Career Options

Things you should know if you want to train to be a truck driver

Life is a highway

The demand for truck drivers continues to grow.

DAVID CHILTON -- Special to the Toronto Sun

Send to a friend

In what work environment would you thrive? To find out, take this test by eCareerFit, the career assessment experts.

Jay Pootha, owner of Jay's Professional Truck Training Centre, says everybody's looking for drivers in Ontario, business is good and he's getting lots of referrals at his school in Scarborough.

Andrew Cierpich, owner of Metro Truck Driving School in Mississauga, is equally upbeat about the prospects for anyone who wants to be a professional driver, saying, colourfully, "Bananas are not growing here; you've got to bring them here."

STRICT RULES

So, given that the jobs are there where does the prospective driver start looking for training? And training is indispensable for anyone who wants to drive a truck, whether it's a huge tractor trailer loaded with thousands of pounds of steel -- or bananas -- or a truck delivering department store purchases.

Sue Allen, a former driver herself and a fleet driver trainer for 15 years, says there's a only one correct way to get these behemoths to move from A to B. Remember the rules governing truck driving are as strict as those for pilots or sailors navigating ships, she says.

Allen is the co-ordinator of Women in Skilled Trades at the School of Transportation at Centennial College and has a long-standing relationship with Humber College's truck driver training centre too. She is emphatic about what to look for first in a school: "Safety and the reputation of the school have to be the backbone for any consideration of (a) school."

Beyond those essentials, another consideration is the cost of training. So while fees can seem steep -- and the actual price will vary from the hundreds of dollars to the thousands depending on the licence the student is pursuing -- everyone warns that cheaper is not better. At Metro Truck, for example, two to three weeks full-time training for a B-Z licence, which allows holders to drive for the TTC, GO Transit and others is $2,600. Humber charges an attention-getting $5,295 for its seven-week

full-time A-Z (tractor trailer) training, and, as elsewhere, it comes with a few strings attached.

Karen Tavener, Humber's director of Transportation Training, says the college asks for 12 months of verifiable Canadian driving experience. "That way they've (prospective students) had a winter," she says. Grade 10 literacy is also required, and so are medical and vision tests and the ability to drive a manual transmission. There's also an interview. That's to find out if professional driving is what the applicant really wants, Tavener says. "It's (driving a truck) not really a tour bus," she continues. "You go where you're told to."

BACKGROUND CHECK

And, Cierpich says, since drivers are by themselves a lot they've got to be organized. They must have a clean abstract (a government issued personal driving history), and although schools, including his own don't require police clearance, Cierpich points out that employers are likely to look into a job seeker's background. So if any drink or drug offences show up it's adios even before the key goes in the ignition.

Alan McClelland, chair of Modified Apprenticeships, Truck/Coach and Heavy Duty Programs at Centennial, says his department doesn't offer drivers specific training in how to maintain their rigs -- owner-operators have to pay for repairs themselves, of course -- but notes the school offers a wealth of continuing education programs that may benefit drivers. Given their irregular schedules, online learning could also prove a winner. And since owner-operators are small businessmen (trucking is overwhelmingly male), taking courses on how to keep the books and manage today's astronomical cost of fuel and maintenance could be a godsend.

davidchilton@rogers.com