The CarriersEdge Podcast | Episode #118
Jane Jazrawy: Hey, welcome to The CarriersEdge Podcast, Happy Summer. It is episode #118. I'm Jane Jazrawy, Co-Founder of CarriersEdge. And with me as always—
Mark Murrell: Mark Murrell, other Co-Founder of CarriersEdge.
Jane: Yes. We have a heat wave happening. We're getting all up into thirty degrees.
Mark: Oh, I don't think we're getting anywhere close to that, actually, but—
Jane: Twenty-two. Yes. Which is a heat wave here.
Mark: Heat wave here. And for those south of the border, that is eighty degrees.
Jane: Yeah. But it can feel pretty hot.
Mark: Yeah. Here. Which can be simultaneously sweater and jacket weather, or shorts and tank top weather.
Jane: Yeah. It depends.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Depends on which part of Victoria you're standing on.
Mark: And depends on what part of the property you're standing on.
Jane: But there are fires happening, unfortunately.
Mark: Yes. It is fire season. Yeah. Unfortunately, yes.
Jane: We're having an elevated heat event, so—
Mark: Yes.
Jane: Yes. That's the exciting weather news.
Mark: Yes. News from the island.
Jane: And also, this is our last episode of the season. Other news.
Mark: Yes. Our season finale. Yes. Of whatever season—I don't even remember.
Jane: I know we think we're—
Mark: At some point we should count this up.
Jane: We need to, like, divide things into seasons and do season something, episode something.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: I think that's a better way of doing it instead of the way we're doing it.
Mark: Yes. Nobody cares that it's 118 episodes.
Jane: No. I think we just do that because that's how we did it to begin with and—
Mark: And it was easier.
Jane: It's easier.
Mark: Yeah. But now that we have staff that are capable of doing these kinds of organizational jobs, we can get it done. We can relabel these.
Jane: We can. We can start thinking creatively outside the box about how to name our podcast.
Mark: Well, speaking of thinking creatively outside of the box and naming things, the first thing that I want to talk about is the thing that you spent the weekend working on, which is quite an exciting project—and also very sad that we have never done this before.
Jane: I think I'd like to focus on the sad part of it.
Mark: Yes.
Jane: More than anything else—that we have not really had a proper course catalog, ever.
Mark: Yes. It is a bit of a sad statement that we've never had a published course catalog—like a kind of many-page book that lists all of the titles and all the information about it. Yes, it is one hundred percent a gap that we've never had one. And it is a gap that is solely attributable to the fact that we had nobody to do it. It would have been us doing it, and we were too busy with other things. And we are now at the point where we have other people doing those other things, and you can now focus on it. And you spent some time on it this weekend and learned a lot and also got it starting to take shape really nicely.
Jane: I think what the problem originally was, was that when we started this—well, not when we started CarriersEdge—well, yeah, when we started CarriersEdge, when we started this company, Cranial Expansion Learning Solutions—when we were doing everything under the sun. We were just assuming that we would do courses for other people and we would never have a course catalog. And then when we decided to do courses for one particular industry, and we chose trucking, it didn't occur to us to do a catalog because we were trying to figure out how trucking wanted to actually buy courses. And we knew that we needed regulatory courses, so we basically had to learn the regulations. So we started with TDG, the Canadian version of hazardous materials. And I don't think we even thought about it. Then, like after TDG, we were like, okay, what do we do next? And then I think it was Defensive Driving, and then it was Hours of Service. And we wrote courses the way that we had written courses for other companies, which are—you know, you write—if it's about the regulations and you write about the regulations, it doesn't matter how long it is or how many lessons there are. If you're going to follow the regulations and you need to learn about it, then there you go. There's the course.
Mark: And also, when you're doing custom work, you finish that course, you hand it off to the client, and then you move on.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: You don't really think about that course ever again. So that was one of the things that we learned five, ten years later. You've got to come back to these courses. You can't leave a course out in the field for ten years and just not do anything. You have to keep updating it and keep refreshing it.
Jane: Yeah. Even when the regs don't change, if it's something like Defensive Driving, where the fundamentals probably haven't changed in fifty years, you still have to refresh that course because the world changes around it.
Jane Jazrawy: Yeah, you know, the technology changes, the graphics abilities change—like, if there's interactive components that you can do, change. But what didn't change was that we wanted to build courses for trucking. We wanted to build education content for the trucking industry. And we just kept on learning more about trucking companies, what they did, how they worked, and the kinds of things that they needed. And through Best Fleets—which we started a couple of years later—same thing. We kept talking to fleets and kept figuring out what they need and what they want and what is happening in the industry. And we just kept writing courses.
And then it became really obvious that I can't write the courses by myself or create courses by myself anymore. I need other people to help me. Then it was—how do we get other people to help? Like, how do we even do that? Because we weren't using subject matter experts. I was learning stuff. And so what do you do? What we found was that subject matter experts in the trucking industry are often experts in very limited topics.
