The role of a heavy equipment operator has changed little over the years. They use their heavy equipment to move earth – in fact, in some circles, heavy equipment is referred to as either earth moving equipment or heavy earth moving equipment. Where there has been a change is in the requirements of some employers. It’s quite normal now to see employers asking for heavy equipment operators with CDL, a commercial drivers license. Employers are looking for operators who can truck the heavy equipment to a job site, unload, complete the task, then load up again and drive to the next job.

There are a number of reasons for the increase in demand for operators with a CDL. One is cost – why employ two people when one person can do both jobs. If employers hire both a truck driver and a heavy equipment operator, there is a risk that one will be sitting idle whilst waiting for the other to complete their role. One operator to do both jobs saves money – and in this day and age, that’s an important factor for any business. Another factor that has led to dual skill requirements is a lot simpler – there is a shortage of truck drivers and, in the past, employers have often struggled to find drivers to move heavy equipment.

Having complementary skills is also good for operators. It means they have several employment options. If it is quiet in the heavy equipment field, for example, during the winter months, then they can take on work as a truck driver as a fill-in until the demand for their skills returns – as it often does in the spring and summer.

For those considering entering the heavy equipment operating field, obtaining a CDL early can be a wise investment. Heavy equipment operator training only takes three weeks. If you are prepared to study at home, you can also gain a commercial drivers license with as little as three weeks of training. That’s a total of six weeks training to obtain dual skills that you will have for a lifetime and that you can use in a range of jobs. It certainly reduces the chances of long periods of unemployment.

Employers are often caught in a difficult situation when it comes to having employees who have been trained to a standard required in that particular workplace. Employers can opt to employ trainers themselves, however, this can be a lengthy and expensive process since trainers will need to develop training programs and organize testing processes that result in formally recognized qualifications. The alternative is to engage the services of a training company that trains in specialized equipment training.

The benefits of engaging a training company like Associated Training Services (ATS) are many. ATS already has a wide range of training programs developed. These can often be developed to suit your workplace. If not, our experienced staff can quickly develop a training program suited to your workplace. We have a long history of working with employers to deliver training designed specifically for their work environment and the equipment or work required. We deliver training in areas such as:

• Crane Operator Training, Testing and Certification,

• OSHA Compliant Rigging & Signal Person Training, Testing, and Qualification,

• Heavy Equipment Training, Testing and Qualification, and

• Class-A CDL Commercial Driver Training, Testing and Licensing.

It is important to have instructors who are certified and who utilize the latest training methods. We can deliver training on-site or in our training facilities. Contact us if you require specialized training for your workplace. We have fifty years of successful service to the industry and during that time has built a strong reputation for quality and delivering what the customer needs, not what we think you need. We work closely with industry, national accreditation organizations, and regulatory authorities to ensure our standards exceed those expected within the industry.

Safety starts NOW! Heavy equipment safety is now one of the most important issues in any workplace. So much so that special regulations are in place that are designed to force employers into ensuring that workplaces are safe. As a heavy equipment operator, you have an important role in this area. However, that safety starts with you personally, before you even start your heavy equipment’s engine.

As a heavy equipment operator, you will be required to follow certain regulations. Some of these regulations will be determined by the actual workplace. For example, on many construction sites, the general rule for all employees may be steel capped boots, work gloves, hard hats, and ear and eye protection – if you don’t comply you could be suspended and sent home until you are ‘work safe’. Continue to ignore the regulations and you will lose your job. On some sites there is a zero tolerance – you’ll lose your job immediately if you have blatantly ignored the regulations.

Other sites may be a little more relaxed, however, the more protection you have, the safer you are going to be. Remember, problems such as ear damage could take decades to show through, and by then it’s too late as the damage is permanent. It’s not just the safety equipment required. There are other safety issues that you need to learn to the point they become a habit. The ‘three points of contact’ rule is a good example. When boarding and leaving your heavy equipment, three points of contact (two feet and a hand, or two hands and a foot) will help to ensure you don’t slip and fall.

Some regulations may seem silly or pointless, however, they have been put in place for a reason, and that reason is to protect you. Other regulations are in place to ensure you don’t harm others or do damage to property. Follow the rules and you will help to ensure a safe workplace, or at least a safe workplace when it comes to your actions. One of the focuses of heavy equipment operator training is safety – not just because it’s a requirement but because it could prevent your, or someone else’s, death.

