some truth in it, my Dad used to give me a shot here and there, when, let’s say he really shouldn’t have.
To tell you the truth, I absolutely hate driving bin lorries. It’s been nothing but a stepping stone to get where I want to be. They’re not high enough for me, they don’t have enough power for me, they’re not a proper lorry to me. - Most of that doesn’t matter to people on here as they secretly try to tell you they’re just in this job cause of the wonga. They say that they don’t care if it’s an artic or a rigid they drive, if the money is the same. Secretly though, they’re lieing, they all want the biggies all of the time.
That aside, you have men jumping in and out of your cab every few minutes, and when they’re not doing that you’re pulling forward a house length every 30 seconds, and I’m sure you can appreciate and understand that that becomes very boring rather quickly.
Thankfully though, I knew that it was just the actual bin lorry side to driving that I wasn’t enjoying, because when I wasn’t actually servicing bins, I loved it. Driving back to the yard, the landfill etc.
I got enough together to go ahead with my Class 1 and to cut a long story short after a week’s course, I passed first time straight away with 3 minors, and was told that he was just bored and had to mark me on something.
So after still going to drive the bin lorries day in day out after passing my Class 1, I come home and I respond to all of the advertisements on the Job Centre website and most if not all rarely ever get back to you. You get the odd HGV driver turned agency bod who understands your predicament, but still unfortunately can’t help you. You basically just get your name out there to everything you can really.
Then one night, not too long ago after work I was sitting at the computer just replying to the ads like I usually do, when I get a phone call from a Frozen company (in our terms this means they transport frozen/chilled) whom I had replied to their ad a few weeks ago. He explained that one of their drivers hadn’t turned up and that they needed be to be at the yard for an hours time. I would be driving a 58 reg Scania, semi-auto but with a clutch. I would need to fuel up on the way down and also fill the trailer diesel tank for the fridge when I got there. He said it would just be a case of backing onto the bay, telling them you were there and which trailer you had (so they could correspond it with the label on the goods inside the warehouse so that they knew which stuff was going to who and what trailer etc), and then back up the road for 0530 or so the next morning.
So like Wheel Nut said above, for my sins I found myself driving this.
So off I set from Glasgow and headed down to the Midlands on my first ever artic shift. Some parts of the M6 I couldn’t even see the back end of my trailer because the fog was genuinely that bad but that’s another story…
Anyway, to cut a long story short, everything went great an the job was completed in time and just how they’d ask.
Now, that’s just my experience, but it’s genuinely been a struggle, a lot of frustration vented etc.
Again, other’s would argue on here that you don’t even need a brain in your head to drive one of these but it is genuinely very mentally tiring, and there’s a lot of stress to go with the job if you let it. You need to think for every other road user as well as yourself, you need to remember that there’s 44t pushing you when you start to break and it doesn’t want to stop in a hurry.
You need to remember that when you want to brake hard you can’t brake THAT hard otherwise your trailer will soon be saying hello to you in your driver window. Despite all the technology, I’ve found brakes on lorries to be, well, reasonable but nothing like we have on cars in terms of ABS, the wheels do lock and release and lock and release but I think that’s more a question of because of the weight.
You will work a 15 hour day and no one will blink an eyelid as to how long you’ve worked, they don’t care, why should they? Pay is generally quite low these days because they can get away with it, I was lucky and in my first driving job I found myself on £9.50 to start with over a 40 hour week, so you can do the sums. Good paying work is out there but it’s hard to get it and you need to go find it because it won’t come to you.
RDCs, or regional distribution centre’s often require you to hand in your keys while you’re on a bay being loaded, all to do with H&S incase the lorry rolls away etc while someone is loading the trailer, it’s all ■■■■■■■ mental really. so the driver’s that end up in these goods in rooms love to tell you their stories of when they were in the SAS or when they had to be escorted from Tesco because they were out of hours,the usual ■■■■■■■■. 
It’s a hugely regulated industry and penalties can be very severe to going over your driving time.
I often get told I’m lying that I hold a Class 1 at 18/19, and i’m my pictures/videos I’m sucking someones nob to get a shot, or I’m driving my Dad’s lorry because he’s given me a shot. But the reality is, the age is down, there is sensible guys out there at my age that can handle these lorries. Everyone told me I might as well just sit on my license until I held it for 2 years or until I was 21 but I was determined to live my dream, why should I sit and wait for it to clock up?
I’ve actually missed a lot of the crap out but that basically sums it up and most on here will agree (hopefully!). Any questions or anything I’ll gladly answer them for you if I can.
lenny - as many posters with direct experience have indicated, there is no LGV driver shortage at present. The only people shouting loudly that there is a driver shortage are certain training brokers who have a vested interest in getting you to sign up and pay over the odds for your training.
This post refers to driving licence categories:
B - cars and goods vehicles up to 3.5t
C - goods vehicles over 3.5t (with no trailer or a trailer of up to 750kg) - rigid lorries
CE - goods vehicles over 3.5t with a trailer over 750kg - artics, “wagon and drag”
D - passenger carrying vehicles (with no trailer or a trailer of up to 750kg) - buses and coaches
It also refers to initial Driver CPC. Unless you hold the relevant ‘family’ of Driver CPC (LGV or PCV), you cannot drive LGVs or PCVs commercially.
