I got started in HGV driving when I was 27, and ever since then I’ve been one of the, if not the youngest driver wherever I’ve worked.
Most people who go through HGV training are in their 30s or 40s, looking to change careers or after being made redundant.
I just can’t understand why there are so few younger people entering the profession, especially when there are so few other jobs where you can realistically expect to earn £30k a year at that age.
With all of the ways that the job is becoming easier, such as satnav, power steering, cruise control, automatic gearboxes etc, surely it should be a more attractive prospect?
So why are there so few younger drivers?
Is it because of listening to older, miserable sods complaining about how bad the job is?
Is it the hours?
Or the training costs?
too many hours, crap hourly rates and having to do nights out to earn a decent packet (for 99% people) kills it for most. When I left school 5 of us went into driving, all of us are doing something completely different now.
I’m 26 so still relatively young , was driving vans around Europe at 17 and class 2 tramping at 18 for 3 years before getting my class 1. I think I did 4 class 1 agency runs before i’d just had enough and started in a factory instead and i’m still at the same place now. At 17 I was earning £8.50 p/h driving the vans, class 1 rates aren’t much higher than that now almost 9 years on!
I do the odd agency shift now and again to try and keep my hand in.
One of the main reasons youngsters are not coming into the game anymore is they don’t go with their dads in the lorry anymore.
In my opinion this is exactly why the whole of the haulage industry has gone wrong no wonder drivers are not coming into the game today.
And before anyone mentions the insurance malarkey it is just a get out.
I have seen our company’s insurance policy and it states ‘passengers can be carried with the owners permission’
I always looked forward to the summer holidays and going with my dad in his lorry all over the country by the time i was 15 i knew my way around the length and breadth of the county.
If drivers could take their kids with them today it would breed a new generation of eager youth who in gaining geographical and practical knowledge at such a young age would more than likely be eager to become lorry drivers later in life.
Harry Monk:
Because why would anyone spend £3,500+ to earn a pound or two over the minimum wage?
Quite a few people spend 27k doing so, though they may well never pay it back!
There are a lot of jobs that only pay minimum wage and TBH, if driving is the route you want to go down and you aren’t a natural salesman, you are clever/interested enough to get a qualification that will lead to a good job, then your options are limited.
The average wage now is 28k. Some of which will be for 40 hour jobs, some of which will include overtime. Generally we think people in other occupations are better paid than us or the job is easier, but it isn’t always.
And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, there are some decent jobs out there (yes there is a lot of rubbish jobs out there, but then we’ve all met drivers that you wonder how they got out of the yard). I employed a 23 year old, that crewed up with his 24 year old mate, went round Europe and up to the arctic circle, was earning mid 40s when he started 8 years ago. Really good lad, but could only just about read and write. He got his license in the army. So he got lucky and yes, there are only a few places that offer the deal we did, but if you don’t try, then you won’t know.
Maybe the youth of today prefer not to sleep in a tin box in the heat of the summer and freeze in the winter with a broken night heater .
Another reason , they see brain dead overworked , overweight drivers wearing a stupid hiviz while driving .
With two weeks of meals on his wife beater string vest .
The lack of decent facilities while overnighting , with food you wouldn’t feed your dog .
Then the anti lorry brigade who hate lorries , and are clueless on how what they buy is moved around.
No prospects of doing European work unless you’re a flip flop and reduced the rate to nothing and free just to get a reload 700 miles away .
They have read all of Carryfasts posts and think is that what happens to you driving a van for the council after the war then become an expert on variables of wagon and drag or A frame weight distribution formulas .
Lets chuck in centre of gravity variables .
toby1234abc:
Maybe the youth of today prefer not to sleep in a tin box in the heat of the summer and freeze in the winter with a broken night heater .
Another reason , they see brain dead overworked , overweight drivers wearing a stupid hiviz while driving .
With two weeks of meals on his wife beater string vest .
The lack of decent facilities while overnighting , with food you wouldn’t feed your dog .
Then the anti lorry brigade who hate lorries , and are clueless on how what they buy is moved around.
No prospects of doing European work unless you’re a flip flop and reduced the rate to nothing and free just to get a reload 700 miles away . They have read all of Carryfasts posts and think is that what happens to you driving a van for the council after the war then become an expert on variables of wagon and drag or A frame weight distribution formulas . Lets chuck in centre of gravity variables .
eagerbeaver:
So based on the already accurate replies to this thread, we can simply say that it’s crap.
And why would young people want a crap job?
