As truck driver turnover rates rise, and more veteran drivers retire, more motor carriers are taking training into their own hands through in-house schools and apprenticeship programs. Photo credit: Shutterstock.com.
US trucking companies struggling to recruit drivers increasingly are targeting new drivers, offering training and apprenticeship programs aimed at growing a new generation of truckers. They’re bringing the process in-house to gain greater control over the stability and quality of their workforce and capacity and reduce high driver turnover rates, especially in the truckload sector.
On Dec. 3, Maverick Transportation will become the latest truckload carrier to open a new driving school, Maverick Driving Academy, in North Little Rock, Arkansas. The new driving school will provide students with the necessary training to get a commercial drivers’ license (CDL) and become “a professional truck driver,” the company said in a statement.
“Our new school is a way to add to the driver education that has already been a vital part of our growth and success,” said John Culp, president of Maverick. “We are committed to growing our company ‘The Maverick Way’ and we’re looking forward to having these new drivers walk through our doors.” That’s “The Maverick Way” as opposed to the “external CDL school way.”
There’s growing awareness that taking control of driving training, rather than recruiting experienced drivers from other carriers or relying on outside training programs, can help carriers train drivers and mold them in the way they want them to do the job. The companies hope it would enable them to keep those drivers rather than watching them bounce to another company for a slight raise in pay.
That’s incredibly important not just to carriers struggling to fill truck cabs but shippers dependent on that capacity.
For Werner Enterprises, “Driver tenure is the biggest metric of financial success,” CEO and president Derek Leathers said at a recent transportation conference. “If that’s the case, you have to redeploy your assets to improve tenure within your fleet. We now graduate more drivers than anyone in the United States” through Werner’s own driver schools and apprenticeships.
“If I acquire a trucking company, I’ll get a few hundred drivers at one time,” Leathers said. Building a driver training school, however, allows Werner to employ its own “success metrics” and “train drivers for the actual jobs they were going to perform.” The result, he said, “was a 20-year low in driver turnover at a time when the driver market has never been tighter.”
Truckload carriers are trying to build a more stable workforce and reduce turnover rates that cost them untold millions of dollars a year. In the second quarter, the driver turnover rate at large truckload carriers (those with more than $30 million in annual revenue) was 98 percent, the highest it had been since the fourth quarter of 2015, the American Trucking Associations (ATA) said.
What does that rate represent or mean? It doesn’t mean that 98 out of 100 employees leave. The turnover rate is a measure of how many drivers a motor carrier must replace on an annual basis to maintain a constant number of drivers. A 100 percent turnover rate means a trucking company is replacing the equivalent of its entire driver pool each year, but not each driver. 
For example, a carrier with 100 employees and a 100 percent turnover rate may be “reseating” 20 trucks with new drivers five times within a year. The cost per driver ranges between $5,000 and $10,000, depending on the carrier. At larger carriers, with hundreds of drivers, that cost can quickly add up to millions of dollars spent just maintaining a constant level of capacity.
Less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers historically have had much lower, even single-digit, turnover rates, but the ATA average turnover rate for the LTL sector jumped 4 percentage points to 14 percent in the second quarter. “Seeing this kind of jump in the LTL market tells me that this sector is struggling with drivers more than in the recent past,” ATA chief economist Bob Costello said.
Chuck Hammel, CEO and founder of Pitt Ohio Group, wouldn’t disagree. “The industry hasn’t really gotten its arms around how we’re going to get new drivers,” Hammel said during a recent interview. “I will argue that we’ve never had a driver shortage as much as we’ve had a pay shortage.” That’s beginning to change as trucking companies raise pay, but just throwing money at the problem won’t solve it.
Hammel sees a need to bring an entire new generation of recruits into trucking, and his company — which has LTL, truckload, and package operations — is doing that through an apprenticeship program. “We’re going into the high schools and getting seniors that choose not to go to college, young men and women, and putting them in a three-year program,” he said.
“Year one, you make $17 an hour and you get full healthcare benefits, full vacation, and sick days, just like everybody else. Year two, you get $18 an hour, year three, $19 an hour, and after that you’re ready for your CDL,” said Hammel. “As a parent, you always want your kid to go to college. But we have to stop putting a big ‘L’ across their forehead if they don’t go to college.”
Just as in the truckload sector, many veteran truck drivers at LTL carriers are approaching retirement, Hammel said, and there aren’t enough younger people entering the business to replace them. In the 1980s, Pittsburgh-based Pitt Ohio recruited many truck drivers as steel mills closed. “They were happy to get a full-time job with benefits,” Hammel said.
But the steel mills have been closed a long time, he said. “So where are we getting drivers from now? We’re not getting them from H.H. Gregg or retailers like that when they close. So you have to cultivate your own. The building trades are having the same problem. And they’re starting to do the same thing. Somebody has to start paying attention to our young people.”
Contact William B. Cassidy at bill.cassidy@ihsmarkit.com and follow him on Twitter: @willbcassidy.
