Up Front

Real shortage of good drivers

Congratulations. If you are an over-the-road professional, you are perhaps the most sought-after worker in the country. According to the Truckload Carriers Association, the trucking industry will be looking to fill an additional 80,000 positions every year for the next 10 years. That’s 800,000 new jobs. And that’s not even counting the hundreds of thousands of driving jobs that open up each year as drivers hop from one company to another or leave the industry altogether.

Even better from the drivers’ standpoint, driving jobs can’t be “outsourced” overseas or turned over to robots.

With all of this as a backdrop, we asked a handful of drivers if they thought the driver shortage was for real. We always go to the drivers when we want to know what’s really going on in this business. Surprisingly, many of them questioned whether the shortage was real or, as one put it, “manufactured” by all of the shuffling around. To find out more what your fellow drivers had to say on the subject, turn to the “Say What?” column on page 34.

If you ask 10 drivers a question you’re bound to get 10 different opinions, but just about every driver we talked to agreed that there is a very real shortage of “good” drivers. Some things never change.