Tempo di lettura: 9 minuti
How Carreras gets 900+ drivers road-ready before peak season
Carreras, a Zaragoza logistics group with more than 900 truck drivers, stopped trying to bring its drivers to the training and started taking the training to them: short modules on a phone or tablet, one central version of each course and peaks planned months ahead. In the words of its HR team, the goal is to "centralise the content to decentralise the consumption".
Truck drivers are, by most accounts, the hardest group in a logistics company to train in person. They are rarely in the same place, rarely at the same time and almost never at head office. Carreras Grupo Logístico, founded in Zaragoza in 1933, has more than 900 of them.
In a Vidext Experts webinar on training in logistics, Javi Nadal, from the Development and Talent area of Carreras' central HR department, explained how the group trains its drivers and warehouse teams across some 40 sites, and how it prepares for peaks it knows are coming. This article collects what he said, in his own words. Quotes are translated from Spanish and lightly edited for filler words.
| Founded | 1933, headquartered in Zaragoza |
| Sites | Around 40 in Spain, plus Portugal, France and Italy, and a digital subsidiary in Argentina |
| People | Around 3,300 |
| Warehousing | More than 800,000 m², mainly consumer goods and food, also industrial |
| Fleet | More than 1,000 vehicles and more than 900 drivers |
| Training in 2025 | 5 to 6 courses per employee, around 16,000 learners |
All figures as given by Javi Nadal during the webinar.
Before the change, training at Carreras followed what Nadal calls "a much more traditional model": a heavy weight on in-person sessions and "a lot of people involved in coordination, being a multi-site company", across every shift. Written material did not fill the gap. With manuals and PDFs, he said, "people either read them once or don't read them at all".
Drivers made the problem sharper than anywhere else.
"The hardest profile to train in person is truck drivers, because their day-to-day is being away from home."
Bringing them together was not realistic either. "Calling them all to our head office in Zaragoza was a huge undertaking in terms of logistics and organisation," Nadal said. Every hour a driver spends travelling to a classroom is an hour the vehicle is not on the road.
The principle that now runs Carreras' training fits in one sentence, and Nadal put it in exactly those words: centralise the content to decentralise the consumption.
In practice, that means one version of each course, built centrally, so that every site receives the same message and the same concepts. Each site, or delegation, keeps the flexibility to add its own content on top. Nadal gave the Valencia delegation as an example: the core is shared, and the local specifics are added there.
For drivers, consumption happens wherever they are. The driver training Carreras has already rolled out, on efficient driving, covers ergonomics, vehicle wear, the environment and accident prevention. It is delivered in modules of 5 to 10 minutes, which drivers complete on a company phone or tablet instead of travelling to head office.
Nadal did not pretend everyone was convinced from day one. "There will always be people who are reluctant to change," he said. But the team has noticed "an increase in participation", and he summarised the feedback from employees like this:
"It's much easier for me to watch a 5 or 10 minute video that I have available on my phone, and if I have a question I can go back to it, than to stop operations to read a manual."
The second half of that sentence matters as much as the first. A module the driver can reopen becomes a reference, not just an event. And nobody has to stop the operation for it.
Logistics peaks are not surprises, and Nadal's point was that training should not treat them as if they were. "Forecasting is quite important," he said. "We always know when they are going to happen."
At Carreras, Christmas, with its nougat, chocolates and sweets, "is total madness". The difference is in when the training starts:
"Knowing from June that you are going to bring in 100, 200, 300 new people, and having it planned, and not thinking: 'there are already 100 people inside, now I have to train them'."
Each department has its own peak. For transport, Nadal mentioned the beer season, which starts in March or April. The same logic applies: if the date is known, the courses can be ready before the people arrive.
The change was not only for learners. Nadal described two goals from the start: "to have a greater impact, to reach a greater number of people", and to gain agility "to generate our own content" without spending a large part of the working day on it.
On the second goal, he was direct: in HR, "the capacity to generate content has multiplied a lot". He also linked the scale of training in 2025, around 16,000 learners and 5 to 6 courses per employee, in part to the tool the team adopted. He framed it as one factor, not the only one.
The before and after fits in one line:
"We used to produce a 50-page PDF that nobody read."
The goal now, in his words, is for training "to reach our people when they really need it".
Asked about AI, Nadal put people first: "We are a department where people are the central focus. We have to choose very carefully where AI can help us, as a means, not as a goal."
That position matches how a training team keeps control of what its people learn. With platforms like Vidext, AI agents build the course from the company's own documents and procedures, and the training team reviews it and gives the go-ahead before anyone sees it. The judgement about what drivers should learn stays with the people who know the operation.
He also shared what he believes works best digitally: training that has to reach many people, that is visual and that is flexible. And a broader conclusion: "If you work well on the content and the structure of the training, any training can be delivered digitally."
The next project at Carreras is onboarding: standardising it and adapting it by profile, warehouse or office, with real images of the site and the processes each person will carry out. Nadal explained why it matters so much to the group:
"Onboarding is one of the most important things in the employee life cycle, and it has a big influence on how stable the person will be in the company."
Reading Carreras' experience from the outside, four lessons stand out for any fleet with drivers spread across sites and routes:
How these pieces fit together with the legal hours every professional driver already owes is covered in our analysis of why driver training still feels improvised.
Carreras did not solve driver training by adding hours or by asking drivers to come in more often. It solved it by deciding where each thing lives: the content in one place, built and maintained centrally, and the training wherever the driver is, in pieces short enough to fit between deliveries.
For a group with more than 900 drivers and peaks it can see coming months ahead, that is less a technology decision than an organisational one. The technology just made it possible to act on it.
Carreras delivers driver training, such as its efficient driving course on ergonomics, vehicle wear, the environment and accident prevention, in modules of 5 to 10 minutes that drivers complete on a company phone or tablet, instead of travelling to head office in Zaragoza.
It means building one central version of each course so that every site receives the same message and concepts, while each site can add its own content and each person completes the training wherever they work.
By planning it months in advance. For the Christmas peak, the group knows from June roughly how many new people it will bring in, so the training is ready before they arrive instead of being organised once they are already on site.
Programma di promozione dell'assunzione a tempo indeterminato di giovani qualificati, nell'ambito del Sistema Nazionale di Garanzia Giovani. Vidext ha ricevuto una sovvenzione di 25.401€, concessa da LABORA (Servizio Valenciano per l'Impiego e la Formazione), per l'assunzione a tempo indeterminato nel 2024 di giovani qualificati iscritti al Sistema Nazionale di Garanzia Giovani, azione suscettibile di cofinanziamento da parte del Fondo Sociale Europeo Plus (FSE+) 2021-2027 o di qualsiasi altro fondo dell'Unione Europea. Expediente ECOGJU/2024/550/46. La presente pubblicazione è effettuata in adempimento degli obblighi di trasparenza stabiliti dalla Legge 19/2013, del 9 dicembre.