Mark Murrell: Yeah. They are subject matter experts with a very narrow scope, and it's almost always through the lens of their own personal experience.
Jane: Yeah. So you can be—and lots of experts on defensive driving—about different types of defensive driving. There's all kinds of defensive driving.
Mark: But that's also through the lens of, in a lot of cases, them operating dry van, flatbed, reefer—
Jane: On a highway.
Mark: Yeah. Central time zone. North and south through central time zone, with a little bit of OEM. Mountains are different—you gotta do it differently through mountains. But that's not the same as in a crowded city like New York or Los Angeles. That's a very different kind of defensive driving. Or tanker defensive driving. Or stinger-steer. So those are all different sets of expertise.
Jane: And the expertise that we have—which is different from knowing a lot about the industry—is the ability to get information out of the industry, document it, and figure out how to position it or to slice and dice it so that people can use it as learning material. So what I realized is that there was a period where we were trying to find subject matter experts to work in-house, but it didn’t work because, you know, when people are subject matter experts, they want to focus on what they're experts in.
Mark: What they already know.
Jane: Yeah. So if I had a subject matter expert who is really good at, I don't know, like, final mile or something like that, but what I wanted was someone to do tanker courses—that person would have a hard time. They would have to learn the tanker industry or something about hazmat—how to do placarding and follow the regulations and do all that kind of thing.
What we ended up doing is bringing people on who can take information they research or learn about and turn it into content. And that's what my expertise is. I don't care what the content is—I can put it in one part of my brain, do a little bit of whatever, and then spit out a course. Like, it's just—I'm a machine.
Mark: Very quickly. You assimilate the knowledge that you need and put it all together into something useful.
Jane: I know how to process information and put it out the other side. I think it's the fast way to—
Mark: Yeah. But you do that quickly. Like, you're not taking ten years to learn this discipline.
Jane: No.
Mark: You don't have that luxury as a content developer. You need to become—maybe not an industry expert—but you need to become knowledgeable and able to converse intelligently on this inside of a couple of months.
Jane: Yeah. And that, basically, I can. And because I'm very good at it—especially with trucking—and I'm very good at it no matter what the topic matter is. But what we did is we brought people in who didn't necessarily know anything about trucking, but knew how to take information and process it and spit it out the other side. And I have a process to do that and have courses come out the other side that are pretty—you know, they all kind of have the same feel. Like, you know when it's a CarriersEdge course, and you know that the standard of it is going to be really high, that the content's going to be accurate, blah blah blah. But what we haven't done is made a list of everything we've done.
Mark: And we've just been so busy building.
Jane: Yeah. And the way that we structured it changed. And it also changed because we were doing this right at the beginning of when trucking was getting into e-learning. So trucking didn’t know what they wanted.
Mark: We didn’t know how they wanted it organized. So that was one of the challenges that I used to find on the website—how do we list courses on our website? And you think, well, the logical thing is to list them alphabetically. Then you end up with stuff that really isn’t the most important thing showing up first, because it ends up having a title that starts with an A or something.
Jane: Mhmm.
Mark: You know—A or B. Accident Scene is always the first course in the list. That’s not the first course that people think of when they’re looking at content. So I, for a while, had the course list arranged in the order of the questions that people typically ask or the subjects that they’re interested in. So it started with Defensive Driving and Hours of Service and Vehicle Inspection and then went into Hazmat and other safety things from there.
But to anybody that wasn’t looking at it that way—or wasn’t a safety manager who’s used to doing onboarding and driver training—it looked like a completely random list. It made no sense at all.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And that’s been one of the challenges for us. On top of the fact that we have variations of titles for different regions and different vehicle types and things like that. So figuring out how to organize it has also been one of the things that really makes it difficult to put together a complete catalog that’s actually usable for somebody.
And I think that’s usually as far as we got—as, yeah, it’d be great to have a course catalog, but how should we organize it? And, oh, there’s already a lot of titles in here, and who’s going to update it and manage it, and how do we keep it fresh? You know, you have this thing where it’s outdated as soon as it’s finished. So we had to get to a point where we had the ability to think about that stuff and put together a plan—but also have the ability to have that content organized in a whole bunch of different ways depending on how somebody wants it.
And I think that’s one of the things that you’ve done here that is going to look really good when it’s finished—is that people can consume that catalog however they want.
Jane: I'm hoping that we're going to have—well, I'm hoping that we can have the first one ready in the next couple of weeks. At least as a test. But what I did is I started organizing things into subjects, like sort of topics. And then I think that's where I kind of figured out how to do it. We have a lot of titles.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And I think this is something that other driver training companies have the same issue with—because, like, how do you organize it? So that you have all these courses that all seem to be about the same thing, and then you have to figure out what—it's crazy.
So what I did was I came up with topic areas: driving skills, business and communication, hours of service, cargo securement, vehicle inspection, weights and dimensions. What else?
Mark: So you're kind of at the topic level, not at like driving skills/non-driving safety?