Building a new road is a fairly complex job, more so if the ground is covered with vegetation. If you were to take some time to watch a new road being built, you would be surprised at the equipment that is used to undertake the job from start to finish. The heavy equipment used includes:

• Bulldozer – the bulldozer is the first piece of machinery used in most construction work. The bulldozer’s job is to clear the land to be built on. When it comes to new roads, the bulldozer clears a strip of all vegetation and rocks and begins the levelling process.
• Loaders – loaders are used throughout the project to move earth and rocks. They are predominantly used initially to load excess earth into dump trucks for removal.
• Dump Trucks – whilst not really heavy equipment, dump trucks play an integral role as they are used to cart waste away and to cart in loads of road base used to build up the new road.
• Graders – graders perform the finishing work, ensuring the new road is smooth and has the right gradient to allow for water run-off.

Other equoipment used include water trucks that damp down the road base, rollers that are used to compress the road base, and specialist heavy equipment that lays the sealant to the prepared base. Like most modern production lines, each part plays their role to a timetable, ensuring a smooth completion of the job.

With new roads being constantly built around the nation, there is always plenty of work for those who operate heavy equipment. If you’re looking for a career as a heavy equipment operator, building new roads is rewarding in many ways, including financial and job satisfaction. You can become a part of one of these teams with as little as three weeks heavy equipment operator training.

Bulldozers would have to be one of the slowest moving pieces of heavy equipment in operation. If you’re looking for a speed machine, then bulldozers are definitely not for you. In most cases, you could outwalk a bulldozer, I doubt you’d raise a sweat trying to evade one. What they lack in speed they more than make up for in power, so whilst you could say that bulldozers are the slowest, it’s also true to say they are the strongest.

What slows a bulldozer down considerably is the fact they run on tracks rather than wheels. Those tracks may be slow moving, however, they can operate in all weather conditions and on very rough terrain. Where wheeled vehicles are prone to becoming bogged, bulldozers breeze through it all with barely a pause. This makes the slow moving bulldozer ideal for a wide range of applications in a wide range of industries.

Some of the areas you could work in as a bulldozer operator include mining, construction, demolition, agriculture and the military. In fact, the tracks used to operate bulldozers are the same as those used to operate tanks. Whilst bulldozers are famed for their large blades that push dirt, they can also have attachments added to the rear that can be used for a variety of jobs. The ripper is the most common, used to rip up hard surfaces like concrete, large rocks and tree stumps.

If you are looking for an interesting and well-paid career in heavy equipment operations, consider what a bulldozer has to offer. You can train to become a bulldozer operator in as little as three weeks, and considering the opportunities and wage rates available, that training should prove to be a good investment.  The training offered through Associated Training Services is undertaken using modern machiney in simulated work environments – the perfect solution for anyone looking for a career or career change.

After putting your career on a new path and completing the necessary training, it is imperative that you put those newfound skills to work immediately. There are a number of reasons. Obviously, you need to recoup the cost of your training, and for many people, training has meant leaving employment – and unemployment is not going to help you recoup those costs. There are other reasons that, long term, are more important.

If you think your heavy equipment operator training is going to make you an expert operator, think again. Training will give you the skills required to enter the workplace. Like most jobs, experience on the job is the final teacher, and it’s a lifelong teacher at that. By putting your new skills to work quickly, you can steadily build on them to become an expert operator.

We make job placement an essential part of your training here at Associated Training Services, and we want you to put your skills to use in the workplace as soon as possible.  Training, despite the best attempts, is really an artificial environment – we give you real work skills, however, it’s not until you get into that real environment that you can develop them.

Associated Training Services has connections to a lot of different businesses around the nation. Our training is well recognized to the point that employers often come to us looking for new operators – just check our jobs website occasionally (a free part of our service to students). Contact us at Associated Training Services if you want more information on training to become a heavy equipment operator.

Whilst some heavy equipment operators work by themselves, most are part of a team, and being a team player is of vital importance. Employers are really interested in one thing – getting the job done on time. If possible, they want the job to finish ahead of schedule, more so if there are contract bonuses for early completion. What they don’t want is to get behind schedule since this could lead to contract penalties. Construction companies generally engage project managers, and it is their job to work with everyone else to ensure that a project is completed as quickly as possible. As a heavy equipment operator, your role in any project is to work as part of the team to meet anytime goals.

Construction projects are quite complex. There are a lot of factors that go into scheduling each goal – for example, costs, location (how far the construction site is from raw materials such as cement suppliers, bitumen suppliers and quarries), and how much time is required to complete each step.

As a heavy equipment operator, you will need to work in conjunction with other heavy equipment operators, truck drivers, and other factors such as weather. If you’re not a team player, then the project could grind to a halt whilst they are waiting for you to complete your role. Having idle workers is dead money for any employer and will often result in a project falling behind time.

Employers then are looking for heavy equipment operators who are skilled in what they do, can get it right first time (every time), and who can work as part of that overall team. There is no longer a place for mavericks who want to do things their way, especially if safety factors are also ignored. Your work ethic in this regard starts with your heavy equipment operator training. Ideally, your heavy equipment training should be in a class environment where other students are also learning to operate heavy equipment. By learning to work together, you are laying the foundation for a successful career in heavy equipment operations.

