The life of a mobile crane operator has to be one of the most varied and most interesting out of all heavy equipment operators. These cranes are mobile for a reason – they go from job to job, often performing a handful of lifts every day.

You may see these vehicles on the roads from time to time. They look like a truck with a crane tower hanging over the cabin. The operator drives the vehicle from one job to another, quickly setting up and doing the job required. They then move on to the next job and each job can be so totally different to the last.

These cranes also serve a special role in our lives, which most of us hope is never called upon. In an emergency they can be the difference between life and death. Motor vehicle accidents, truck rollovers and even train derailments. These often require the services of a mobile crane operator and his rig.

In these situations, they need the immense lifting power of a crane, but they are often limited to the amount of space available to work in and the need for speed. Mobile cranes can quickly lift heavy objects clear of danger or, in the case of truck rollovers, right the vehicle so it can be towed away and the roads cleared.

Mobile crane operators used under these circumstances need to be highly skilled and extremely patient. They also need to be able to listen to, and to follow, orders from those in charge of the situation. More importantly, they need to be able to respond quickly to instructions from those on the ground as the lifting is undertaken. There are times when stop really does mean stop – an extra inch and you may cause even bigger problems.

Of course, mobile crane operators learn the basics of their trade through training establishments such as ATS Heavy Equipment Operator Schools. Once they have finished their mobile crane training it may take many years before you have acquired the skills and experience that is required in an emergency. Then again, in emergency situation, you may be the only person in a position to respond. Are you ready for it?

In years gone by, the cab of most heavy equipment was, to say the least, pretty bare. In fact, for some equipment there was no cab, only a set of roll bars, if you were lucky. Today’s cabs are a far cry from those early days.

If you thought modern cars had it all, you’re wrong. The cab of some heavy equipment, for example an excavator or grader, is full of gadgets, dials and mod cons. Let’s start with the cab itself. Gone are the roll bars and mesh sides. Now you have a fully enclosed cab with broad and often deep windows. As an operator, you have a complete 360 degree view, yet the machine itself maintains a safe posture when it comes to a roll over.

The modern seat has all the aspects of a luxury car – plus some. Height adjustment, seat angle and lumbar support are just some of the features. Some seats can rotate a full 360 degrees. Some even have internal heating for those cold winter days. Talking about heat – how about full reverse cycle air conditioning? – climate control at that.

We haven’t even got to the controls yet. Steering is, of course, power steering. Brakes are the best in the business, power assisted where necessary. You have a wealth of dials letting you know oil pressures, hydraulic pressures and – oh yes, your speed as well.

The cab of today’s heavy equipment could almost fit into the luxurious category. I have seen cabs with small coolers to keep your drinks cool. Radio, CD and GPS are almost standard along with a two-way radio system to stay in contact with fellow workers.

All things considered, its no wonder that heavy equipment operation is becoming a popular career choice. Can you imagine undertaking some of your heavy equipment operator training in that sort of environment? Of course, there are still quite a few of the old machines around for those that truly love the outdoors. If you ever get the opportunity – take a tour and marvel at how good the cab of most modern heavy equipment is.

There is a misconception surrounding heavy equipment that focuses employment wholly and solely in the construction or mining sectors of business. This is so very far from the truth. I mean, even farmers use a range of heavy equipment each day on their farms.

It is true that construction and mining probably do require more heavy equipment operators than most other sectors, however, areas such as forestry also have a strong demand for qualified operators. They are not the only areas. You can add landscaping, shipping and even warehousing to that list.

Warehousing and heavy equipment? I see your raised eyebrows. It does of course come down to the size and type of warehouse. Most warehouses use cranes of some description to help move products. I have seen some warehouses that use bulldozers or loaders to push certain products around.

It is a similar story in the shipping industry with crane operators being in high demand along with experienced bulldozer operators.

It is the forestry industry that is perhaps the most surprising. They don’t require heavy equipment operators in a normal sense. This industry uses equipment that has been created for a specific task. A good example is the stump cutter – designed to totally remove old tree stumps. There are special machines used to prune back trees so they grow tall and straight with no side growth.

What forestry does have in common with other sectors of business is the need for suitably trained heavy equipment operators. If you have experience and knowledge on a range of heavy equipment then those skills can be sold to a forestry company. The skills are very easily transferred to new specialist machines.

Heavy equipment training takes you through the basic skills required to be successful in a wide range of career opportunities. Don’t just narrow your focus on the obvious. If you want to be a stump cutter then start by undertaking some basic heavy equipment training – it may just open some doors for you.

Heavy equipment careers are not quite the same as many other careers. Sure, most careers offer a lifetime of employment opportunities. Many also offer advancement opportunities, sometimes to the very top of a business empire. A career in heavy equipment does offer a lifetime of employment opportunities, but it goes far beyond that.

For starters, qualified and experienced heavy equipment operators can work just about anywhere in the world. You may have to learn some of the local safety aspect, but otherwise, heavy equipment is heavy equipment.

