Pictured from left are trainees Brandon Strickland, Katie Hohn, Lowes General Manager Bernie Morris and Lowes Compliance Manager Gavin Nielsen
A trailblazing apprenticeship scheme has won Lowes Petroleum Service the Queensland Trucking Association’s People Leadership Excellence Award.
The award was announced at a gala dinner in Brisbane in November 2011.
Lowes Career Plus, a four-year truck-driving traineeship, is now serving as a model for other transport businesses across Australia.
Lowes Petroleum Service scored the prestigious award for providing career opportunities and vocational training to its employees and the broader industry.
General Manager Bernie Morris said the award came as a complete surprise.
“We went with no idea we were going to win.
“It is a great achievement.”
Mr Morris said Operations Manager, and Lowe’s first long-haul truckie, Tom Woodhead, had come up with the idea seven years ago.
“We call it ‘Tom’s Vision’. He could see that the average age of truck drivers was going up – it’s around 48 at the moment and the new legislation was coming in all the time.
“About six of us got together and thought, “We’re not going to sit and wait. We wanted to be the point of the arrow when it came to change as opposed to the feather in the tail,” Mr Morris said.
“We started by getting diplomas in training, so we could do a lot of the training work in-house,” he said.
By happy coincidence, Goondiwindi State High School, Trucksafe, the Queensland Trucking Association and Southern Queensland Institute of TAFE were working on a similar plan, to offer four-year truck-driving apprenticeships.
The first two years are completed as school-based apprenticeships. Brandon Strickland and Katie Hohn are at the end of Year 12 and ready for the next step, which is completing their certificate III in truck driving while working full-time at Lowes.
At the presentation, they said if a small business in a small town like Goondiwindi can do it, then everyone can do it.
