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Drivers already owe 35 training hours every five years. Why does driver training still feel improvised?
The law fixes how many hours a professional driver must train, not what a company teaches them about its own routes, customers and vehicles. The statutory hours get booked because the licence depends on them. The company's own training is left to whoever has time that week, and that is the part drivers feel is improvised.
Few frontline jobs have their training hours written into law as precisely as professional driving. In the European Union, every truck, bus and coach driver needs 35 hours of periodic training every five years to keep the Driver CPC qualification, recorded as code 95 on the licence.¹ Fleets plan around that deadline because a driver without it cannot work.
The hours are not the problem either. In Spain, transport and storage companies that used their state training credit in 2024 gave each trained employee 27.4 hours of training on average, above the 22.9 hours across all sectors, according to FUNDAE, the public foundation that manages that credit.² By that measure, the sector trains more than most.
And yet ask a driver, a traffic manager or a depot lead how training works, and the answer is often a version of "it depends". It depends on who is in the office, on which shift you are on and on whether someone remembered to tell you that the customer changed its dock rules. In this article we look at why driver training still feels improvised when the hours are fixed, and what changes when a fleet treats its own training as something it produces, not something that happens.
The Driver CPC regulates the legal minimum with real precision. Everything that makes a driver good at working for a specific company sits outside it.
| Element of driver training | Fixed by the Driver CPC | Left to the company |
|---|---|---|
| Hours | 35 hours every five years, in units of at least 7 hours¹ | How much time goes to the company's own procedures |
| Content | General subjects: safe and fuel-efficient driving, regulations, health, safety and service¹ | Routes, customer sites, vehicles, loading rules, incident lessons |
| Timing | Before the end of each five-year cycle | When a driver learns about a change that happens today |
| Format | Classroom and practical sessions, with up to 12 hours by e-learning¹ | Whether updates reach drivers who are never at the depot |
| Record | Code 95 on the licence or qualification card | Who was trained on which version of which procedure |
The CPC column is predictable, so it gets planned. The company column changes every month, has no deadline written into a licence and rarely has a named owner. That is where the improvisation lives.
Periodic CPC training is usually booked with an approved training centre. The centre delivers the hours and issues the certificate, so that box is ticked. The company's own training has no equivalent. In most fleets it falls to the traffic manager, the fleet manager or a senior driver, people whose main job is getting vehicles on the road on time. Training gets done in the gaps between planning, which means it gets done when there is a gap.
A warehouse can gather a shift in front of a screen for ten minutes. A fleet cannot. Long-haul drivers may not pass through the depot for days, night drivers miss the morning briefing and agency drivers may come in for a single route. A briefing at the depot reaches whoever happens to be there, so the same rule reaches different drivers weeks apart, or not at all.
A fleet's own procedures change constantly: a new customer with its own site rules, a new trailer type, a revised loading sequence, a lesson from last month's incident. Each one is small. None justifies a formal course. So each one becomes a phone call, a WhatsApp message or a laminated sheet in the cab, and after a year the "training" for a route is a pile of messages that nobody could reconstruct.
The CPC record lives on the licence and in the training centre's system. The company's own training, when it is recorded at all, lives in attendance sheets and spreadsheets in the depot office. When a customer audit, an insurer or an incident investigation asks what a driver was taught about a specific procedure, the fleet can prove the 35 hours but often cannot prove the part that was actually about that procedure.
Improvised training works, more or less, when the same experienced drivers stay for years and learn the company's way by doing. That workforce is shrinking. The IRU, the global road transport organisation, puts the shortage at more than 502,000 unfilled driver positions in Europe, a shortage rate of 13%, and expects a further 660,000 drivers to retire by 2030.³
Both numbers push in the same direction. Fleets hire more drivers who are new to the company, more agency drivers who come and go and fewer veterans who carry the unwritten rules in their heads. Every one of those changes makes "ask someone at the depot" a weaker training model.
The cost of getting it wrong is not abstract. The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) has called for EU action on work-related road deaths, pointing to how large a share of road fatalities involve someone driving for work.⁴ Not every crash is a training failure, but procedures for fatigue, loading and incidents are exactly the kind of company-specific knowledge the CPC hours do not cover.
The pattern behind all four problems is the same: the company's own training is treated as something that happens, not as something that gets produced. There is no source version of it, so every delivery is a fresh improvisation. Changing that does not require more hours. It requires a different way of building the hours a fleet already spends.
In practice, a produced company layer has four features:
The bottleneck has always been the second point: producing short, accurate updates fast enough is what the traffic manager never has time for. That is the part that has changed. With platforms like Vidext, the person responsible for the fleet describes what changed and attaches the procedure or the customer's instructions, an agent proposes a course plan and builds it, and nothing reaches drivers until that person reviews it and gives the go-ahead. The traffic manager stays the one who decides what drivers are taught. They just stop being the one who has to build it by hand.
How those pieces fit into a full programme, with refresher triggers and the records to keep, is covered in our guide to driver training programmes.
These questions are a quick way to see which side of the line a fleet is on. Each one should have an answer that does not start with "it depends".
A fleet that can answer all five has a programme. A fleet that answers two or three has the CPC hours and good intentions, which is where most fleets are.
The Driver CPC solved one problem well: it guarantees that every professional driver in Europe receives a minimum of general training on a fixed cycle. It was never designed to teach a driver how one company works, and that part was always going to fall to the company.
What feels improvised is not the regulation. It is the company layer that has no source, no owner and no record, delivered by whoever happens to be at the depot. As fleets hire more drivers who are new to them, that layer is the one worth fixing, and the hours are not what is missing. What is missing is the production.
Professional truck, bus and coach drivers in the EU must complete 35 hours of periodic training every five years to keep the Driver CPC qualification. The training is delivered in units of at least seven hours, and up to 12 of the 35 hours can be delivered through e-learning under the conditions each Member State sets.
No. The Driver CPC covers general subjects such as safe and fuel-efficient driving, regulations, health, safety and customer service. Company procedures, routes, customer site rules, vehicle-specific checks and lessons from incidents are the company's responsibility and are not part of the statutory hours.
Drivers rarely gather in one place at one time, company procedures change often and the company's own training usually has no dedicated owner. Updates delivered in person at the depot reach drivers at different times or not at all, and records are often split between the CPC certificate and internal spreadsheets.
Keep one written version of each procedure, turn each change into a short update within days, send it to drivers on their phone so it does not depend on visiting the depot, and record which version each driver completed. A person responsible for the fleet should review and approve each update before it goes out.
Agency and temporary drivers bring their own CPC qualification, but not the company's procedures. They drive the same vehicles to the same customers, so they should complete the same company-specific training as employed drivers, ideally before their first route.
¹ Directive (EU) 2022/2561 on the initial qualification and periodic training of drivers - EUR-Lex ² Clave anual 2024: formación en las empresas - FUNDAE ³ Europe faces 502,000 driver vacancies, IRU warns - Trans.info ⁴ ETSC calls for EU action as data reveal scale of work-related road deaths - European Transport Safety Council
Programme to promote permanent employment of qualified young people within the framework of the National Youth Guarantee System. Vidext has received a grant of €25,401 awarded by LABORA (Valencian Employment and Training Service) for the permanent hiring in 2024 of qualified young person(s) registered in the National Youth Guarantee System, an action eligible for co-financing by the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+) 2021-2027 or any other European Union fund. Expediente ECOGJU/2024/550/46. This publication is made in compliance with the transparency obligations established by Spanish Law 19/2013 of 9 December.
