i n d u s t r y

Driver Institute Is Alive & Well

Revitalized Professional Truck Driver Institute of America pushes long-range voluntary approach to driver training.

Doug Condra
Editorial Director

The Professional Truck Driver Institute of America, founded a decade ago to certify driver school curriculums and improve the quality of entry-level drivers, is alive and well. It wasn’t always so.
A year ago the organization, troubled by lack of both funding and industry support, was taken under the wing of the Truckload Carriers Assn. TCA members hire the most entry-level drivers and have the highest turnover rates. They saw the PTDIA as a potential solution to those and other problems.
Among the problems: Trucking was looking down the barrel of a loaded gun…of mandatory entry-level driver training, with all its increased costs, paperwork and regulations, said TCA President Lana Batts, who is also PTDIApresident.
Since TCA took over managing the driver institute, it has pushed the concept of a long-range voluntary approach to driver training supported by the industry. As Batts puts it, “We needed something that would provide the Department of Transportation with a credible alternative to its usual approach of regulations piled upon more regulations.”
First, organizations and people who have a stake in driver training were surveyed. That included carriers, insurance companies, driver schools, school licensing boards, public and private funding organizations and drivers.
That survey led to a number of steps to bolster PTDIA’s programs. Among them:
• The board of directors was expanded to include representatives from numerous industry segments ranging from carriers and suppliers to safety organizations and the Teamsters union, as well as driver schools.
• Duane Acklie, Crete Carrier Corp. chairman, was elected PTDIA chairman to succeed Herb Schmidt, CFI senior vice president who had served the institute for a decade.
• A set of skill standards was developed for entry-level truck drivers.
• Curriculum guidelines were formulated to help schools teach the skills.
• Course certification standards, upon which schools will be judged by PTDIA, were set (these and the skill standards and curriculum guidelines mentioned above are all pilot programs).
• Twenty-five schools were PTDIA-certified a year ago; 31 more have applied for certification, and TCA plans to double the number of certified schools by the end of 1998.
• A series of “stakeholder” meetings was launched to update carriers, regulatory agencies and education-funding organizations on PTDIA programs.
The stakeholder meetings, conducted through a grant from John Deere Transportation Insurance, introduce state officials to truck driving as a profession, emphasizing the significance of trucking jobs to the states’ economies. Meetings have been held in Illinois, Pennsylvania and Texas, with others planned for California (in early ’98) and Lansing, MI (April 22).
Those meetings, according to PTDIA, have resulted in Illinois’ adoption of the PTDIA skill standards, and Ohio, Arizona and Michigan are considering using them as school licensing criteria. John Deere Transportation Insurance, Liberty Mutual and Northland Insurance now all use PTDIA standards in evaluating company driver training.
The DOT uses the standards to test training simulators. The Department of Labor has sent them to more than 700 job-funding sites to encourage displaced and workfare workers to become truck drivers. And Canada and Mexico are considering adopting the standards.
The Commercial Vehicle Training Assn., whose members are U.S. and Canadian truck driver training schools, praised the PTDIA standards “for focusing greater attention on educational performance and less on prescriptive regulation.”
Batts, who is also TCA president, says that having those school representatives working on PTDIA committees has turned an adversarial relationship into a cooperative one. The school association has extended memberships to publicly funded training schools, and elected Wade Murphree, American Institute of Technology president, as its new chairman.
PTDIA Chairman Acklie says trucking “is at a critical crossroads where we must take a stand for what will have long-term implications for better driver training, highway safety and employment.”
“A strong PTDIA will produce better-trained drivers and demonstrate this industry’s absolute commitment to safety,” he says.

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