Lorry Driving

nickwilks7

Hi, I am thinking of doing my hgv licence, but not to sure about paying £2,000 to do it!
Is there any company's who will pay to put you through the tests in return for , say, 2 years work for them?

Any help would be appreciated!!
Thanks

sheilavw

Hi a few years ago my Husband paid for class 2 himself and got a job. The company asked him to do his class 1, they paid, and they contributed and took rest out of his wage at about £20 a week, but I think if he left within a certain period he would pay back what they had contributed. Its worth asking around

Hammyman

nickwilks7 wrote: »

Hi, I am thinking of doing my hgv licence, but not to sure about paying £2,000 to do it!
Is there any company's who will pay to put you through the tests in return for , say, 2 years work for them?

Any help would be appreciated!!
Thanks

After spending £150 on licence and medical then another £1500 on Cat C then realising you need to spend another £1500 on Cat C+E and then realising you need to spend another £500-£1000 to get your Driver CPC before you can be employed only to find you're competing for jobs with lots of drivers with decades of experience, I think you need some truths about what you're letting yourself in for.

Employers are still in the 1800's. You'll get treated like dirt, they don't really care if you need to be home for something. Being sick isn't really an option. On the subject of being sick, bad backs and obesity are a big problem in the industry and most drivers are carrying some injury or another.

You will either be starting between 3am-6am or finishing between 3am-6am.

The average working day is around 11hrs, the average working week 55hrs. The maximum legal working day is 15hrs. It is still legally possible to work an 84hr week. Overtime isn't optional, its expected. If you can legally do it, you'll be expected to.

Not going out because the weather conditions are bad isn't an option. You'll be expected to do everything you can.

Expect from October to June to be outside in the driving rain and wind trying to pull back or close 45ftx10ft trailer curtains or sheeting down a load.

Lots of places still require you to use pallet trucks to move pallets up to 1.5 tonnes by hand to the back of the trailer.

You could end up in a job when you leave home at 4am Monday morning and not get back until late Friday, early Saturday

If you night out, there aren't many facilities for parking, even less for getting a shower and sleeping in a layby peeing in bottles is still sadly commonplace. Many companies you collect and deliver at won't even let you use their toilets, let alone that staff canteen with the nice warm food you've not seen for days.

Everybody wants what you're carrying but nobody wants you there. Expect to be completely ignored when you turn up with a delivery.

Many delivery places were designed when the horse and cart was the mode of transport and you're expected to get a 44 tonne, 53ft long vehicle in there.

You will find it very hard to do the job if you've not got any initiative. For example, working out how to get that collapsed pallet up high enough for the forklift truck to get the forks in using nothing other than whats lying around in the yard around you.

No matter how much you plan your day, something will go wrong. It is quite common to turn up for a collection only to find you've to wait a couple of hours for it to either be made or be unloaded off the ship. Just because you have a delivery time doesn't guarantee you'll be unloaded in the same hour or even the same half of the day. At one Tesco RDC, it wasn't uncommon to be sat there waiting to get on a bay for FOUR HOURS then spend another TWO HOURS on the bay as it got unloaded.

You spend a LOT of time sat in traffic jams, rush hour traffic, queues for accidents. Whilst driving, everyone wants to be in front of you and will carve you up, expect you to stop 44 tonnes in the same distance as a 1 tonne car and park in positions that make it nigh on impossible to get into where you want to be but it'll all be your fault.

You will be expected to be able to work out at the drop of a hat what time you'll get to a certain point taking into account when you need to take breaks in respect to EU drivers hours and breaks in respect to WTD. And if you exceed the driving hours, the fines are quite large. Road haulage is the most legislated sector in the UK and you're expected to know it all.

You are responsible for everything. If you're pulled in at a weighbridge and you're overloaded, you get the fine. If the vehicle is in dangerous condition, you get the fine.

Forget planning anything social after you've finished work. As soon as you have, Murphy's law will kick you in the gentlemens vegetables and something will go wrong. As Pat Nicholson, Chairwoman of the Professional Drivers Association said to me after she was forced to quit on medical grounds, "I didn't realise just how much it impacted my life and how little I got to see my family and friends. I can see what you was on about." - I was a staunch supporter of the 48hr maximum working week. In regards to how it affected my family life, with my first son, for the first year he used to scream when I picked him up on a Saturday morning because he didn't know who I was. Even though I was home every night, I left at 4.30am and got back at 6.30-7pm on average so he was always in bed and I never saw him. Divorce rates are quite high because a lot of the time you're not home and when you are, you're so knackered you don't want to do much and after driving 2500 miles a week, the last thing you want to do is go out for a drive on a Sunday with the family.

