RoSPA Young Drivers at Work Report

Chapter 8
“Once you’re comfortable driving, obviously it’s only
a perception but you perceive yourself as being a
competent decent driver then anything you see
you just think,‘nah, I’m a decent driver’, and you
hear quite a lot about people saying it’s going to
take a crash to slow them down so I don’t think
there’s a lot you can do for a lot of people until
they have a bump or something, then it does
make you think because obviously the cost of it
and the shock of it happening. ”
(Focus group 5 member)
“In this job there’s a lot of difference between
training and then actually going out and doing it,
there’s nothing that’s in-between in this job, you’ve
got to go out and learn it. I think driving might be
the same because with every job you go to now
you do a test about how you learn don’t you and
then you adapt that learning.With driving I think
it would be hard to use that style of adapting your
learning because driving is set rules, it’s got to be
done in a certain way, so I wouldn’t know how
that will ever change. ”
(Focus group 4 member)
The consensus was that you learn to drive by yourself and
by making your own mistakes,‘more by luck than
judgement‘ and ‘like taking the stabilisers off’. Experience is
a mandatory element in all three previously quoted HSE
definitions of competence. However HSE take the view
that, experience is something that can be structured;
formally obtained and developed. This view was also borne
out in the interviews with some employer respondents.
Whilst not explicitly stating that they are training for
experience, respondents have illustrated the methods by
which they do just that.
One method identified, for example, was the buddy or
mentor system which provides young drivers with a source
of knowledge and guidance from within the organisation.
In a typical buddying system young members of staff are
paired with colleagues who have more driving experience.
For a certain period of time (usually until the organisation
considers the young person ready) only the experienced
colleague is allowed to drive. This is especially the case on
long journeys or on work trips abroad:
“We don’t send them out on their own to start
with, we always send them out with [someone],
we don’t say ‘here’s the keys now off you go’,
we always send them out with people, older
drivers who are more experienced.We probably
do that half a dozen times and then we just send
them locally somewhere and then build them up
like that. That’s the way we always tend to do it
rather than straight in at the deep end. ”
(Health and Safety Manager, telephone interviewee)
“We cover more than 10,000 miles a year in hire cars
as a company. So we do a fair distance driving in cars
that aren’t our own and more often than not on the
wrong side of the road.Very often more experienced
consultants will travel with less experienced
consultants and very often the more experienced
consultants who have more experience of driving
on the wrong side of the road will do so. ”
(Consultant, telephone interviewee)
“In our office what we try to do is if a graduate is
going to a new site, we try and get them to go
with a more senior person first because going to
an X site it’s difficult to get on anyway. It’s a new
environment and therefore it’s best for them to go
accompanied so they’re not going across terrain
that’s unfamiliar with them. ”
(Business Manager, telephone interviewee)
“In this day and age you only get experience with
knowledge by somebody with you telling you. ”
(Small Business Owner, telephone interviewee)
“I’m very lucky in that I have a huge diversity of age
range so that I do get experienced people saying,
‘Yeah well I remember, you do need to load that
properly because I’ve seen what happens when
you don’t’. ”
(Chairman voluntary organisation,
telephone interviewee)
Young Drivers at Work Report
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