Every warehouse manager knows the feeling of looking at the calendar in early autumn and realising that volumes are about to climb, the agency rota is about to swell and the number of people qualified to move pallets has not changed since the spring. The weeks before your busiest period are the easiest time to fix that, yet forklift truck training is so often the item that slips down the list until the first trailers are already queuing at the doors.
Booking early gives you a proper choice of dates, time for new operators to settle into safe habits before the pressure arrives, and a head start at a point when skilled forklift operators are in such high demand that trained drivers on familiar trucks are far easier to keep than to find mid-season.
Whether you run a warehouse, a manufacturing site or a busy builders’ yard, the same planning applies to any operation that leans on its forklift operators to keep goods moving when it matters most.
Forklift Truck Training Decisions to Make Before the Rush
Much of the pressure on your operators during a busy season can be eased weeks or even months earlier, with a few straightforward decisions about who needs forklift training, what kind and when.
Working Out How Many Trained Operators You Need
Start with the busiest shift you expect to run, then add cover for holidays, sickness and the operators who will inevitably be pulled onto other jobs, because that figure is almost always higher than the number of certificated drivers you have today. Any gap you find can be closed with novice forklift truck training for promising members of your existing team, who already know your site and products far better than any temporary recruit.
Scheduling Forklift Refresher Training Outside Your Peak
Refreshers falling due in November or December are worth bringing forward so they do not collide with your heaviest weeks. Running forklift refresher training now also gives the instructor a chance to pick up any habits that have crept in over the year, which matters when those same operators will soon be working longer shifts around more pedestrians and more agency colleagues.
Adding a Second Truck Type to Your Operators’ Forklift Licence
Operators who can drive more than one type of truck give you far more flexibility when the workload shifts between racking aisles and loading bays. Training a counterbalance driver on a reach truck or pivot steer, or the other way round, costs much less than recruiting a new operator mid-season, and the same thinking applies to yard shunter training for the people moving trailers around a busy site.
Why Rushed Forklift Training Puts Your Busy Season at Risk
Squeezing training into the same fortnight that volumes spike means your new operators sit their assessments tired, distracted and conscious of the backlog waiting for them, before going straight onto a floor that is busier and more cluttered than at any other point in the year. More pedestrians, temporary storage and vehicles reversing into bays create exactly the environment in which a gap in training turns into a near miss.
Planning ahead lets the learning bed in before the pressure builds, and it keeps your forklift training compliance in order at the very moment an incident would cause you the most disruption. The value of proper forklift safety training shows up most clearly in these weeks, and pairing it with banksman training for the people guiding vehicles around your yard closes another gap that busy periods tend to expose.
Choosing On-Site or Centre-Based Forklift Truck Training
Training at our purpose-built facility in Bromborough takes your operators away from the noise of the working day so they can concentrate fully on the course, and it keeps your own trucks free for the work that is already coming in. It suits smaller groups and individuals particularly well, including people hoping to gain a forklift licence before seasonal roles open up, and anyone wondering how to become a forklift truck driver can start completely from scratch there.
Bringing an instructor to your own premises works better when you have several operators to train at once, or when you want the course to reflect your racking, loads and traffic routes. Either way, you can choose forklift training accredited by RTITB or AITT, and the choice between them often comes down to which standard your existing operator records already follow.
Browse Our Full Range of Forklift Truck Training Courses
The quickest way to see what fits your plans is to browse our full range of forklift truck training courses, covering counterbalance, reach and pivot steer trucks for every experience level, alongside related industrial vehicle courses.
Some of them can be booked directly on our website, so you can lock in dates for your team now rather than competing for them later in the year, and the five-day counterbalance novice course is a popular place for new operators to begin.
If you are planning training for a larger team or would like dates at your own premises, call us on 0151 343 0588 and we will help you build a schedule that has every operator ready before the first rush arrives. Businesses across Merseyside already use us for AITT forklift training in Liverpool and the Wirral, so you will be in good company.