Jane: No. No. No. I have general regulatory.
Just like regulations that are just sort of there—like HazCom, you know—or general safety, which is things like fall protection.
Mark: Right.
Jane: So they are safety, but it doesn't necessarily need to have its own thing. I wanted to see what kinds of groupings I could do. And this is what I do when I write a course as well—I try to group everything, because that's the way to understand information: to group it, to categorize it, and then organize it within the categories. So I kind of did what I do with course development—I did that to the catalog as well.
And so now I think the first course—now if you go alphabetically—is business and communication as the first subject area.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: And the first one is Owner Operator Business Skills—business skills for owner operators.
Mark: Oh, okay.
Jane: So you're getting a little bit of a different—but one of the things we've had this issue with is that when we first built the courses, we built TDG first, and TDG had eight lessons. But that was TDG—like, you're going to learn it. If you're going to learn about TDG—
Mark: That's what you've gotta learn.
Jane: Yeah. Eight lessons. That's the content that you have to learn. And in the Canadian market, that's still kind of the case. But in the American market, it's very different—where the training needs to be shorter.
So what we started doing was dividing things up into refresher. So you took—again, let's say Hours of Service—the full course is four lessons.
Mark: And it's about ninety minutes of content.
Jane: I don't remember.
Mark: It works.
Jane: It's so many different times and minutes—it’s something like that.
Mark: Well, it goes through everything that you would go through in like a full-day classroom Hours of Service course.
Jane: Yes. If you were just doing Hours of Service. And there are four lessons in the full course that we did. So what we have done traditionally is separated those things.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: It's not separated in my head, because it's all the same content. You know, the full course and the lessons make up the full course—it’s the same content. There isn't another course. So what I decided to do in the catalog—which we've never done—is present it together.
Mark: Yeah. I think that's a good way of looking at it. So you're doing it by subject?
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Because people tend to look at it by subject, and that’s one of the things I like about how you’ve organized it. If somebody is looking for different subjects to see what's covered, they can see it in there.
But what's a problem in some other catalogs is—you go and you look at this thing, and it looks like a lot of titles, but then you see that there's one for tractor-trailer, there's one for a straight truck, there's one for passenger vans, and it’s like, oh, okay, well, those don't really apply. So what is there really for me?
And that's where I think you've done something nice—where you've organized it also by vehicle type.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: So you can say, “I operate flatbeds. What are all the titles for me?” “I operate tanker. What are the titles for me?” “Okay, here’s everything.” Because some of them are common to every vehicle type, and some of them are very specialized.
And just because it doesn’t say “tanker” in the title doesn’t mean it isn’t applicable to tanker drivers. So you’ve gone through and organized all of that so that somebody can look at it and see, “Okay, I’ve got a fleet of tankers. I’ve got to train my drivers. Here are the titles that I have available to work with.”
Jane: Right.
Mark: Really nice.
Jane Jazrawy: So that's just a basic list. And if you want to see the whole description, then you can go and look at that too.
Mark Murrell: Mhmm.
Jane: Yeah. I’ve called it “Driving Skills” because it’s not just defensive driving. We have defensive driving courses. We have distracted driving. We have road rage.
Mark: Winter driving in there.
Jane: Winter driving. I think that’s it. That’s a lot of courses. I’ve grouped it under defensive driving, which has— we have titles for tanker and tractor trailer and straight truck. I’ve got them organized. They’re all grouped together in the descriptions, but it’s kind of clear that there are three different versions of the course for each of these things.
I did it that way because you either have the course descriptions grouped—topic one, two, three, and four—then topic one, two, three, and four for the different vehicle types, then topic—and then, like, I could either do it that way, or I could do all four of the first lesson, all four of the second lesson. So I might change my mind in how I— I don’t think it really matters. I think people know that we have lots of defensive driving for a bunch of different vehicle types.
But it was nice—what was nice is when I was getting to like page ninety—like, well, yep, we have a lot of—yeah. And that’s the US catalog, which—we have fewer courses. Like, not that many—we tend to do a US course whenever we do a Canadian course. We do have a few more Canadian courses just because we started earlier in Canada.
So I have to do a separate Canadian catalog.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And I’m going to do it the same way, you know. It’s going to be very similar. It’s just going to have obviously Canadian courses.
Mark: Yeah. It’s going to be very useful. I know this is something that our partners have been asking about for quite a while.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And I know I’ve made lots of excuses for many years. But you know—it gets updated all the time. So go and check the website. But they want something that they can distribute.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And I know why they’re after it. I know what they’re looking for. And I think the fact that it’s going to be fairly dense is not necessarily a problem. You’re going to have links to jump around.
Jane: Yep.
Mark: It could be a PDF that you can jump around in. And maybe it’s something that we even print out and get bound and have a few copies at a show somewhere. Because that’s another thing that people ask us about at shows—do you have a course catalog? And I see what you’ve included, and I think that would be really useful.
