Dive Brief:
- Yellow Corp. recently opened four more company-sponsored driving academies as it seeks to train new drivers in a challenging labor environment, President and COO Darrel Harris said during a Q2 earnings call.
- The LTL carrier now offers CDL instruction at the new locations in Columbus, Ohio; Tracy, California; Maybrook, New York; and Detroit, Michigan, in partnership with the Department of Labor’s recently launched apprenticeship program.
- A fifth driver academy in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is set to open this month, bringing the total number of company-sponsored driving schools to 22.
Dive Insight:
Yellow’s new driving academies support the carrier’s goal of training 1,000 new drivers by the end of the year. The company opened another in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in March.
“We remain committed to hiring and training the next generation of safe professional drivers,” Harris said. “Our academies provide career opportunities with good jobs and competitive benefits.”
The COO has remarked on the industrywide recruitment and retention problems — and the company’s efforts to surmount them — in the last few earnings calls.
Yellow had more than 30,000 employees as of Q1 and planned to continue recruiting drivers, mechanics and dockworkers, who Harris described to investors as “the most important assets we have.” He said in a Q4 earnings call that human capital “is a top priority for us.”
Other LTL carriers have also invested in their driver education programs to boost their driver numbers. XPO Logistics, which had about 43,000 employees as of Q2, ramped up targeted recruitment efforts and in-house driver instruction at its 130 training locations, incoming CEO Mario Harik said on an earnings call.
“The hiring environment overall is still tight, but it loosened significantly in the second quarter,” Harik said. “We had a 44% average increase in the number of applications for each job we posted in the quarter.”
