With the Brisbane Truck Show over, May has been an amazing month in the transport industry.
We have so much to look forward still this year, as we work through Covid we’re very excited about face-to-face activities and the success of events like the Brisbane Truck Show and other industry events show how much people love to tell their stories and get together with other people who have the same ideas and values.
Almost everyone in the industry abides by the safety standards that we expect, wanting everyone who works with or for them to get home safely at the end of the day and other drivers to do the same.
The values that most of us hold dear are those of integrity, honesty, trust, and value for money and getting paid properly for what we do. Unfortunately, this is not always the case in our industry, but everybody should be on the same page to make these things happen.
The sooner we get those who don’t have these values out of the industry, the safer and the better for everyone.
When we want an image campaign, we want to show that we are a safe, attractive, high tech industry, which is exactly what we are, but we’re not seen to be.
Until we change the perception of this industry, we’re not going to be able to attract or retain the people will need to keep this industry advancing or have the talent available to get the job done.
We need to be concentrating on attracting youth, women, returned soldiers and change of careers people plus our immigrants and refugees.
Instead of showing racism to the other nationalities in our industry, we should be embracing them and if you think that they’re not trying or whether they cannot do the job properly; how about helping them or having a chat, lending a helping hand instead of deriding them and making matters worse.
I have heard complaints about Indian truck drivers and they form such a large part of the driver capacity at the moment, some say they are rude but do they complainers ever think about the fact that maybe if you just talk to them and go “how are you going mate, are you having a good/bad day?” it would make such a difference.
I interact with multiple drivers every day and quite honestly, I have no issues because I treat all of them as people; the sooner we treat everybody as human beings trying to earn a living, what a better world this will be.
So how about we band together to create a better image for industry; embrace those entering it, so we can attract, train, and retain new entrants.
We need to make them welcome and encourage them to stay because old timers like me, won’t be around forever.
Unless we have new people to replace us, we won’t have the numbers to keep the industry going at the capacity predicted for the years to come.