But also, I think, like you said, there’s a lot of stuff in there that you kind of don’t realize. And it’s easier to see it now that we’ve redesigned that part of our system to show content more easily and to distinguish between different types of content and make it easier to assign things.
But I think there’s a lot of stuff in there that people kind of forget about or they haven’t really paid attention to. It hasn’t occurred to them. So having the catalog, I think, will give people a lot more titles to look at that they’ve kind of overlooked or not noticed or haven’t seen that they even have in their own library.
Jane: Yeah. I’m very happy to be doing it, but also sad that it’s taken me this long.
Mark: Well, if we had done it earlier, we would have had to do a quicker version of it that would have compromised some things. So now you’re able to do it and do it better.
Jane: The other thing that has made a huge difference is how well I can use Adobe InDesign.
Mark: Yes. Your InDesign skills are much better.
Jane: Well, the thing is that I learn things pretty quickly. I’m pretty good with Photoshop—I have expert skills in a lot of applications. Photoshop and Word were my two go-to things, you know, when I was doing courses back in 2007. Oh, and I used Dreamweaver. But one tool that I never actually really learned how to use was InDesign—Adobe InDesign—which is a layout program.
And I knew—I have used other things like it, not very much, but a little bit. Like PageMaker, which apparently is still a thing.
Mark: Or QuarkXPress.
Jane: Oh, Quark.
Mark: That was the dominant layout tool for years until it just got swallowed up by Adobe.
Jane: So I knew—like, I knew vaguely how to use it. But we’ve had to use it more and more, especially with magazine layout where we’re doing ads and have to figure out how to—and booklets, like your Views from the Edge, that little book of all the blog stories, which we have on our website if you’d like to download one. I think there’s four.
Mark: It’s an annual summary. A compilation of blogs.
Jane: And it’s a nice little thing to, you know, kind of flip through and read the blogs—the ten blogs that we liked from that year or that Mark liked. So I had to use that, then I had to—I had to learn it because I had to teach other people how to use it.
That’s fun. And I started to really hammer on the creative team about using styles. And this is something I’m going to do an internal presentation about—because styles make things consistent.
Mark: Yes. Don’t be manually formatting paragraphs and—
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Content blocks. Create a style and apply the style.
Jane: You can do that in Word. You can do that in Excel. I think more people should use it in Excel because it would be very helpful. Because Excel is, like, you know—these tiny little lines with no space. And it’s not very difficult to actually create more space.
So I realized that in InDesign—and you knew this because you were using it before—I was like, the Best Fleets book was created in InDesign.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: And I didn’t really know how to use the styles. I certainly have learned. So as I have learned it—as I’m doing the Best Fleets books and all of the stuff that we use InDesign for—I started to get a sense of what I could do with it.
And this is where the catalog kind of came into being. Because I could have done it in Word, and I’ve seen what some people do—some people do their course catalogs in Word.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: But it's very clunky.
Mark: Yeah. It's very kind of text-dense and not easy to jump around.
Jane: Yeah. So what you want to do—if this is a virtual document—is give people a lot of information and the ability to jump around. And that’s what—
Mark: Well, and the other side of it is that ultimately, it is a marketing item. You want to promote things that you have worked so hard on. So it should be something that has some design to it, and it should be something that reflects the brand and your messaging—what it is you’re trying to do—and underscores why you do the things that you do.
And that’s, I think, part of it that you’ve done that’s kind of cool. There’s a part at the beginning that explains how to use this, how to get the most out of this catalog, and what these different elements mean. Because we haven’t even talked about the fact that we’ve got different levels of courses. We have gold, silver, and bronze level courses.
Because one of the challenges when you're looking at—this was something that originally came as a request from our insurance partners—when they are looking at a customer of theirs who says, "Oh, I put all my drivers through all of this training," well, not all of those courses are the same. A vehicle inspection course is not the same as a healthy eating course. And if you say you’ve put all your drivers through training, and you put them through a healthy eating course, it’s not the same as putting them through defensive driving or distracted driving.
So we had to start building a hierarchy of levels to distinguish between courses that are higher value in the risk management world and then sort of step down from there. So we have every course labeled as a gold, silver, or bronze level course so that you can track what’s actually happening and the value of those courses in terms of road safety for drivers.
And you had to have a way to distinguish those within your catalog and explain what that is. And I think you’ve done a nice job of laying that out—explaining the different levels and why some of them are one level and some are a different level. So that’s another element that we have to figure out and stay on top of.
Jane: I realized that I have to include the PIPs as well—the Put It Into Practice documents that we have that allow people to sort of take training to the next level.
Mark: Yeah. What do you do after the training is done? How do you keep the momentum going after drivers finish that course? The Put It Into Practice—or PIPs—do that really nicely. So they’re going to be in the catalog too?
Jane: Yep.
Mark: Oh, good.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: That’s cool. Because they are really nice. They’re excellent additions.
