EFFECTIVELY SHUTS THE DOOR ON ITS MOST IMPORTANT TALENT POOL—YOUNG PEOPLE WHO ARE GRADUATING HIGH SCHOOL AND STARTING THEIR FIRST CAREER.
force at the upper end, and we’re just sim- ply not backfilling.” For the industry, a graduated CDL is
about more than finding drivers whose ages fall somewhere in a three-year time span. The 21-year-old age requirement effectively shuts the door on its most important talent pool—young people who are graduating high school and starting their first career. With trucking not really an option, young people choose a different path, with trucking necessarily a second career coming later in life.
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 finding
a way to safely bring younger individuals into the trucking industry,” Brewster said. The 2014 ATRI study found that while
96.5 percent of schools with a 10th grade offer business courses and 94.4 percent of
THE 21-YEAR-OLD AGE REQUIREMENT
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 repair a truck requires an actual truck, and those are expensive. High schools can train students for other careers for a fraction of the cost. The good news is that the motor carrier
industry can do something about it. “There’s an opportunity for motor carri-
ers to step up to the plate with their local high schools and help provide some of those opportunities for young people,” she said. Brewster said the industry has a similar
problem finding technicians. A process is needed where young people can be hired out of high school to drive intrastate, work in dispatch, work in the dock, or become a technician before hitting the road. “We really do need to start to design a
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 informa- tion could be used to create a tool to identi- fy potential safe younger drivers. Those drivers would then undergo a pilot test using only intrastate driving. “This tool would allow us to identify
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from a larger population a cohort of young- er 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. Ramar’s Levine says he has been advo-
cating for a graduated CDL license for the last five or six years. This summer, his com- pany was five drivers short, and the chal- lenges will only increase with an aging driver workforce nationally that’s not always comfortable with the industry’s new technology. His company moves everything from household goods to specialty items like art, satellites and, once, a moon buggy. Some of his freight is very valuable, and yet his company doesn’t hesitate to hire
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