It does have its good points and I did it for 16 years but nowadays the good parts are getting fewer and far between as more and more legislation is brought in to make the job impossible.

Jo_F

^^^ wot he said.

You will struggle to get someone to pay for you to do it, and if you do it yourself, you will struggle to get work, most places will only take on with around 2 years on the road experience. My partner has just been finding this.

He's lucky that his shunter experience helped him.

He did a test job for a company, an over nighter, then he was trained for the run he is doing this week as holiday cover, but his first week was a week out, living in the cab all week, up and down the country, backwards and forwards, with 3 hours stuck up waiting to be tipped and loaded, then having to make it back by a certain time, and being able to do it all in the allowed hours, taking breaks when he should, not when he could. One day he came within 15 mins of running out of driving time.

The later he got back, the later the start next day, as he has to take a certain amount of time off, he left here 8am on the Monday, and was back lunchtime on the Saturday.

He's doing over night runs this week, but they are 5pm to around 3am, so he's back up relatively early in the day, but hours before he has to start work.

dickydonkin

^^^ wot they have both said.

The comments above are true - sadly very true in fact.

There is not a lot I can add. I did the job for twenty odd years and I worked for two very god companies and although I still retain my C+E entitlement to drive, I just could not do it any more - unless it was a 'one off' as a favour or something like that.

I am trying to add to Hammyman's and Joe_F's comments but I think everything is covered.

emmell

My brother packed in HGV driving for taxi driving.
ML.

Hammyman

emmell wrote: »

My brother packed in HGV driving for taxi driving.
ML.

My HGV driving friend tried taxi driving then went back to HGV driving before he lost his licence or killed himself from driving whilst exhausted.

Glass_Half_Empty??

Just to add to the above negativity
You go out early yes, but many jobs these days are all different hours of the day what do you do currently? On these long days of waiting around for hours on end you can go to bed(I always used to at certain drops as I knew I was there for a long time:D) You dont have anyone bothering you non stop unless you get unlucky with the job you get I have been mostly left to it wherever I have worked and as long as the job is done the gaffa is happy. The initiative thing is correct but also you gain experience as time goes on and you dont have to even think when cetain problems arise you just get on with it. Yeah we drive a lot, but I like driving and dont mind folk cutting me up, it happens in my car as well as in my lorry its just that folk in this day and age are dicks and it wont stop. I used to get serious road rage to the point I have stopped and argued in the street but driving now I just relax and get on with my job. You are being paid to sit in that traffic jam, paid to sleep for 3 hours at the RDC while you get loaded/tipped. The lorry's are kitted out for the driver these days, very comfy. Decent stereos a lot with mp3 input bunk beds fridges or you can invest in your own cool box. Take your own snap and you dont need a canteen, take books magazines a laptop or tv you can get invertors now to run just about anything in your truck. There is places to park not always secure but most firms I know now will pay all parking fees back and if you work for a big firm who have bases all over UK you can park in them. Also loads of places have shower rooms for drivers now so they can get a wash while being tipped.
The worst part is the lack of routine in finishing and how things happen everytime you plan anything but its just part of the job If you dont want a tramping job then dont take it there are plenty of firms who dont enforce tramping. Working hours are strict and rightly so, not always enforced in the fairest of fashions by the vostarpo(vosa) but I havent had any issues with them so far and have spoke to plenty of drivers stopped with the odd infringement and been told to go away with no fine and others who get fined the second they open their trap :rotfl:
And anyone packing in driving a lorry for a taxi must be mental :beer:
Dont believe "all" the doom and gloom you read on here its not a bad job the pay can be good and you get weekends off. I spent 4 years working in pubs before driving for minimum wage and every weekend 50-60 hour weeks for a pittance. I know what I would rather do now :cool:

more_money_for_me

In my cab now, home sometime Saturday afternoon. I was lucky and got both my C and C&E paid, but this isn't the norm. You are most likely to a job with someone like Stobart or Wincanton with a new licence, although not sure if they have subsidised training or anything. Don't underestimate what has been said above about hard work, unsociable hours, injuries ect it is all true. I personally enjoy it, but it isn't an easy option.

Batchy

my friend loves it one min, hates it the next, sounds just about like any other job, sept, lots of responsibility, life or death sort!

tesuhoha

And don't even think about becoming a plumber instead because thats even worse.