browndingo
Active Member
Absolutely.
And that is not to say the five days of Integrad are wasted time, new drivers definitely learn some invaluable things. But in this way, UPS segregates/isolates the new drivers or employees and this, I'm guessing, they feel is the best way to instill or coerce their own patterns of behavior into the new driver.
Eliminates any questioning, any "differences", original thoughts and nuances that every human being normally has ( coming from the local center level of on-cars, vet drivers) into a standardized one-size-fits-all approach.
Absolutely not.
In fact, the students who thought they were going to be shown the one correct way to do everything really struggled. They got hung up on little stuff like when to get a signature first on a package and when to scan the package on the walk up. They didn't understand why sometimes you should get out on the driver side and sometimes on the passenger side. They wanted simple one-size-fits-all answers they could spit back out on a test.
The intention of the class is really to simulate the long hours, independent working conditions and actual work of a day of driving, with every activity integrated to reinforce what you've learned. You aren't sitting in a classroom all day repeating things. You're on your feet or in a package car almost the whole day.
They do not eliminate any questioning - in fact they give you a hard time if you don't come up with questions for them. And a lot of the questions start with "Well at my center they do it a different way..." and they answer with two or three situations where you might have to do things differently.
Veteran drivers have tons of valuable experience, but again - that does not necessarily make them good teachers. I was telling a vet driver about Integrad and mentioned how they teach you to check the front of your car as you walk back from a stop. He rolled his eyes, as if this was some stupid new "rule" that UPS had come up with that in the real world would waste an hour every day. I couldn't believe it. I asked him, "You don't look in front of your car as you're walking back?" "No," he said, shaking his head and laughing. I pressed him on it - "Of course you do. Everyone does. It's so automatic that you don't even realize you're doing it."
That is a 25+-year driver. He's a safe driver. He probably has most, if not all, the safe habits they teach you at Integrad, but he's learned many of them the hard way. (He's had double knee surgery, so you bet he uses 3 points of contact now. But he didn't always.) He works safely, but he couldn't tell you the hundreds of ways he does that. Like the example of checking the front of your car - He doesn't think he does that, but of course he does or he'd be running over dogs and cats and kids' toys every week. He isn't going to be able to teach that to a new driver because it's so much second nature to him he doesn't realize he does it. And a rookie isn't necessarily observant enough to see everything a driver does and understand why he does it.