In Ukraine, there is an acute shortage of personnel on the freight transportation market — carriers lack up to 40,000 drivers. About this reported Serhiy Derkach, Deputy Minister of Community and Territorial Development.
“If we talk about large cargo transportation, today about 130 thousand trucks are involved in them. And according to the information we receive from carriers, 30% are idle due to a lack of drivers. That is, the deficit is about 30-40 thousand drivers of the CE category. This is a huge number and a difficult story. A few months ago, we were in one of the large companies. They have 30 large new cars on the site. And the owners say that there is no one to drive them: there are contracts, but there are no drivers.” Derkach said.
He noted that it will not be possible to solve this problem quickly, so the Ministry is initiating programs to train new personnel. As an example, Derkach cited educational projects for female drivers, as well as retraining programs for veterans. In the future, it is planned to launch a youth-oriented initiative to attract as many as possible to the profession.
“Why are we focusing our attention on these categories? All these people have no booking issues. Veterans, women have no booking issues. That’s why we work with these categories”, Derkach explained.
Separately, he noted that the business has partially resolved the booking problem, which was one of the key reasons for the deficit last year.
“All transport companies, if they work, especially in the field of international transportation, pay the appropriate salary – they all have the opportunity to book 50% of employees. But there is a nuance: there are many people in the companies who are not directly engaged in driving. Therefore, the business faced a challenge: how to keep staff and properly repurpose them in order to fit into this 50% and provide themselves with employees of the most in-demand professions.”, – noted the deputy minister.