In the current climate, it is very unlikely that a company will pay to train an LGV driver because most jobs have a queue of qualified drivers waiting to take them. No company is going to pay out £1000-£3000 to train a driver if they don’t have to.
In these days of plenty of applicants for a job, it is becoming common to require applicants to gain essential driving entitlements at their expense. Paramedics need C1 or C entitlement as most ambulances are built on heavy van chassis of between 3.5t and 7.5t MAM. Most NHS ambulance services require applicants who are newly qualified paramedics to hold C1 or C entitlement - they will not pay for this.
However, there are some jobs where LGV tuition is provided:
- some jobs that include LGV driving amongst other duties (including certain jobs in the fire service, some jobs working with horses - though these are likely to be heavily oversubscribed anyway, but not ambulance jobs where applicants are usually required to gain C1 or C at their expense)
- the occasional driving job where they struggle to attract applicants (possibly driving refuse lorries in some areas)
- some HMÂ Forces jobs that include driving, especially with the Royal Logistics Corps (both regular and TA) - though if you go down this route you are signing up to fight for and possibly die for your country - you cannot refuse a TA deployment just because you don’t fancy it
If you get one of these jobs, expect only to get the minimum possible training for the role - most fire service and bin lorry jobs only need automatic C entitlement, so at most you will be put through a manual C test and may be put through an automatic C test to save money (which limits your C entitlement to automatic LGVs).
Stobart take on a handful of apprentices, though there are not many openings and they will want a pay back for the money they spend putting you through C, CE and the LGV initial Driver CPC. This probably means they will want you to work at national minimum wage for several years - and be young enough that it is not the full national minimum wage either.
You have several things against you. You only have a B licence at present and are under 25, so even if you gain C entitlement, you carry an insurance loading that is unacceptable to many employers.
The ideal thing would be to gain C and CE entitlement at your expense, sit on them for a couple of years (or, even better, until you are 25) and wait. You will be much more employable aged over 25 and having passed your test(s) more than two years ago, even if you’ve never driven an LGV since passing. By this point, those drivers who refuse to take Driver CPCÂ periodic training will have lost their entitlement to drive LGVs commercially - but whilst many are currently threatening not to undertake this training, I suspect many will begrudgingly go through with it at the last minute.
However, I understand that you may not be in a position to lay down several thousand pounds to gain a licence that gets you no further to an LGV driving job.
The reality is that many newly qualified LGVÂ drivers land up starting at the bottom of the tree, which is multi-drop on 3.5t or 7.5t vehicles, or on the bins. You already have the licence for the first of these - if you had some 3.5t multi-drop experience, employers would look at you much more seriously and if you impress an employer that runs a mixed fleet, you may just secure C and/or CE training at that employer’s expense. If you got a 3.5t multi-drop job you can try to save up for your own C training.
In the end, getting the licence(s) is relatively easy - the course lasts around a week and most pass first time or after no more than a couple of retests. The only significant hurdle is raining the money to pay for the course. Getting a job is harder - but you can take a 3.5t multi-drop job with the licence you have. As Sam Millar’s post shows, you have to get out there and make your opportunities.
As Sam explains, it is sometimes possible to get LGV training paid for if you have been unemployed for a while, though my impression is that this is no longer possible in the majority of areas. They will not pay unless they are persuaded you have employment to go to once qualified - they are well aware that there are a lot of unemployed drivers with C entitlement. Still, if you don’t ask, you won’t get.
The other possibility is that your local bus company may put people through category D and the PCV initial Driver CPC at their expense. Many bus companies struggle to attract drivers for stage fare work - driving public bus routes - and that it what you would be doing, often at anti-social hours.
The majority of bus companies only put you in for an automatic category D test, which will leave you unable to drive manual PCVs, mainly some coaches. The exception is if you also have or gain manual category C, which removes any ‘automatic only’ restrictions from D.
If you go down this route, there will be some sort of training bond you have to pay back if you leave the job. Further, whilst passing a D test and having PCV driving experience may make it easier for you to pass a C test in the future, you would still have to go through LGV training, a C test and LGVÂ initial Driver CPCÂ if you wanted to drive goods vehicles over 3.5t. Most LGV employers do not count PCV experience.
Whatever you do, do not be seduced by the training brokers (Easy as HGV, Advantage and the rest). They charge you for nothing more than a slick marketing operation and taking a slice of the money you pay for your training.
You are far better off going direct to a training provider. Most offer assessment drives for free or a modest charge, which will allow you to sample the training on offer and get a personalised quote. These forums maintain a list of member recommended trainers.
You don’t mention your employment status at the moment. In your position, I’d be looking for 3.5t work (likely to be multi-drop) and talking to whichever company has the local domestic refuse contract to see if there’s any chance of them paying for C training. It may also be worth enquiring with companies with small mixed fleets who are advertising for drivers to see if they’re willing to take you on as a van driver and discuss C training in the future if they are happy with you.
The opportunities will not fall into your lap as there is no shortage of LGV drivers. You have to get out there and market yourself as a possible LGV driver. Good luck!