They used to say there were two certainties in life, death and taxes – they missed the third one, garbage. Every society produces it and every society has problems handling it. At the forefront of waste disposal and landfill are the bulldozers and bulldozer operators. We should be thankful they do such a good job too.

It has to be one of those things in life that we take too much for granted. It is so easy to sit in our homes, we cook, we eat, we accumulate garbage. What do we do, we take it out to the trash can each day and, on the right day, take the trash out ready to be emptied. From that point on, we don’t want to know.

I won’t go into all the processes. Suffice to say your rubbish ends up in a landfill site somewhere. Garbage trucks empty the often compacted waste on to the landfill pile. From there, bulldozers spend the day turning the garbage over, slowly mixing it, breaking it up, and then burying it all. The bulldozer itself acts a compactor, compacting the ground and previously garbage. And they do this all day, everyday.

Whilst it may sound like a mindless task, a bulldozer operator working on a landfill site cannot afford to be mindless. They must be alert, forever watching for dangerous objects, and objects that shouldn’t be there. At the same time they need to have a good knowledge of the process they are involved with. Landfill management is a very exacting science. Garbage can only be a certain thickness before requiring a coverage of soil. The area needs to rest for a while – this is why landfill sites are forever changing their dumping zones.

Training to be a bulldozer operator is not that difficult. Working as a bulldozer operator on a landfill site that involves domestic garbage is one that requires experience and patience – a well guarded nose also helps.

You may not be aware of it but if you have a local football stadium, hockey fields or even soccer grounds then you can be sure a motor grader has had an integral role in the creation of those playing areas. In fact, when you look around at most recreation centers, if they are flat, or built on a flat piece of ground, then a motor grader had a role.

These days, the motor grader can do almost all the work involved in creating sporting grounds. From carving out the top of native soil to smoothing and leveling the base materials used. Sports such as hockey use an artificial surface, a form of synthetic grass, to play on. These artificial surfaces require perfectly flat terrain before they can be laid. Motor graders, particularly those equipped with laser guidance and/or GPS systems are capable of preparing a flat and even surface of the size required.

Of course, as a grader operator you won’t be working on sports grounds too often unless you’re employed by a professional sports ground construction business. However, this is one example of the variety of work that grader operators do on a regular basis.

What professional grader operators do have in common is a background that includes a heavy equipment operator training through an accredited training organization. This ensures their training credentials are recognized throughout the nation and that the training has been designed to meet a minimum set of standards. Fancy working on the next major football stadium, perhaps an Olympic stadium? If so, start your training now – you won’t regret it.

You may wonder what a search engine like Google and heavy equipment job placement have in common. Not a lot really, except one: Google, is becoming a fairly reliable tool when it comes to trends and statistics.

As a predictor of the economy, a lot of experts are now taking note of what is happening within the search engines. It makes sense too. At present, Google is reporting a drop in the number of searches related to finding employment. That is one area that does relate to job placement. If job searches are down it may indicate a drop in competitiveness in job applications – in other words, if a heavy equipment operator vacancy is advertised, there will be fewer applicants for the position.

There is a second more important set of statistics that is coming out of Google and these stats really do relate to construction in general and to heavy equipment operations by association. Google has reported a marked increase in real estate and property searches. They have also reported an increase in searches related to building new properties.

If you put these figures together, a drop in the number of people looking for work and an increase in the demand for new buildings, there is only one conclusion – opportunities for new heavy equipment operators will steadily increase. We already have the situation where many states are fast tracking construction projects. This has already started to put a strain on heavy equipment operator numbers. If Google’s statistics are right, we are going to see an increase in new home building which will, over time, lead to a severe shortage of heavy equipment operators.

For anyone looking for a change of career, completing a heavy equipment operator training program now could see them perfectly placed to advantage of this shortfall. There are good careers awaiting those who act now, job placement is getting easier – just ask Google – the new world economic trend statistician.

Excavators are doing so many functions these days that a comparison with 20, or even 10, years ago is almost impossible. Hammers, shears, thumps, and rotators – sounds more like characters from a kids cartoon series than a tool shed. But here is a quiz – which of those would you find in an excavator’s tool shed? Give up? Guess what, they can all be found in an excavator’s tool shed.

What has made excavating such an interesting career is that wide range of attachments. It goes beyond the attachments however. Think about what each of those attachments might do. Hammers hit, shears cut, rotators rotate and thumps, well let’s just say they thump. However, the action of each is very different. This means that over the years the excavators themselves have also changed.

Hydraulics has been one area of change but basic design has also changed with more emphasis placed on the sizes and size ratios of the booms and sticks. Human arms are a good comparison with the lower arm being proportional to the upper arm.

In fact, humans do make a good comparison. The cab is the human body, the boom represents the upper arm and is joined to the body at a shoulder like joint. The stick is like the lower arm and is joined to the boom with an elbow like joint, and the bucket or attachment is like the hand, joined to the lower arm at the wrist. Excavators also rely on muscles and tendons to do the work, the exception being the hydraulics that do the actual work.