Jane: Yeah. There’s not as many PIPs. The PIPs go with kind of the subject area.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: So defensive driving has a PIP that goes with any defensive driving course. Because it’s not—it’s not a separate course. It’s ideas to do things around a course.
Mark: Yeah. So it may be ideas for—
Jane: Social media.
Mark: Do social media or a kind of a survey to do, or how to do something practical with drivers that builds on that content. It just gives people ideas, and it’s largely sourced from Best Fleets to Drive For data and examples of things that fleets are doing that work, and our own experiences working with different companies to see how they do different things and what works well for them.
So it’s really just a set of ideas for things that fleets can be doing, but it really helps to magnify the value of the training that people get. So that’s great—that’s going to be included in the catalog as well.
Jane: Well, it only occurred to me—I only started working on this thing last week—so I still have things that I wouldn’t mind adding in. But what’s nice is if you design the document properly, then you can add things and remove things pretty quickly.
Mark: You don’t have to kill yourself updating it.
Jane: Yeah. You don’t need to do that.
Mark: Oh, that’s good. Well, these are the things you learn as you spend your days building a library of content.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And I think one of the other things that we were talking about on the weekend while you were working on this is the naming conventions for courses. And we have to go back and revisit that, because you kind of name the courses in a way that made sense at the time for each course. But then when you put them in a catalog, we think, okay, well—
Jane: That doesn’t work.
Mark: Maybe we want to do something differently there. But I think these are challenges that—I feel a little bit, I don’t know—reassured in tackling these challenges. And I don’t think there are a lot of other people that have faced these things before.
There’s hardly anybody in the trucking industry that is committed to building such a detailed library of content. I mean, maybe JJ Keller—they’ve got a pretty good content development team, and I would imagine they have the same challenges with their handbooks and reference material and things like that. But nobody else is really that deeply focused on training content to the level that we are.
So I don’t think these are problems that dozens of other people have already solved, and we’re tackling it now and scratching our heads while everybody else is laughing about how they’ve already figured it out. So I feel better about the fact that I don’t think anybody has really addressed this.
Jane: One of the things that we do that’s really unique is we reuse the same content. So when we create—like Defensive Driving—how do I put this? But we reuse—
Mark: Talking about sharing content across courses?
Jane: Yeah. So, like, if you’re going to talk about animal strikes—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: That is something that is common to every single defensive driving—or the topic. So that’s in some sort of adverse conditions, I think it is. So, you know, things that are going to be on the road that are going to negatively impact you. And so every single course—we have an animal strikes page.
Mark: Yeah. Regardless of the vehicle type. Yeah. Whether it’s US or Canada—there’s an animal strike page.
Jane: Yeah. And it has a picture of a deer. I don’t have to even change the picture. So that page is used in—actually French and Spanish as well.
Mark: It's
Jane: It’s all shared. Well, the French and Spanish—
Mark: Those are different pages, but you’ve probably got that page in, like, ten different courses.
Jane: At least.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: Yeah. It takes some of the effort out. There’s a lot of effort that goes into all of our courses, but it takes some of the effort out because I can reuse.
Mark: Well, the ability to share pages is one of the reasons I built the content authoring system the way I did. Because we have so many courses where there are variations of things, and if you had to have ten different iterations of that animal strike page… what happens if you find a typo in it? Now you’ve got to go into ten different places to make the change. That’s ten times the space on the server storing that data, and it gets really inefficient really fast.
Jane: But that actual animal strike page is just one page?
Mark: Yeah. It’s exactly the same. The way we do it, it’s the same page—it just gets loaded into different courses. And that saves a lot of time.
Jane: And that way, if you have to update it, you just update it.
Mark: You fix that typo once, and it’s fixed everywhere.
Jane: For Hours of Service, there are common pages too. I think there are even common pages that are used in both Canadian and US versions.
Mark: Interesting.
Jane: So they’re used tons and tons of times.
Mark: Even though the regulations are different?
Jane: And some of the language is different, yeah. But a lot of the core concepts are the same. You just have to be careful because there are always different numbers associated with it. But that’s kind of why we haven’t had a catalog. Because our system—
Mark: Has complexity in it.
Jane: Yeah. We don’t do what a lot of other companies do—they’ll just have 12 copies of the same course.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: For whatever variations they have. But I think a lot of companies don’t have variations at all. They might have something in Spanish.
Mark: They have a tractor trailer course, and that’s it.
Jane: They might have a cargo van course or a straight truck course—they might.
Mark: This is also kind of a side effect of the way we build courses where we're much more detailed in the content, and we’re going through a “day in the life” of a driver. We’re doing a photo shoot on set with a carrier that operates a specific type of equipment. We’re using very specific scenarios and things. And if you're doing that, then you have to make variations for all the different types of equipment and all the different scenarios. Whereas other types of content that are much more generalized, that are just kind of a bullet of a best practice with a little bit of B-roll and some of those kind of things, you don’t need to make a variation because it's so generic it applies everywhere.