Yer just bitter cos I finished before you could add my uniform to your collection.
In all seriousness, if everyone hates it so much, go do something else. Human beings aren’t trees.
I really wanted one of your shirts mate. It’s the only thing to come out of Runcorn that I’ve ever fancied
On a fractionally more serious note though, young people don’t want to sleep in a truck. They don’t want to drive them either. The money is really poor given the ramifications of errors (which a lot of the time are not even your fault). Plenty truck drivers die each year doing their job, the hours are long and the sheer amount of clueless/dangerous/selfish drivers seem to be at record levels.
The bottom line is that MOST of us on here would batter their kids if they ended up doing this job and that sort of clinches the deal.
If wagon steering was so great with cracking pay, amazing facilities and treated like Gods, we would want our kids to enjoy the same. It’s not. We are treated with utter contempt by other road users, we share prison style plastic/metal benches with filthy toilets, the hours are stupidly long, the pay is rubbish, the fines and other crap are a daily risk, and to top it all…it will probably ruin your health.
I do it because I dicked around at school. And this is my sentence
albion:
And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, there are some decent jobs out there (yes there is a lot of rubbish jobs out there, but then we’ve all met drivers that you wonder how they got out of the yard). I employed a 23 year old, that crewed up with his 24 year old mate, went round Europe and up to the arctic circle, was earning mid 40s when he started 8 years ago. Really good lad, but could only just about read and write. He got his license in the army. So he got lucky and yes, there are only a few places that offer the deal we did, but if you don’t try, then you won’t know.
I took my HGV1 lessons and test precisely because I knew that I would be driving all over Europe as soon as I’d got my licence. These days continental jobs are as rare as hen’s teeth and I really don’t think that I would make the effort if I was 26 again to do the type of work on offer nowadays. With a very few exceptions, such as your operation, there just is no adventure in the job any more.
CookieMonster:
I got started in HGV driving when I was 27, and ever since then I’ve been one of the, if not the youngest driver wherever I’ve worked.
Most people who go through HGV training are in their 30s or 40s, looking to change careers or after being made redundant.
I just can’t understand why there are so few younger people entering the profession, especially when there are so few other jobs where you can realistically expect to earn £30k a year at that age.
With all of the ways that the job is becoming easier, such as satnav, power steering, cruise control, automatic gearboxes etc, surely it should be a more attractive prospect?
So why are there so few younger drivers?
Is it because of listening to older, miserable sods complaining about how bad the job is?
Is it the hours?
Or the training costs?
Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk
Well from a quote;… ‘‘Older miserable sod’s’’ point of view…
(Or on the other hand, maybe a cynical realist maybe eh?.., which came with experience. )
Yeh a young lad can earn 30k a year, but how many weekly hours does he have to work to achieve it?
Their mates are doing 40 hours, while they are exceeding 60 or 70…so in effect a week and a half’s hours for a week’s wage, so why tf would they want to join the industry ffs??
For instance my eldest lad ( who wanted to be a trucker until I managed to talk him out of it ) earns 30k+ for 40 hours a week as a service manager at a Ford main dealer, …would he be on that now if he’d gone as a driver instead at 21? …would he ■■■■ as like.
Sure the job is easier as you say, with fewer ‘‘real skills’’ needed (aka dumbing down) but with that brings complete ■■■■ whits with Class 1s (or ehatever tf they call em now ) who would never have made the grade 20 yrs ago…just look around on the roads now.
Don’t get me started on training costs…and all to earn just above min wage, yep wonderful investment proposition, Dragon’s Den would snap yer hand off.
Harry Monk:
there just is no adventure in the job any more.
^^^^ in a nutshell. Reckon I was born a hundred years too late.
absolutely spot on. i’m so glad I had some. and before you young mechanised young pups post about “the old day’s” trust me you will never know how good it was, and crap at tme’s but the world is a different place now…
Harry Monk:
there just is no adventure in the job any more.
^^^^ in a nutshell. Reckon I was born a hundred years too late.
absolutely spot on. i’m so glad I had some. and before you young mechanised young pups post about “the old day’s” trust me you will never know how good it was, and crap at tme’s but the world is a different place now…
albion:
And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, there are some decent jobs out there (yes there is a lot of rubbish jobs out there, but then we’ve all met drivers that you wonder how they got out of the yard). I employed a 23 year old, that crewed up with his 24 year old mate, went round Europe and up to the arctic circle, was earning mid 40s when he started 8 years ago. Really good lad, but could only just about read and write. He got his license in the army. So he got lucky and yes, there are only a few places that offer the deal we did, but if you don’t try, then you won’t know.
