A MANAGER'S PASSBOOK
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To get anywhere in the transport industry today, you need a CPC, or Certificate of Professional Competence. We give a first-hand guide to improving your career prospects.
• How often should you whitewash the rough walls around your depot to stay the right side of the Factories Act and keep out of trouble with the Health and Safety experts? How often should an air compressor be tested? What does carriage forward mean? Are fuel stocks current or fixed assets? Are licences direct running costs? How long does a VTG-5 testing certificate last? Does an own account operator need an 0-licence?
If you know at least 75% of the right answers to these questions, you either already have a Certificate of Professional Competence or you are squandering your knowledge and your talents. A CPC, for short, is the passport to managing a haulage business today. There is a straightforward requirement that any haulage firm seeking to get an Operator's Licence must first get a professionally qualified transport manager armed with — you have guessed it — a CPC.
To find out where to go, how much to pay, how long it takes and how difficult it is to get a CPC. I decided the easiest way was to do it myself.
That was my first mistake.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, is easy when it comes to getting a CPC. I thought I knew quite a lot about the transport industry and its associated legislation — I had been working in and around the business for a few years after all — but I quickly found that I knew more or less nothing, and the little that I did know was either hopelessly muddled or just plain wrong.
WHERE TO START
Look in the classified columns of the transport industry's leading magazines, such as Commercial Motor, and you will find plenty of courses advertised all around the country. Most are home study correspondence courses with a few of the more up-market training schools offering one day crammers. The Freight Transport Association goes one better and offers members residential five-day courses in its country house, home-from-home training school at Wadhurst in East Sussex. The bigger and more professional independent training schools also offer residential courses, for fiveor ten-days at a stretch.
Like most busy transport operators, I decided that I just did not have enough spare time to devote to a fiveor ten-day course. I opted for a home study pack and got in touch with Road Transport Correspondence Courses of Witney in Oxfordshire. Two weeks later, in early November 1986, two big black ring binders thumped onto the door mat. Both were crammed full of the information I was going to have to learn. I flicked through them and decided to start in earnest after Christmas — the exam was not going to be held until Friday March 20. That was mistake number two. The CPC course is a memory test, plain and simple and the more you read the notes the more you remember.
HOW TO REVISE
Though it is silly to try and learn everything parrot fashion months in advance — you will forget 50% of its again by the time the exams arrive if you try that — it is certainly a good idea to sit down for an hour every now and then from an early stage. If you only end up remembering one or two key facts every session it is worth it. There is nothing worse than sitting down in a blind panic when it is almost too late to try and cram everything in, unless you have a wordperfect photographic memory.
I also decided that because the CPC exam is a 60-question, one-and-a-halfhour, multiple-choice test I would be able to guess the answers to the questions of which I was unsure. There would almost certainly be the right answer staring me straight in the face amongst the red herrings.
That was mistake number three. Amongst the multiple choice answers, it is true, there is always one blatantly and howlingly wrong response but the others have a horrible habit of looking correct. During the exam itself I even found myself being tempted off course on questions I knew the answer to, by answers that sounded even more rational than the right answer.
WHAT TO STUDY
The subject areas you will need to swot up and memorise in painstaking detail are drivers' hours regulations and records, tachographs, vehicle taxation, HGV driving licences, parking, waiting, loading, unloading, speed limits, traffic offences, mechanical and construction and use conditions, lighting regulations, planned preventative maintenance, fleet inspection, roadside checks, vehicle passenger insurance, general insurance, traffic accident procedures, safe loading, vehicle weights and dimensions, vehicle selection, health and safety at work, 0licensing, vehicle costing, commercial business conduct, and business and financial management.
I actually began swotting at the end of February, one month before the exam was scheduled to take place. The volume of information it was necessary to learn was overwhelming to begin with, but the more I grappled with it the easier it became. The Road Transport Correspondence Courses files break the subject areas down into manageable and digestible chunks and at the end of every section there is a question and answer sheet to test your memory. The questions and answers are written exactly as they are in the exam itself with multiple choice replies.
RTCC packs also include two full mock exams which you fill in and send off for marking. A mock exam, which does not include any indication of the correct answers, adds just the right touch of fear.
To overcome this fear 1 decided to go on a one day crammer, run by RTCC at the King's Hall in Esher a week before the exams. My fourth mistake was to go there thinking I had most things straight in my mind. I had not.
Graham Lewsey, who ran the one day training course, threw all sorts of facts and figures at my 30 or so fellow trainees and asked us the sort of questions he has spotted cropping up regularly in the exams. His advice was sound, and very useful when we took the exam.
The one note of panic he struck in us all was to tell us that to pass the exam, the Royal Society of Arts stipulates that every candidate must get at least 75% of the questions right. The exam's 60 questions are split into five sections and some sections only have six or seven questions in total — such as the drivers' hours section. To pass here you must therefore get at least four out of six correct because it is also stipulated that you must get 75% in every section. Get three out of six and you will fail the section and the whole exam. The whole thing can literally hinge on one question.
I went home and started learning for real. When the exam came, the following week, I took things slowly. There is plenty of time to read each question carefully at least twice. Beware of the trick question, worded as cleverly as possible to throw you off the scent.
It takes four or five weeks for the results to then come through and, thankfully, I passed.
The Road Transport Correspondence Courses home study pack I used costs 293 for the goods national course. There is an international CPC course too. The one day crammer, based at Esher, costs 230 plus VAT and the exam fee varies from centre to centre.
El by Geoff Hadwick