If you’re interested in a career as a heavy equipment operator, you have a number of choices. You can learn to operate heavy equipment through friends or family, or you can learn as a part of a group – today’s successful operators learn their craft through recognized schools as part of a group of students since they also gain those all important team player skills.

Ask people what they thought an excavator did and they would most likely say they dug trenches. Modern excavators do far more than that; in fact, they are one of the most important units of heavy equipment on a demolition site. Excavators are also some of the primary units of equipment in mining, although the machinery itself bears a passing resemblance to your basic construction excavator – nevertheless, they are still excavators.

Training to become an excavator operator is fairly straightforward, however, it is recommended you learn to operate a variety of different heavy equipment. This broadens your work opportunities whilst giving you a better understanding of how heavy equipment works. Excavators are actually simple machines when it comes to their constructions. The equipment houses an operator’s cab that sits on tracks. The digging arm extends forward with the digging motion being towards the operator. Learning to operate this equipment then is based on an understanding of what each of the levers and pedals does and learning to coordinate your hands, feet, and eyes. Add in workplace safety training and you’re ready for employment.

That training only takes three weeks to complete (and includes instruction on a range of equipment). Once you have completed your excavator operator training you will be proficient in a number of different machines, including bulldozers, graders, loaders and of course, excavators. You can then look for employment where your skills can be refined and where you can learn to use many of the different attachments that an excavator can use.

Like the idea of working as an excavator operator? Can you spare three weeks to undertake the training? If you can answer “yes” to those two questions, then you’re well on the way to an exciting and well-paid career as an excavator operator.

Technology is slowly changing the way we do things when it comes to heavy equipment and the construction industry. This technology is now allowing some heavy equipment machinery to do jobs that were in the past restricted to one particular type of machine. Laser grade control is a good example. In the past, if you wanted grading, you needed to use a grader. If you had a small area that was hard to access, then grading needed to be done by hand, and that can be quite labor intensive.

Laser grade control is a two dimensional system that uses laser beacons that are set up around the area to be graded. The technology uses those beacons as a guide, adjusting the blade settings on heavy equipment ‘on-the-fly’ – that is, moment by moment as required by the terrain. Graders make good use of this system, however, it is not restricted to graders. Smaller equipment such as skid steers can have the technology fitted, and they can fit in smaller areas.

Whilst that is a good example of how laser grade controls can be used, the reality now is that technology such as this is being incorporated into bigger machinery. There is the potential to make graders, for example, redundant, however, when it comes to long grading projects such as road building, you just can’t beat a dedicated piece of machinery like a grader – they are built for this task, and they do it extremely well.

Some construction projects will use this technology in a range of heavy equipment and whilst a grader will do the bulk of the grading work, other machinery with this technology will be used in support. This could help to speed up the completion time of many projects, a happy thought for construction companies. The latest in laser grade control is 3D, however, whilst more powerful, it does come with a much higher price tag.

What does this all mean to those who are considering a career in heavy equipment operations, particularly as a grader operator? Learning how to use laser grade control will become more important, and whilst graders will now compete for some jobs with other machinery, there will still be strong demand for grader operators. The key to being a successful heavy equipment operator is to become proficient on a range of machinery – you’ll never be out of work then.

Terminology is something that everyone needs to come to terms with when starting a new career, and heavy equipment operations is certainly no different. Some terminology is manufacturer-specific, some regional-specific, whilst others often fit into the category of slang and only used in some workplaces. Loaders are a good example with the generic term ‘wheel loader’ the most common. Other forms of loader really depend on size or the way the loader operates when it comes to naming them. The following is a list of common terms used to name ‘wheel loader’.

• Front-End Loader – another generic term for a loader.
• Skip Loader – this loader is quite small, with the arms that control the loading shovel coming from behind the operator.
• Skid Steer Loaders – this is also a small loader and runs on tracks. It’s the tracks that give this loader its name. Each track runs independently with steering handled by stopping or reversing one track – hence the term ‘skid steer’ loader.
• Backhoe Loader – (often referred to as just a backhoe) is a combination of a wheel loader and excavator (or hoe, which is at the back of the vehicle). This is a popular unit of heavy equipment because of its versatility.

You may come across other terms used to name loaders, and hopefuly you’ll come to terms with those names quickly. Fortunately, loader training on one will equip you with the basic skills required to operate all with the exception of a backhoe loader. You’ll need to learn to either use the excavator component or learn to operate excavators to be proficient on this equipment. Loaders do the same basic job – they move earth and load dump trucks. For most operators, these are easy to learn to operate and a lot of fun on the job.