If you can imagine a person with only one hand, their missing hand replaced, not by one, but by a wide range of attachments. The excavator has the same capability and the range of attachments is incredible – so too are the names. Undertaking a reliable excavator training program is worth while just to learn the jargon.

Being an excavator is a great career. You are operating a machine that is virtually an extension of your arm, only a thousand times more powerful.

The backhoe has often been seen as a thrown together cross between a fully fledged excavator and a full size front-end loader. There is probably a little truth in it as well since the backhoe can do some of the work of an excavator using one end of the machine, and do some of the work of a front end loader using the other half.

Looking a little like a scorpion, backhoes have their place in construction, particularly when the jobs require the services of a smaller machine. Over the years new technology has made big inroads into the capabilities of excavators, road graders and to a lesser extent, bulldozers and front-end loaders. The backhoe hasn’t been forgotten with new attachments coming out all the time.

One attachment that came out several years ago really changed some of the capabilities of backhoes. There are times when a sidewalk needs to be torn up and the best machine for the job was the backhoe. However, there were times when the only way to complete the job involved damaging the areas either side of the sidewalk. A new tool called a Rototilt was introduced that completely changed the way a backhoe tackled the job. Now, a backhoe can dig up a sidewalk and cause little or no damage to surrounding areas.

This is just one attachment, there are hundreds of others. What has it meant to the backhoe? It is no longer a cross between an excavator and a front-end loader, it is a legitimate machine in its own right. Whilst the combined skills of an excavator operator and front-end loader operator are ideal, the backhoe now demands skills specific to the machine. If you are looking for a career in heavy equipment that is challenging and involves a lot of variety, consider undertaking backhoe training – it’s a career that continues to evolve and challenge operators – you will never find yourself becoming bored.

In a world that is being automated at a rapid rate, heavy equipment careers look to be safe from automation and one of the biggest reasons is simply dirt. The ezine on Grader and Excavation Contractor has a good article titled the Human Element – it’s well worth a read if you have any doubts on heavy equipment careers and robotics. The author, John Trotti, puts it very clearly:

Despite all the machinery involved, dirtworking is not merely a mechanical exercise. If it were, we could go immediately to robotics and spend our time shuttling back and forth between our favorite fishing hole and bank while legions of little black boxes did all the work. Instead, machine productivity starts with the operator’s underlying knowledge of dirt, without which all the skill in the world at video games doesn’t mean squat.

The writer goes on to lament the lack of farm grown workers that are moving into heavy equipment careers. Why? Farmers, including their children, have a sound working knowledge of dirt. They have to if they are going to be successful farmers. City breed workers that are moving into heavy equipment careers are starting without that knowledge of dirt. Of course, that doesn’t mean they cannot learn – they can and do. Even the young farmers who are coming off the land still need dirt education to some degree. After all, they know a lot about ‘their’ dirt, but not necessarily the dirt on the other side of the road.

What does this have to do with robots? Plenty. Robots can learn about dirt. However, think about it for a moment. For a robot to make decisions based on the dirt, it would need to drill a small sample, run a few tests, make a decision and act – but it would need to do it constantly because dirt changes. Experienced operators do all of that, in a split second, almost without thinking. It becomes intuitive. As they are digging through a loamy soil, if they suddenly hit rock or clay, they automatically change the way they attack the soil. There’s no drilling, no testing, just action.

Maybe one day a robot will be built that can act intuitively. I don’t expect to see it my life time, or yours for that matter. Heavy equipment careers will be safe for a long time to come so long as we learn all about the dirt as we work. That learning starts with a good heavy equipment training program – get the right foundation and your career is assured.

Now here is an unusual vehicle and an unusual truck driving job – operating a vacuum truck. As the name suggests, it is a truck that has a vacuum attachment and just like your home vacuum, it is designed to clean up dirt. Instead of vacuuming carpet, the vacuum truck cleans up after an excavator has been hard at work – you could say it was an excavator’s best friend.

Excavators are good at what they do – excavate. There are a lot of different devices that can be attached to excavators, unfortunately some of them make life a little harder. There are specialized drill attachments. These are great for drilling holes but leave behind all the drill castings from the hole. Rather than change back to a bucket to remove these castings, a vacuum truck works with the excavator sucking up the dirt as it is removed from the drill hole.

Of course, excavators themselves can only do so much. Their buckets can dig trenches and remove a high percentage of the dirt, however, the remnants often need removing by hand, or by vacuuming. Imagine removing sand from a child’s sand pit using a bucket and spade. Eventually you will be left with small amounts – too small for the bucket and spade to be effective. You could use something smaller, like a teaspoon to get at that last little bit – or a vacuum cleaner to do the job quickly – the same is true in construction.

