Tight budget? Let's cut training!

I'm talking to a lot of people these days that are concerned about a slowing economy and its impact on the freight business. There's lots of talk about cost-cutting and just as day follows night, execs and bean counters start talking about cutting back on driver training programs. Some of you may be dealing with this internally now - having your budgets cut or getting grief about the cost of training programs.

This will come as no surprise to you, but I think cutting training is an incredibly bad idea. If you're facing this prospect at your organization right now, here are some things to help you in that battle.

The first thing to do is look at why you train drivers in the first place. You don't train drivers because you have nothing better to do with your time. You train them because you want them to perform their jobs better, because performing their jobs better means more revenue and less expenses.

Regardless of whether the economy is good or bad, businesses need to run efficiently to be successful. That means reducing unplanned or unnecessary expenses as much as possible. In trucking, those expenses take the form of collisions, violations, damaged freight, late deliveries, poor fuel economy, etc. All of those things cost money, lots of it, and those are all costs that can be significantly reduced, if not eliminated. Training is by far the more effective way to reduce those costs.

When times are tough, businesses need to get serious about identifying and eliminating those unplanned expenses. 

Now, the quick answer might be to axe the drivers that cost you money in those areas and try to replace them with better drivers. That misses the point for a couple of reasons:

• Those troublesome drivers may be incurring expenses in ways that can be easily fixed, with the appropriate interventions. Helping a driver improve their skills can do wonders for their loyalty and you could end up with a tremendously profitably (and grateful) driver
• There may be drivers who are about to start costing you money, but up to now they've looked good on paper
• After your investment in replacing the 'problem' drivers, you could end up with someone who's no better (and may actually be worse)

A much better strategy is to use training and assessment programs to:

• Identify the drivers who have gaps that will cost you money (whether or not those gaps have turned into actual costs to date)
• Determine why those drivers have gaps
• Wherever possible, close those gaps and help those drivers become successful

That strategy builds the business for the long term. And training programs are the most cost-effective way to accomplish it.

Budget freezes, staffing purges, and blanket policy changes are at best stopgap solutions - in most cases they do more harm than good. Building a solid foundation and using the tough times to strengthen the team are always the best strategies for success.

Hopefully some of these tips will help you preserve your training budgets!