terstate driving not a realistic option, many move in other directions, leaving trucking as merely a second career to be considered later in life. “I think we’ve got a lot better shot at
finding people that are seniors in high school that see that as a viable career op- tion for them than we are trying to catch people off the rebound from another career,” he said. Moreover, as the ATA’s Abbott pointed
out, a graduated CDL also would make jobs available to an age group with a high unem- ployment rate. This isn’t the first time the idea has
been considered. In the late 1990s-early 2000s, ATRI shared in a project with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to consider a graduated CDL process. The report was never published, but the insur- ance industry notably was open to the idea. “They did appreciate the value of find-
ing a way to safely bring younger individu- als into the trucking industry,” Brewster said.
Brewster said there are many reasons
the motor carrier industry is struggling to find younger drivers. A growing number of young people are enrolling in college, and those that graduate don’t want to drive a truck. Students are encouraged to pursue four-year degrees even if that’s not the best path for them, which leads to student debt and/or a degree that’s not marketable. The 2014 ATRI study found that while
96.5 percent of schools with a 10th grade offer business courses and 94.4 percent of schools offer computer technology, only 28.8 percent offer transportation-related courses. Brewster said cost is one of the reasons
why. Teaching students how to drive or re- pair a truck requires a truck, and those are expensive. Schools can train many students in the health care industry for a fraction of the cost. The good news is that the motor car-
rier industry can do something about it. “There’s an opportunity for motor car-
riers to step up to the plate with their local high school and help provide some of those opportunities for young people,” she said. Brewster said the industry has a simi-
lar problem in finding technicians. A pro- cess is needed where young people can be hired out of high school to drive intrastate, work in dispatch, work in the dock, or be- come a technician before hitting the road. “We really do need to start to design a
Q3 2015 TENNESSEE TRUCKING NEWS 11
path for individuals to come into the truck- ing industry at 18 upon graduation from high school and make it a career for them,” she said. Brewster said ATRI is studying how to
determine the attributes of safe 35-year-old drivers and then seeing if that information could be used to create a tool to identify po- tential safe younger drivers. Those drivers would then undergo a pilot test using only intrastate driving. “This tool would allow us to identify
from a larger population a group of younger individuals whose behavior styles were
more like safe, older drivers,” she said. If successful, it could serve as the basis
for a graduated CDL study, Brewster said. Tommy Hodges, chairman of
Shelbyville-based Titan Transfer, hires 175- 200 drivers a year for a fleet that has nearly 600 trucks. Because the company runs through 48 states and into Mexico, it can’t really hire any drivers under 21. Hodges said his carrier would aggres-
sively recruit drivers in the 18-21 age group if it could. He started driving when he was 17 years old and hit the streets when he
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