HW Richardson’s Driving Skills Competition winner Zoe Ward has completed the New Zealand Certificate in Commercial Road Transport Skills Level 3 with MITO – Te Pūkenga.

Zoe works as a concrete driver with Allied Concrete, where she started as a cadet driver back in 2021. During her cadetship, Zoe obtained her full Class 4 licence, and has been trained to perform a concrete batching role.

Zoe received the Harold Richardson Memorial and Concrete Rookie Award – the first female contestant to take out an overall division award.

Zoe says she started in the transport sector after being unsure what to do after she finished school.

“I couldn’t find anything at university that interested me, and I was working in a supermarket during my first year out of school. I started doing deliveries, and I found I quite liked driving, so decided to go from there, and it all sort of happened,” she says.

Zoe’s uncle is a driver trainer and helped her get her cadetship with Allied Concrete, and her training started from there.

She said she found working and training quite easy to balance.

“You can do the MITO – Te Pūkenga training in your spare time, and with the practicals, you don’t have to do them all at once, you can do parts of it and come back to it,” Zoe says.

“Our company was really supportive and flexible, so if I needed to do practicals I could just come off the truck for the day and get that done, and I had great support from MITO – Te Pūkenga through email and phone.”

She says the content of the MITO – Te Pūkenga courses was interesting and she got to learn things she may not have done in her job.

“I got to complete a dangerous goods course, which is a great extra qualification that is good to have.”

Zoe says the training she received through MITO – Te Pūkenga put her in good stead at the HWR competition.

“I had to do a pre-start for my MITO – Te Pūkenga certification and I also had to do that for the competition, so that pre-start course definitely helped me there. I also had to be assessed on my driving during the course so that would have helped too,” she says.

Zoe says she is keen to keep learning and training moving forward in her career.

“It’s good to learn new things. I want to keep learning and developing my skills.”