Jane: That’s the thing— I think that's the failing of a lot— And we don't do this a lot. talk about the failings of other online training systems. But where I see them falling down— Well, it might be kind of a sneaky advantage. If you keep it vague, no one can tell you you’re wrong.
Mark: Whereas people tell us we’re wrong—regularly.
Jane: All the time. And a lot of times, we have to make our case and say, “No, this regulation actually says this. You’re wrong." And you do that— Well, we don’t actually say “you’re wrong,” but we do tell people this is our understanding of the regulations, and we’ve vetted it—
Mark: We go to the source for whatever it is and get clarify if there's any ambiguity. But—
Jane: Sometimes FMCSA messages ensue.
Mark: Yeah. But in many cases, people are just misunderstanding. Or they learned it from some “truck stop professor.”
Jane: Or they’ve taken a course that was vague. That doesn't really go into so they say, you know, for Hours of Service, they'll give you the duty periods, daily limits, the duty limits like the 70 hour, 8 day, and all of that stuff. And your 34-hour resets. That’s it. And we get requests for people to have shorter courses. Yes, you could have a shorter course. But do you want your people to understand hours of service regulations? Or do you just want just to have 10 minutes?
And some people just want the 10 minutes. But they’re not going to get good information. And when those drivers are pulled over and get a whatever fine for a whatever violation, it’s either because they don’t know, or they don’t care.
So the Don't Care is — Well, what can you do... you can fire them. But if they didn’t know, you can definitely do something about it.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: So we're coming out with an Air Brakes course, and I think I saw an air brakes course on somebody else's platform where it was like, I don't know, an hour.
Mark: That's pretty long. For a lot of it—
Jane: Might have been half an hour, like—
Mark: Seen people put out air brake courses that are, like, twenty minutes. I'm like—
Jane: Actually, maybe that's what it was. I don't remember how actual long it was, but the Air Brake course that we've been working on—like, even just to list all the tests that you have to do for your air brakes every time you—well, maybe not every time. So there's like at least eight, right? You have to do every time. You know, half an hour—that's all you have for half an hour—but you're not explaining how, like, why you're doing—
Mark: Well, we've been talking about this course for a while because it's been in development for—
Jane: A year.
Mark: Yeah. A year now. And it's—it's coming. It's not vaporware. It is actually coming.
Jane: It is. It is.
Mark: Is it coming this summer, you think?
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Okay.
Jane: Voiceover is happening.
Mark: Okay. So—but it is in-depth. You will know your air brake at the end of this course.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Which is interesting. Philosophy. Yeah. So our philosophy on these things is not, “How can we get out of this thing as quick as possible?” It's, “Let's make sure that people know their stuff at the end.”
Jane: And it is seven lessons, seven different modules. I think the full course must be, like, two hundred minutes. I'm thinking that if you want to do the whole course, I would not give it to any driver to do in one day. It’s a lot of information, but you will know every system—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: In your air brakes after this. And there's just so much good stuff in it. The animations are really good. The way the information is organized is really good. We've had so much help from Rolf—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Eventually, where I got from Technicom on this. I think it's a really good course. And people are going to just—I mean, I would almost do like an air brake course club.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Where you just take one every quarter, you take one system and just talk about it, and how it's important to your vehicle.
Mark: That's a good idea. Course club. So instead of assigning a course and just leaving it at that, you assign a small portion of a course—like one of the lessons, one of the refresher modules—then you discuss it as a group. After everybody’s completed it, then you move on to the next module. Everyone goes through it, then discusses it as a group.
Jane: Yeah. Like, do it at a safety meeting, or—I don’t know.
Mark: That’s kind of what we do with courses when we have an internal course assignment, or something the management team is doing, or a book we’re reading. We do a portion of it, then discuss it, and then move on to the next part. It’s very helpful. You get a lot of good insights getting everybody's opinions on what they got out of it.
Jane: You know what people understand, what they skipped over.
Mark: You definitely know the people who didn't do it, or who didn’t really pay any attention to what they were doing.
Jane: Even if—even if you had… yeah. I mean, that’s what I would do in a safety meeting. You may not do it with every course that you assign—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: But maybe you do it in one safety meeting. You have half an hour where you're like, “Okay, let's talk about this course.” You know, “What did you learn about air brakes?” And maybe some people are going to say, “Nothing.”
Mark: Something more intense like air brakes, or like weights and dimensions—
Jane: Yes.
Mark: Or some of the other more complicated courses. I think there’d definitely be value in doing that.
Jane: Or take the Put It Into Practice—take one of the activities out of the Put It Into Practice, or at least read over the PIP and see if there’s anything that kind of gives you an idea and do that at a safety meeting.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: Like, do a demo. Or if everybody’s in person, do some activity there. Do something that’s based on the course, because then you’re going to really help with understanding. And maybe some people who understand it really, really well can help people who don’t understand it really well. And that way, you know, the learning is everywhere.
