Though there are plenty of examples of men and women in their 20s jumping into trucking full-bore — and staying — research continues to show the demographics among drivers shifting to the older side, as I reported over the weekend with results from ATRI’s recent driver-demographics report. This drives no shortage of talk of just where the next generation of drivers will come from. While the answer of why the population is getting older may do well to include a recognition of the maturity that comes with age and the risk-aversion businesses are feeling more and more of these days, suffice it to say the whole question of how to attract the younger folks to the work of driving truck is one people are talking about — a lot.
Following the Conversion Interactive/Truckload Carriers Association recruiting and retention conference a couple weeks back now, an attendee of the conference wrote me with some observations he’d made talking to the twenty-somethings at the carrier he works for.
The source is a longtime driver now working in retention at a carrier of size — not the biggest by far, but not the smallest, either. After he returned from the conference, he says, he and colleagues engaged in a little bit of head-scratching over the difficulties the industry writ large has had bringing the next generation into the business of driving truck. He put the question of why twenty-somethings seemingly weren’t interested in being truck drivers to a twenty-something in a nondriving role at the company, Bruce Jenkins. Though you run into problems of validity when making broad generalizations about any “generation” of people, Jenkins’ response was thorough, to say the least, candid, and touched on a myriad of issues. You can read it for yourself below. And: What do you think? Is the writer on to something?
Why aren’t twenty-somethings interested in truck driving?
We are a generation of leisure. Not just leisure, but laziness. There is no piece of information we can’t access in the palm of our hands, and there is no product we can’t acquire by going to a single building that has every single product we could need on a regular basis. Most of us have no idea how these products reach their destination and do not care. Everything is done for us. No one my age knows about trucking. We are a generation of consumers — not suppliers. We have no idea what it takes to make our leisurely lives possible.
An occupation in truck driving is not generally considered a successful achievement and has a lot of bad stigma. We grew up with stories of truck driving being dangerous and dirty. We grew up being told to go to college before we even knew the word education. If you don’t continue your education you cannot be successful. This is the idea we grew up with. And it’s partially true — 300 million people is a lot of competition, and even the most basic jobs now require post-grade-school education.