I took my HGV1 lessons and test precisely because I knew that I would be driving all over Europe as soon as I’d got my licence. These days continental jobs are as rare as hen’s teeth and I really don’t think that I would make the effort if I was 26 again to do the type of work on offer nowadays. With a very few exceptions, such as your operation, there just is no adventure in the job any more.
I do agree with the adventure bit Harry. I used to think (somewhat romantically ), that it was not totally unlike the ships of old in so far as you set off and apart from the occasional phone call, you were pretty free and you had to use your brains at customs posts, you had to learn to deal with a huge amount of situations, probably had to have mechanical knowledge and you had to be trust worthy.
People say how hard the old days were and they were, fixing a truck in the snow instead of waiting for a tech with a laptop, heaters?, the first truck I remember you could see the road through the floor. I think the almost total removal of needing to rely and trust your drivers to make their own decisions because everything is now micro managed to the nth degree and a driver makes or has no chance of exerting any control over his job, is a prime reason for people’s disinterest in the job.
But it’s going like that with all jobs. My finance manager left his banking job because he could no longer make decisions, he was supposed to feed info into a computer and wait for the computer to say no.
On the other hand, how many companies have come to be wary of younger drivers in general, not lack of skills as such cos none of us had a bloody clue when we started out, but too often reliability commitment and care are not featuring highly.
And before i get accused of all sorts, yes there’s some thoroughly decent young drivers out there who are putting many older ones to shame, those good young drivers have decent futures in the industry.
It is kinda funny though watching the industry shoot itself in the foot time after time, and oblivous to what they are doing.
They’ve dumbed the job down and taken away the interest and sense of achievement or even dare i say pride that could be gained from the job, and lo and behold they’ve attracted exactly what anyone with an ounce of sense could have told them they would, so after more dumbing down to try to prevent the daily catastrophes of the idiot elements they’re at the point now of finally getting rid of the remaining good staff they have, by completely failing to differentiate between the good and bad staff so the final straw is the fitting of in cab cameras…well done transport industry, closed circuit full time spying on each individual driver, and you wonder why no bugger wants to do it any more, bravo.
Why do i pick out in cab cameras? because all they will do is provide various views of utterly gormless expressions as the latest disaster unfolds, it won’t stop them doing it, all it will do is to confirm to the suits what any bugger with an ounce of common could have told them would happen…the answer being don’t install in-cab cameras, instead don’t install monkeys on your driver’s seats and you won’t get monkey results
Why would a young potential driver want to sign up to being watched for every second of his/her working life from the very second they’ve passed their tests?
These cameras are not general surveillance, which we have lots of in this once free country, this is the driver’s very own personal big brother…for what? £10 an hour basic, do give over
CookieMonster:
I got started in HGV driving when I was 27, and ever since then I’ve been one of the, if not the youngest driver wherever I’ve worked.
Most people who go through HGV training are in their 30s or 40s, looking to change careers or after being made redundant.
I just can’t understand why there are so few younger people entering the profession, especially when there are so few other jobs where you can realistically expect to earn £30k a year at that age.
With all of the ways that the job is becoming easier, such as satnav, power steering, cruise control, automatic gearboxes etc, surely it should be a more attractive prospect?
So why are there so few younger drivers?
Is it because of listening to older, miserable sods complaining about how bad the job is?
Is it the hours?
Or the training costs?
Sent from my SM-G973F using Tapatalk
Cos they can earn £55k plus with a 35 hour week driving trains. And they dont have to pay for the training.
Plus ASLEF will NEVER agree to in cab cctv pointing at the DRIVER.
, was driving vans around Europe at 17 and class 2 tramping at 18 for 3 years before getting my class 1. I think I did 4 class 1 agency runs before i’d just had enough and started in a factory instead and i’m still at the same place now. At 17 I was earning £8.50 p/h driving the vans, class 1 rates aren’t much higher than that now almost 9 years on!
)
) earns 30k+ for 40 hours a week as a service manager at a Ford main dealer, …would he be on that now if he’d gone as a driver instead at 21? …would he ■■■■ as like. 
), that it was not totally unlike the ships of old in so far as you set off and apart from the occasional phone call, you were pretty free and you had to use your brains at customs posts, you had to learn to deal with a huge amount of situations, probably had to have mechanical knowledge and you had to be trust worthy.