Mark: Mhmm. Okay. Yeah, some good ideas. And that, I think, pivots us a little bit—you’re talking about how to learn and how to make the most of the learning. I don’t want to talk a whole lot about it because we covered it last time, but we do have our webinar on English language proficiency.
Jane: Yep.
Mark: So by the time this podcast hits the public, we will have finished that webinar. But right now, we have like 250 people registered for it, which is a bit nutty. And I’m seeing the questions people are asking—and the kind of questions people are asking—most of the questions that I look at tell me that people do not know how to approach a problem like this. So I think—we talked about this a little bit—that English language proficiency is most likely going to turn out to be roadside. How that’s going to play out… we’re starting to see some guidance come out, and certainly a bunch more stories. All of a sudden this week, there’s a bunch more stories coming out about it. But people don’t seem to know how to learn—how to figure that stuff out. So that’s one of the things I want to talk about a fair bit in the session tomorrow: how do you go about—what was our process, or your process—for figuring out what’s really going on and getting a sense of it? That, I hope, will give people some benefit beyond just the ins and outs of this specific situation.
Jane: Well, I kind of did what I do for everything.
Mark: Yeah. So that’s what we’re going to do—go through your process of zoom out, then zoom in. Figure out what to focus on, what the details are, and then consider all of the different variations and what it means in the context of the scenario you’re facing now. Like, all of those kinds of things that you do to figure it out. So I think it’s going to be a very good webinar. I think that hour is going to go very fast.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: So I think we’re probably going to get peppered with a million questions that really don’t have anything to do with this. We’ve seen some of those questions already—people are sending in their questions in advance, and some of them really have nothing to do with roadside inspection or engagement with an officer.
Jane: Yeah. One of the problems with something like this is—it’s actually a very simple change.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: The change isn’t that much, but the implications of it are huge.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: Maybe. Depending on the makeup of your fleet. Depending on your hiring process. Depending on—like, it really depends. It depends on a whole bunch of things. But the actual regulation and how it’s going to be enforced is really simple.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: I think people are just kind of having a bit of a freak-out because they don’t know the implications.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: And that’s what we’re going to talk about tomorrow—talk about what to do. I think some fleets are going to be in trouble.
Mark: Possibly. But at the same time, like you just said, the rule hasn’t changed. It’s just the penalty that’s changed.
Jane: Yes.
Mark: So did you have people—were you in violation of the rule before and just getting away with it? Okay, well, you were rolling the dice before. You can keep rolling the dice if you want.
Jane: It’s not rolling the dice because they didn’t—they didn’t—it did—
Mark: There was a penalty. There was a fine.
Jane: But they just stopped enforcing it.
Mark: Yeah.
Jane: That’s the whole thing. This is a law that has been on the books. This has been a rule: that people need to speak English. And we know this because to cross the border—to drive across the border—you’re supposed to be able to speak English and communicate with border officials.
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: So the Canadians have always—that’s always been in the back of my mind. Like, what do you mean? You have to speak English to cross the border. But apparently, it’s been relaxed so much. And people have used alternate, you know, means of communication. And it was relaxed on purpose in 2016—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: When they basically said don’t enforce it. And this is something they do—that CVSA and roadside enforcement—every once in a while. They say, “Okay, you’ve got six months before we enforce it. We’re doing some education. It’s the education period. Then after six months, we’re going to start fining you.” So they can choose to enforce something or not enforce something.
Mark: Yeah. It’s much easier than actually repealing a rule or creating a new one—that’s a whole lot of work. But deciding whether or not to enforce it, that’s much quicker.
Jane: There was something that I just learned—some other thing that’s big that they’re just not enforcing. And maybe I’m thinking it was like a COVID-related—
Mark: Mhmm.
Jane: I don’t remember. But it’s not unusual. Oh, I remember! What year was it when Hours of Service had that crazy overnight-to-night…?
Mark: Oh, yeah.
Jane: I think that rule is still in place. I don't think it's been repealed. They just don't enforce it.
Mark: I do remember that not being enforced.
Jane: For a while, I know that they didn't enforce it. I don't know what has happened to it yet because I haven't looked it up. But that, in the US, that rule of you have to—
Mark: I don't remember exactly what it was, but there was something that basically forced people to stop—
Jane: Off duty.
Mark: Off duty overnight, and it was gonna create a whole lot of havoc on the roads early in the morning. And yeah, it was just a nightmare.
Jane: Yeah. And everybody was having, like, a communal freak out about it.
Mark: Yep.
Jane: And I had written—and what bugged me was I had written these beautiful explanations of it.
Mark: Yeah. We had gotten new content. And I think for those changes, we had not just updated the existing course, but we'd put together a little short course. It was a summary of the new stuff.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And it was very short. It was like eight pages or something. But then pretty quickly after, all of those things basically got parked, and six of the eight pages were nothing.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: Well, you know, had a big pop-up on top of them that said, “This is no longer being enforced.” So there were actually two pages of useful content.
