Better recognising the skills of heavy vehicle drivers by making the qualifications more relevant to them and significantly reducing associated costs is a key objective of work the road transport sector currently has underway with industry training organisation MITO, says Road Transport Forum chief executive Ken Shirley.

“Qualifications are a key element in addressing the road transport industry‘s workforce issues and refining the training programmes that lead to the qualifications to better suit how the industry operates can have a positive effect on staff recruitment and retention,” says Shirley.

The industry was involved in the review of qualifications, condensing the 93 existing road freight transport qualifications down to five. The programmes of training leading to the qualifications now need tuning to make them more appealing and marketable to the industry.

“Both MITO and the industry recognise that more credit needs to be given to on-the-job based training and practical competence. Going hand-in-hand with that is greater provision for more flexible assessment. This change would reduce costs and enable people to be trained and assessed as they work.”

Shirley says the industry wants to promote a well-trained and highly skilled profession.

“There are huge numbers of extremely competent people working in road transport who could easily have their skills recognised by a qualification. The aim of this work is get to a stage where a person can be more cost-effectively assessed and gain a nationally recognised qualification for displaying their skills on the job.

“It is our intention to align the training programmes to better recognise the realities of our workforce and the talented people within it,” says Shirley.