Many operators decide that rather than relying on someone else for employment, they will buy their own equipment and start working for themselves. This can be particularly lucrative if you start out with one of the smaller machines like a bobcat or small backhoe.

A career in heavy equipment goes beyond all of that. Being part of a construction team is a little like being in the military. You develop a strong sense of camaraderie – you’re prepared to go into battle for one another. Construction teams develop these strong bonds as they work together day-in and day-out, often in potentially dangerous situations, and become well oiled units that complete projects with little problems.

Even when a team splits up, for instance, when a project finishes, those bonds remain. You can see it, even years down the track when they meet up again on a new job. You can see the effect these teams have when you watch a new arrival – particularly a young person. As they become a part of the team, their confidence grows and with it their ability to get a job done well.

Heavy equipment careers are not just careers for life. Heavy equipment careers become your life – but not in a negative or overpowering way. For the tens of thousands of operators out there, the life of a heavy equipment operator is second to none. They love the work, they love the hours, and they love their work team. There are not many people in careers who can say that – for the whole career.

Heavy equipment training is not the same everywhere. As with any business, you have good operators and poor operators and many that fall somewhere in between. So what is validating and how do you do it? The term validating in this case refers to checking the suitableness of the training to your needs. This involves checking the training methods and ensuring the credibility of the training itself.

The next question is how to validate your training. Your first step has to be to talk to the training organization to determine how they deliver their training. The second step is to talk to former students to get their feedback on heavy equipment training. This can be difficult. However, good training organizations will have testimonials in either written or video format. The most reliable are the video format testimonials – you can read people’s faces as they talk to gauge how honest the testimonial is.

If you’re fortunate, you may even get to talk to the end users, the employers. They are the people who can really tell you how effective the training has been. If you can’t actually talk to the employers, you can at least get an indication of how successful a heavy equipment training organization is by the list of employers on their job’s database – if they have one.

ATS Heavy Equipment Operators Schools are not the only organization offering training in this field. However, when it comes to validating your training, you can talk to us, you can review video testimonials from former students, and we do have a large group of satisfied employers on our jobs database. We also go one step further by offering free online training. This is a unique opportunity to get a feel for heavy equipment training – all in your own home at your own pace. Before undertaking heavy equipment training – get some form of validation – it is time well spent.

I recently wrote on how to Become An Excavator Operator And Learn To Control A Real Monster – today I could almost eat my words. Over the last ten days or so I have watched with interest an excavator, admittedly one of the smaller variety, working away each day on a new pipeline. Although we have been in the industry for decades, I can still watch them at work with a certain amount of awe.

What caught my attention with this job? The excavator operator’s ‘fine’ skills. The excavator wasn’t being used as a ‘monster’, at least not all the time. Let me give you a run down on the job.

Day one – the excavator operator used the bucket like a butter knife to gently peel away the turf from the surface. This was neatly piled to one side of the job.

Day two and three – the excavator became the monster and dug a fairly deep and fairly wide trench ready for the pipes to be laid.

Day four – each pipe was rigged to the excavator bucket and gently lowered into the trench. One by one they all went in.

Day five – the trench was back-filled. I thought that was it – job done and I won’t see them again. Wrong.

Day six – back again – this time, as gentle as a baby, the excavator operator carefully scraped and combed the sides of the filled-in trench pulling in all the loose debris. Behind him his fellow workers were relaying the turf that had been pulled up on day one.

Now they are gone. I couldn’t resist it; I had to go and look at the worksite. You can see where the turf has been put down. However, that is all you can see. You would never know there had been a deep trench there a couple of days earlier. That excavator operator had cleaned the area to perfection – that takes skills – skills that are acquired first through quality excavator operator training, and secondly through years of practice.

I know his face looked familiar. I may have seen him on another work site – but then again, I wonder if he was one of ours and had undertaken his training through ATS Heavy Equipment Operator Schools. I should have asked.

There is a lot more to driving a dump truck than often meets the eye. One thing is for sure – a dump truck driver is not your average truck driver. Granted, a dump truck driver does need to know how to drive a truck. They do need to know the road rules and meet all the requirements of a general truck driver. It just doesn’t stop there.

If you consider the role of a dump truck driver, they are required to drive from point A to point B with a load, and dump it. Okay you say, a dump truck driver also needs to know how to operate the dump mechanism that tips the tray to dump the load. Whilst this is true, many dump truck drivers need added skills.

One of the most important skills that a dump truck driver requires is the ability to spread a load over a distance. This could be gravel that is evenly spread over a 100 yard stretch of newly formed road. You may have seen these drivers. They start the tilt on the dumper whilst driving at an even speed. The load is spread as the truck moves forward. The skill is knowing how fast to drive and how far to tip the tray.

These skills are developed during your training but it is on the job experience that hones those skills. In the hands of an expert dumper, that load of gravel can spread to the point it looks like a grader has gone over it to smooth it out.

