Is Dispatch training required?

To start off ... no. To succeed? You better learn fast.

 

There's so much of this business that you just don't or even can't learn from a book. Dispatch training? I don't even know what dispatch training is? Sounds like more worthless industry snake oil. You just have to know your costs and you have to learn your lanes which only comes with time. Get out here and do it. Figure it out. It's not rocket science. Experience is useful and helpful. Only one way to get it... doesn't come from books...

 

Yes.

Be nice to 100 drivers assigned to you, a percentage of whom are already late as of 6 am according to a computer printout handed to you at arrival from your previous night dispatcher.

Soothe ruffled feathers all morning.

Hand out money like a Drunken King intent on emptying Treasury.

Explain to your company officers why so and so did not do this, that or something else you barely remember listening to the 10 minute ranting or reading reams of paragraphs in bad words pouring from a over typed qualcomm ternimal.

Soothe your shippers and recievers.

Hand out more money.

Run outside for your vices where possible sweating the next phone call.

Go home at end of day all stressed and a 5th of something into your Dinner cup.

Dream about a few really difficult drivers, toss and turn in bed all the time wondering how it worked out.

Arrive next day half asleep and barely functioning ready to tell off whomever made the mistake to call in until your first morning coffee and doughnut has kicked in along your vices.

enjoy.

 

Oh by the way your vocal vocabulary will be reduced to:

What Number? What? WTF? Who? When? WHY DID (Insert neg or pos action) HOW MUCH!?

And so on.

Your BIGGEST two word use will be:

Why NOT?!

 

There isn't any training, dispatchers should be out on the road for at least a year before sitting in front of a computer.

I've got a friend who worked as a lab dispatcher for years, he got out of that job and then went into IT and then into trucking. He said that after getting out of a truck he wanted to do something else so he got a job dispatching at a local company with 400 trucks and a couple hundred O/Os. He said it was like going to a resort compared to the lab dispatching. He was telling me the people there were actually pulling their hair out on simple issues, always stressed and always acting like it was the hardest thing to do, while he was as he said 'relaxing at the pool side watching them self-destruct'.

his point was that it is a simple job and it is all about managing time and people. Most can't do it but others can and those others who can are not doing it for a reason.

 

I've yet to encounter a dispatcher that has any transportation training.

 

A dispatch training would make sense in a situation when someone completely out of the trucking business wanted to enter the field and had no idea about regulations, contracts, loadboards etc. But if the training is to train how to handle drivers/brokers/costumers and how to be professional with them and put up with their moods without getting emotional...these kinds of things, I don't know if that's trainable. I think that it is something that someone acquires by experience. The same goes for trucks scheduling. I am sure there are training centers that would take money for it. These centers, if you pay them they will train you for everything you want. How to walk a dog, how to pick up women, how to play roulette, how to appear smart ### - as someone said earlier it's a snake oil.

 

We had a 23 year old dispatcher once. We sit looking at his load dispatch and realized we needed a 100 mph truck (Governed at 72 flat) to make his delivery schedule after a interchange in Russelville. We called him and asked if he understood that his appointment time required a very fast truck that does not exist? he apologized and said that he was fresh out of the Army at 23 and dispatching was his first foray into trucking.

We rapidly started breaking him in. First by making a appointment time based on the usual 35 mph average so that we will be on time no matter what happens. He turned out well. We were never late. Shippers and Recievers were not any wiser. LOL. Yes we could do 1550 miles in 24 hours to 30 hours roughly max as a team but we did not have to. 1000 is plenty.

 

Training? No.

Perhaps a lobotomy though...