Scroll a North Queensland social feed on any given day and you will find two or three separate businesses advertising for the same truck driver. All of them are fishing in a pool of applicants that has been shrinking for years and none of them are filling the role quickly.
“There’s been a significant reduction in application numbers across the board,” said Tayla Connolly, Business Manager at Townsville operator Oakdare and founder of the Careers in Gear program. “It’s not just one company looking for truck drivers. I might see two or three ads looking for truck drivers on any one day.”
The cause was a slow one. “Transport was an industry that fell off everybody’s radar,” Connolly said. Fewer children of operators are following their parents into the business than they were 20 or 30 years ago and the industry has been too busy covering the gaps to notice. Connolly was one of them. She grew up around her parents’ Townsville operation and left at 17 wanting nothing to do with it, spending years in another industry entirely before coming back. If the sector could not hold on to the kids who had grown up in the yard, it was never going to attract the ones who had never set foot in one.
Much of the shortfall is now being filled by overseas workers, which Connolly puts down to necessity rather than preference. “I much prefer to employ somebody who was local and had grown up in my community,” she said. If the next generation does not come through, she expects the cost to fall on operators and on the communities relying on the freight in roughly equal measure.
Eighteen months ago Connolly founded Careers in Gear to work on the front end of that problem rather than the back end of it. It runs as a not-for-profit with no government funding behind it and the premise is straightforward. Students cannot choose a career they have never heard of.
A tour day starts at the school gate around 9am. Twenty students and two or three teachers board a coaster bus and work through five or six businesses before 3pm, with the itinerary built for range rather than depth. A truck dealership covers new vehicle sales and the parts counter. A transport operator shows them a business where trucking is the whole job. Then a warehouse moving food or parcels and a quarry or road construction site. “We give them the opportunity to stand in those environments,” Connolly said. Students walk workshop floors, climb into truck cabs and watch a forklift work a warehouse, and somewhere along the way they find out what a parts interpreter is.
What lands hardest is money. “Transport as a whole sector is fairly well paid,” Connolly said and most students have no idea until someone shows them. “Their eyes light up when they look at it. It doesn’t matter which part of the supply chain you’re in.” The second surprise is flexibility. Most assume a driving job means weeks away from home and it can if that is what they want, running road trains between Townsville and Perth. It can just as easily mean being home for dinner every night.
“The school system has been extremely accommodating and collaborative,” Connolly said. “I thought that could be a problem.” What she found instead reframed the challenge. “I don’t even think it’s a case of people having a perception of the industry at all,” she said. “It’s a lack of understanding of how integral the industry is to everyday life.”
Eight schools have come through in the past six months, all within the Townsville region. It is too early for a full cycle, with the Year 10s who took the first tours still at school, but the early numbers are moving. Oakdare has hosted three or four work experience students in the past twelve months, which Connolly describes as three or four more than before Careers in Gear existed. One student walked out of a tour and into a job late last year and a handful more have picked up part-time work or started chasing something permanent.
Northern Stevedoring Services came on board as one of the first formal sponsors, which counts for more than usual when there is no government funding stream to fall back on. Beyond the financial support, a working wharf shows students something a trucking yard cannot. “The average person doesn’t know what a stevedore is,” Connolly said, “or how containers actually get unloaded off the back of a vehicle, or how many items are stored and exported.” Cranes, container handling, rail, warehousing and heavy transport sit within a few hundred metres of each other at the port, which makes it a rare thing to put in front of a bus full of teenagers in a single stop.
Asked what getting involved looks like for other businesses, Connolly’s answer was “anything and everything.” A small operator can host a tour through its depot. A larger one can help fund the program. Caps, pens or water bottles fill the goody bags students take home. A business sitting on a traineeship it cannot fill can simply say so, and that goes straight to students who have already put their hand up. “Every business has something to give,” she said, “and size doesn’t matter to us, it’s the support that counts.”
The three-year goal is more schools and, more to the point, the same schools coming back. “Make it a recurring program,” Connolly said. “Schools that are committing to it year on year.” North Queensland businesses wanting in can reach Careers in Gear through its Facebook page or at https://www.careersingear.com.au/.