Driver Safety Training, What’s it Cost?
If you’re reading this paper, you most likely have some interest in creating, investing in or improving your driver safety training program. No matter which of these reasons caused you to start your research, you can rest assured you’re doing a good thing. Driver safety is very important for companies for many reasons. Any company with a fleet of drivers is well aware of the risks involved. As such, most companies with larger fleets invest in some type of driver training program. Just acquiring a license that allows one to drive a transit bus or semi-truck isn’t enough. There are many other skills that professional drivers should master before hitting the road. Whether one creates a safety training program in-house or buys one from a third-party vendor, these programs are not cheap to develop.
What’s the Cost of Driver Safety Training?
By now you probably want to see a number. You’d like to see some amount of money that will give you an idea of how much you will need to buy or improve a training program. I could begin to list some estimates, but that will fail to underline the importance of safety and what it really means to your company. Yes, money is important. Practically every action companies take stems from their budget. Companies that are large enough to have a fleet of vehicles and drivers made the right moves and became profitable. They were careful with their planning, execution and investments. That means when looking to purchase anything that may cost tens of thousands of dollars, those companies practice due diligence.
Before delving deeper into how much it will cost, I pose these questions: How much will it cost you not to invest? How much will it cost you to forego a training program that will make your drivers safer and more effective out on the road? How much damage does even one claim do to your bottom line? What is the cost of ignorance? I can almost guarantee you that the money it will cost to pay the claims that come from on the job accidents will far exceed the money it would take to acquire an effective training program.
Accidents Can and Do Happen.
There’s no program or technology in the world that can prevent all accidents from happening. However, many accidents are preventable. The first step in this prevention begins with drivers that know what they’re doing. Not only should they operate a vehicle effectively, but should do so safely with skills that allow them to avoid many of the common accidents that plague the roadways. Drivers learn such skills from driver safety training programs.
Lowering the number of accidents and claims your company will potentially face is a notion that would excite any CFO or controller. While a training program can cost $50,000 or maybe even $300,000, one less claim due to an effective program can save the company millions of dollars and, more importantly, countless lives. How’s that for a return on investment? This is not a hypothetical situation, this is something that has happened. Too often does a company put a dollar value on the safety of their employees not realizing that the safer their employees are, the more money the company actually saves.
If you stumbled upon this article with the aim of finding out how much a driver safety training program might cost, you might have gotten some idea of the amount. It’s not cheap. As a result of reading this, ask yourself, your superiors and subordinates, “how much will it cost us to not have a driver safety training program in place?” Money does matter, there’s no way around that. But, understanding the importance of investing in an effective driver safety training program will go a long way. Understanding this allows anyone to see that what may seem like a hefty, unnecessary investment can and will pay for itself in a much shorter time span than any other investment your company can make in it’s people.