Whilst dump truck driving is a specialist area of truck driving, undertaking truck driver training provides you with the skills and licensing that can open the doors to a wide variety of trucking jobs. These may be long distance haulage or local deliveries; hauling heavy equipment or driving that dumper. Either way, you will have a skill for life and a qualification that can provide employment nationwide.

When people think of heavy equipment, their initial reaction is to think of bulldozers, graders, excavators, and perhaps backhoes. There is actually a much wider range of machinery that is used in construction or mining that is classified as heavy equipment – you may often see it in use without having a name to put to it.

Skid steer loaders, or skid loaders as they are often called, are one example. Although small and lightweight in comparison to their much larger relatives, the skid steer is nonetheless important on a job site. The skid steer gets its name from the way it operates.

This little machine is run in four wheel drive with the left and right wheels driven independently. That means the left can be moving forward whilst the right hand side is stopped, effectively turning the machine on the spot. Because the right hand side is stopped, it will ‘skid’ through the turn.

A skid steer loader is often used in tight situations where larger equipment has no access. Although its normal configuration is with a loader attachment, there are many other attachments that can be used. These include backhoe, hydraulic breaker, pallet forks, angle broom, sweeper, auger, mower, snow blower, stump grinder, tree spade, trencher, dumping hopper, ripper, tillers, grapple, tilt, roller, snow blade, wheel saw, cement mixer, and wood chipper machine.

Another piece of heavy equipment that you may see in use is referred to simply as a scraper – since that is what it does. This is a strange looking piece of equipment – they often remind me of a strange looking insect. The machine is comprised of a scraper blade, a little like a cheese knife, a hopper, and an articulated drive cab. The machine is used to scrap layers of the surface depositing the scraped material into the hopper. Like a cheese knife, they are good at slicing even layers from the surface leaving a fairly smooth surface.

There are many other different types of heavy equipment, each requiring certain skills to operate them effectively. These skills need to be developed using the equipment on a suitable surface, or in work-like situations. Before selecting a heavy equipment training provider, check whether or not they provide training on the type of equipment you want to operate, and whether or not they provide real life training – ATS Heavy Equipment Operators Schools do.

Training on loaders used to be so boring. It often relied on you simply spending hours on end moving a pile of earth from A to B and when you were finished, moving it back again. These days, training on loaders has become far more interesting and doesn’t just rely on building hours in a loader operator’s seat.

When you undertake loader training now you find the course far more comprehensive and interesting than in years gone by. There is a requirement for you to undertake safety training – a requirement that could prevent you from entering a construction site unless you have completed it.

Safety of course is one issue. Now, when you get out into the field and work as a loader operator you are expected to know a lot more than just how to move that pile of dirt. There are basic, and sometimes not so basic, general equipment maintenance tasks and inspections that need to be undertaken – often on a daily basis.

Loader training now goes beyond simply operating a loader. Most heavy equipment training programs also include instruction on other machines such as a bulldozer, grader and backhoe. For the student, this has several benefits. First, and most importantly, you are not restricted to just one machine. You can obtain employment operating a much wider range of equipment.

Even if you wanted to specialize on a loader, knowing how other equipment works, what their limitations are and how they handle gives you a much better understanding of that equipment when they are working around you on a construction or mining site.

Today’s construction sites are often very different to those of the past. Operators move between various types of heavy equipment, particularly when construction is going on around the clock. If you’re looking for wheel loader training then contact the very best in the business – ATS Heavy Equipment Operator Schools. We will get you started in the career of your choice.

Take on training to become an excavator operator and you have the potential to get into the control cab of one of the best machines around. Heavy equipment that is used in mining and construction come in many different configurations but nothing that beats the brute power of a giant excavator.

Most of the excavators you see working on building sites, on the side of the road excavating channels, or scarping a new road bed range in size of 5-60 tons. Their buckets can carry as much as a ton or two and their digging power is immense.

Take that image and multiply it a little – alright – multiply it a lot. Imagine a machine that weighs around 800 tons and the amount of material collected in a bucket is around the 75 ton mark. In fact, with those statistics, imagine a beast with a bucket and the strength to lift two or more of its little brothers.

Most excavator operators only get to dream of operating a huge monster like that. They do exist, though, predominantly in the mining industry, but also on some construction sites where excavating large holes is called for. A good example is where they include a multi-level underground car park. The excavator’s job is to dig that hole and it needs to be dug exactly to specifications.

One of the benefits of excavator operator training is that you are taught to operate a wide variety of machines. Once you have completed your training you can then go on to specialize on a particular type of machine ranging from backhoe to bulldozer and on to an excavator. Get a few years experience on an excavator and you can try to find your way through to one of those giants. Can you imagine the power that sits in that engine room? Many of those giants have not one, but two large diesel powered engines, each delivering as much as 2000HP – now that is what I call a monster machine.