Are there special skills require to operate a vacuum truck – not really, just a commercial drivers license. It’s an unusual job but one that does what would normally take several men many hours to do using hand tools. If you’re ever at an excavation site – keep your eyes open to see if they are using a vacuum cleaner on wheels – the vacuum truck, an excavator’s best friend.

One of the biggest advances in heavy equipment technology has not been in inventing something new, it has been in making the existing better. One area that has really seen improvements has been hydraulics. If you were to compare today’s heavy equipment with those of the 30 years ago, the biggest difference would be in how smooth and how fine the controls are now.

Thirty years ago, heavy equipment was cumbersome and awkward. It got the job done but there was a lot of grinding, shuddering and jerking that went on. Operators often climbed out of the cab (if it had one) at the end of the day feeling like they had been in huge vibration machine all day – in fact, they had.

Improvements to hydraulics have been huge. Using variable displacement pumps and closed center directional control valves, heavy equipment now runs smoothly. The vibrations have virtually disappeared, the shuddering and jerking replaced by smooth seamless movements. Operators now have the ability to operate their equipment to such fine degrees of measurement they can pick up an egg without breaking it or lower their buckets in fine increments so they are just touching the egg, again, without breaking it. This was impossible 30 years ago where ‘fine’ increments were measure in inches – several of them, not just one.

The benefits to an operator are immense. At the end of the day they don’t feel like they have been shaken to pieces. More importantly, they can perform their job with extreme accuracy to the point that other new technologies like laser guidance and GPS can be added. It’s pointless relying on laser guidance which requires accuracy to within fractions of an inch, if the equipment cannot perform to those standards. Today’s equipment can and does. Of course, that means heavy equipment training has changed and now focuses on using this new technology.

Being a heavy equipment operator is now one of the fine skills and brings with it a lot of job satisfaction. New heavy equipment technology, along with the improvements to existing technology, leads to better productivity – that’s a win-win for everyone involved in heavy equipment.

If you have ever visited or worked on a construction site you may have noticed one piece of equipment that seems to be everywhere. Chances are, it will be a wheel loader. They certainly are busy bees although others may refer to them as the ‘gopher’ of the heavy equipment team.

Gopher’s they are too. They dig holes, move dirt, carry pipes, remove rubbish and debris and do any other type of lifting and carrying that is required. About the only piece of heavy equipment that does more in the way of lifting than a loader is a crane, and that’s only because they have a longer arm. In fact, when it comes to working on a construction site, a loader operator has to be skilled enough to quickly switch from one mode, say loading dirt into a truck, to another such as carrying pipes and gently lowering them into a trench.

Wheel loaders not only do a wide variety of tasks with their scoop, they have a wide range of attachments that can be added. The list of attachments these days is almost endless. If you can think of a task, there will be an attachment of some description for a loader.

As I mentioned, loader operators require a range of skills. One of the best training programs available is one that provides experience on several different pieces of heavy equipment. If you can gain some experience in operating a bulldozer, excavator and backhoe, you will find that these skills can be blended and actually complement those of a loader operator.

Find a training program for loader operators that has this combination of skills and you will be set to enter the workplace ready to tackle most jobs. ATS Heavy Equipment Operator Schools provide training on a variety of heavy equipment and can have you work ready in as little as three weeks. Not only will they have you work ready, their employment assistance program can help you find that first job. What are you waiting for? – the construction industry needs operators now.

If you were to place a bulldozer and road grader side-by-side you would have to admit they were completely different machines. About the only similarity between the two is they both have blades. The bulldozer’s blade is front and center whilst the road grader’s blade is somewhat smaller in height, often wider, and slung under the machine. Looking at them, you would imagine they would do completely different types of work.

That was true several years ago. The bulldozer was the ‘bull’ of a construction site. Its job was to virtually tear everything up and leave the area relatively flat. The grader’s job was then to come in and do all the fine work to exact measurements.

As Bob Dylan once sang, ‘times they are a changing’. With the inception of modern technology such as GPS and laser leveling, bulldozers can now do many of the tasks often left to the road graders. Modern technology can now do wonders – in this case, taking a big powerful brute of a machine and turning it into a gentle machine that do a lot of the fine tuning once the domain of a road grader.

This doesn’t mean that road graders are now defunct. One of the reasons that laser leveling was introduced was to ease the load on road graders. They can now be left to perform the final finishing touches to a new road – the real ‘grading’ needed before the hard surface is laid.

What does this mean when it comes to employment opportunities and training? First, it reinforces the need to undertake training that includes experience on a variety of equipment. Secondly, it lifts the skill levels of operators. Bulldozer operators need to learn to use laser leveling and the art of grading using a dozer blade, whilst road grader operators need to hone their skills in the area of fine or finishing grading. It all comes back to training. Your heavy equipment training should include experience on both bulldozers and road graders – that will set you up to perform either role with ease.