As the news of two more operations scaling back or shutting down is in the news, the crisis due to a shortage of skilled labour comes into an even sharper focus and we have to ask the question, where are the young guns? Where will we find the people who will carry the industry through the next 30 years?
There has been a lot of focus on the need to bring more young people, and others who can be trained in the right skills, to be able to work on the front line of the trucking industry, in order to maintain the high standards our customers expect from their road transport suppliers.
However, it’s not just a crisis at the driver level, it is an issue from the bottom to the very top of the industry. We are just not attracting the kind of skills and brains into our operations to keep up with a rapidly changing technical and economic climate, plus we have an actual climate which is changing as well.
The industry has always moved forward when the customer base has needed it, it has innovated to keep up with the demands of a fast moving economy, which needs fast moving goods. New blood has brought in new ideas and kept the trucking industry one step ahead, keeping the freight flowing at the right time and at the right place.
We may have a recruiting issue at the coal face, but we also have a dearth of young talent leading dynamic trucking operations and changing the nature of the industry to face future challenges.
When there has been a need for someone to come up with new transport solutions to emerging logistics issues, in the past, there have been keen innovative young people who have seen the opportunity, seized and run with it.
Those entrepreneurs took risks and made it work. They solved their customers’ problems and in doing so created strong profitable enduring transport businesses, many of which are still around today, some, not so much.
Where are the new Ron Finemores, Terry Nolans, Don Watsons, Glen Camerons, Jim Pearsons, Bruce Scotts etc of today? Where are the new ideas going to come from? Where are the next set of disruptors going to come from?
This is a very difficult question to answer, and one to which the answer may be, there are none. Perhaps the opportunities these strong willed and boundary pushing entrepreneurs saw and acted upon are no longer available.
If that’s the case then the question we may have to ask is, what kind of structural changes in the industry need to take place for it to retain the dynamism which made those pioneers the game changers they were?
The question remains: Where are the Young Guns? Really, Where are the Young Guns?
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