Jane: Yeah. That was frustrating. It's frustrating, but it was a really good learning opportunity because it told me—told me that sometimes when something is controversial, wait for a bit before you commit.
Mark: Wait for a bit before you commit. Yes. We definitely learned.
Jane: You know what? In TDG in Canada, that's kind of—we yeah.
Mark: Oh yes. There were supposed to be changes to the—
Jane: TDG regulations. And it was gonna be everybody has to do general awareness, and then people who are drivers have to do this kind of course, and people who are—like, if you're handling, you do these courses, if you're transporting, you do those courses. So you wouldn't be able to do TDG all in one course. You'd have to do it in sections. And so we actually restructured our TDG course to make sure that it met those sections. And I think we were starting to—actually no, Tiffany did start to rewrite or redo the content to meet the things that the rule was saying. And so we had this alternate course that was almost finished. And what we ended up doing—we did do some redesign of the course—but what we ended up doing was keeping the structure in there.
Mark: Because those new regulations went nowhere.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: And that—
Jane: Was closer. That was closer to being a real thing.
Mark: Yeah. It was at public committee, and then it got sent back—like public comments and sort of going through listening sessions—and then it got sent back to the drawing board because—
Jane: It—
Mark: Was way too negative, the response.
Jane: Which kind of brings me to the other thing that happened over the last little while—about the fake news.
Mark: Yeah. Okay.
Jane: And how to tell fake news.
Mark: Yeah. Quickly.
Jane: I love James. I—well, no. It wasn't James I was talking to. I was talking to James about it, but—
Mark: Well, Jim Park.
Jane: Jim Park. Yeah.
Mark: It’s a great story in Truck News.
Jane: Yeah. There's a story that's been going around about new driving laws in 2025.
Mark: That are all coming into effect July 1st in Canada.
Jane: Something like that. So if you believe that, stop believing it now because it's not true. There's some fake news sites that are pushing all kinds of drivel.
Mark: We think it's AI-generated content, which means 90% of it is wrong. It's based on something—like probably some proposed rule change or minor variation that's going into effect—and of course, the AI, being completely brain-dead, misinterprets it and puts out a whole bunch of garbage instead.
Jane: I don't even know about that. It sounds like it's almost on the up and up. But this one—Jim Park's article—if you take a look, I don't know what it's called—
Mark: It's something like “Fake News in Trucking,” and it’s in Truck News.
Jane: Yeah.
Mark: It’s a recent article from Jim Park.
Jane: And it's a little—it's a blog, so it's not a news article. It's an opinion piece. It is a real article. It's just not—it's a blog. And he does a really good job of talking about how to figure out if something is fake or not. I think one of the biggest things with regulations is that every time there's a regulation change, there's a whole whack of talking about it. So the government wants to talk about it. The government is going to tell you, “This is coming,” or “We have listening sessions,” or “What do you think about this?” There's always something like that. And they always give you lots and lots of time to get used to the rule. So they will say, “You’ve got a grace period for six months.” So if you only hear about a sudden change of rules, and there’s none of that that goes with it, and you can’t find an official Transport Canada or FMCSA source—it’s probably not true.
Mark: Is most likely not. Yeah. And when these things are changing, there are no surprises.
Jane: No. Because all of these different associations are talking about it and talking about the responses to it. So—
Mark: Well, like this English language thing. It actually started in April.
Jane: No. It started in February.
Mark: Oh. You know, the first articles I saw were in April, talking about it happening at the federal level in April. And all they're doing is a very quick change in the penalty and starting to enforce something that's already a rule. And it's not actually happening until the end of June. So there's like three months of notice on that—for something that's already a rule and they’re just going to start enforcing it again. So if there was an actual rule, you'd know about it two years in advance.
Jane: Oh yeah. If it was an actual rule—yeah. If they were—
Mark: It would be in the public a year or two in advance.
Jane: I think they would have had listening sessions. And CVSA wouldn’t be enforcing anything if there wasn’t any—
Mark: No. In the US, they have to start with an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. That tells you that it’s a long way off.
Jane: Uh-huh.
Mark: And the same thing happens north of the border too.
Jane: So when I said it started in February, that’s when the government and the state government in Arkansas first proposed the bill. The first bill was that—two things—you can’t have foreign CDL, which freaked out everybody in Canada. And two, you had to be proficient in English. Everybody was freaked out about that first part, so they didn’t talk about the second part. But that’s where it started. That’s where all this whole thing started.
Mark: Okay. And for more on that—
Jane: Yes. Tune in tomorrow because we will tell you.
Mark: Or go to our website and look at the recording of the webinar, which will be up shortly after this podcast goes live. And that, I think, is going to bring us to the end for today.
Jane: To the end of our season.
Mark: To the end of our season.
Jane: Have a great summer, everyone. I hope it’s enjoyable and safe.
Mark: Have a great summer, and we’ll see you in the fall.