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Technician. Diesel. Trailer repair. Fabrication. Maintenance. Welding. This handful of key words, entered into the job search engine Monster.com, recently tagged over one hundred resumes for job openings for heavy truck technicians at Milwaukee, WI-based Advanced Waste Services. That has made the two men in the picture very happy, because they have three technician jobs to fill yesterday, and like most other fleet managers in the same situation, they have been colliding head-first with the technician shortage that has plagued the industry for years.
When Jason Derby signed on as vice president of maintenance operations at Advanced Waste Services six months ago, he had his work cut out for him. The company was using its fleet of 38 pickup trucks and company cars, 29 semis, 42 trailers (including van trailers, walking floor trailers, tankers, and roll-off trailers), 11 vacuum trucks, two box trucks, and two water blasters to transport industrial waste products from across the Midwest to its facilities in Milwaukee, Rockford, IL and Portage, IN, and they were doing it with exactly one technician and one service bay.
"The technician basically lived here," says Derby.
What's made it workable, until recently, was the fact that the fleet of tractors was on a full-maintenance lease from Penske. And 13 new Peterbilt tractors are being brought in on full-maintenance leases from Paclease.
But just about everything else in the fleet is company-owned, and so Derby had his hands full...
"For the first step I thought I'd come in here and tweak a few knobs and sit in my office and direct traffic and life will be good," he says. "But the business is very complicated, and it took me quite a while to get comfortable with the plant equipment. I myself have to learn how to work on everything, and there's not much of a training regimen that can prepare you to work at a company like this. It was pretty much, jump in there, get the welder and torch out, and start fixing stuff.
"Because," he asks, "how am I going to train, manage and lead eight to ten mechanics if I don't really understand what we're doing?"
FIRST HIRE
Things started out smoothly for Derby. Teaming up with vice president of human resources Bill Christel, Derby quickly found two new technicians to add to the staff. One came to him through an ad placed in the local newspaper; the other came from his driver staff.
