Here at Armstrongs, we assume clients come to get their heavy vehicle licence because they want to get a driving job of some description. Fair assumption to make, right?

Why then do the vast majority of people who want to get their heavy vehicle licence insist on doing as little training as possible?

If there is one thing that every wannabe truckie needs to be aware of, it is this – after you apply for a driving job and make it through the first cut of the recruiting process, YOU WILL BE REQUIRED TO UNDERGO A DRIVER EVALUATION OF SOME SORT.

Now, if you will please, riddle us this…

If a person goes to ‘Quick-As-We-Can Truck Licensing’ and pays next to nothing (or literally nothing) for their course and somehow (honestly, don’t ask us how) walks away with a HR or HC licence for example after doing about 4-6 hours “training” BUT you go to Armstrongs to get your HR or HC licence and spend days learning to drive a heavy vehicle, come DRIVER EVALUATION TIME, who do you think is going to be the most prepared and show more natural driving ability, competence, and safe driving behaviours? The guy who went to Quick-As-We-Can Truck Licensing or you?  YOU of course!

Trust us when we say that Ops Managers, Senior Drivers, and In-House Driver Trainers are sick to death or seeing guys who have applied for driving jobs who can’t even move the vehicle from one side of the yard to the other without destroying the gearbox and bunny-hopping the truck. Does anyone think that an employer is going to just hand you the keys to an asset worth hundreds or thousands of dollars after watching you try to destroy one of his trucks?  Of course not!

Prospective truckies need to realise that the more time you spend behind the wheel during license training the better your employment prospects will be. More training, more chance to secure a job.  Less training, less chance.  It’s really not that complicated.

So when you are doing your research and considering where you should go to get your heavy vehicle licence (please don’t tell us you are basing your decision purely on who is closest to home!), focus on what licensing product is going to get the most amount of knowledge and skill for your money. As you are considering the all the different course options think about you, in the yard of some transport company, Ops Manager in front of you, and he has just given you the keys to the truck and he now wants you to prove that you can do what your newly minted heavy vehicle licence says you can do.  If that sounds like a nightmare you don’t want to have then, well, we suppose Armstrongs will be hearing from you soon.

Here’s a couple of things to remember about how the current heavy vehicle license training and assessment works:

Current Market Offerings Aren’t Designed To Produce ‘Drivers’:

From what is publicly advertised (plus what we hear from our clients and contacts) it appears possible to be issued with a Certificate of Competency for a Heavy Rigid Non-Synchro with as little as half a day’s training under your belt. So that’s four hours if anyone was wondering.  The likelihood of any provider being able to turn a novice into a safe and competent HR Non-Synchro “driver” in just four hours is impossible.

The License Threshold is Too Low To Produce ‘Drivers’:

Armstrongs CEO Craig Nicholson spent many a year obtaining his Masters in Assessment & Evaluation, Bachelors Degree in Education & Training, and Associate Diploma in Training & Development, all with a focus on (you guessed it) heavy vehicle driver training and assessment! Craig points out that “There are one hundred and forty six individual skills that a competent heavy vehicle driver should be able to demonstrate but only 38% of those are assessed in full or part when clients undergo their heavy vehicle training and assessment.”  No wonder industry complains new drivers can’t drive!  Furthermore Craig explains “those skills that are trained and assessed are mainly low order tasks.”  You get what you…train for I guess.

Most People Out There Don’t Want ‘Driver’ Training:

The overwhelming majority of the client’s we service don’t want driver training in any case. How do we know this?  Well, the two most common questions asked by clients when inquiring about getting their heavy vehicle licence “How much?” and “How long?” The answer to the first question is easy enough to justify, but the answer to the second is much harder to convince prospective clients that more training is actually a good thing!  We have lost a lot of business purely on the basis that our courses were too long.

So if you need your licence – specifically because you actually want to get a driving job – then Armstrongs has a heavy vehicle license training course to suit your needs across all categories of heavy vehicle and using all types of gearbox configurations.

If you are part of the small minority out there who would like to learn how to “drive” a heavy vehicle then we would love you as a client. Give us a call.