Opinion: How mentoring can help stop the fleet brain drain

By Paul Hollick, chair of the Association of Fleet Professionals (AFP)

Fleet management is overwhelmingly a middle-aged profession. If you enter a room full of fleet managers, they will all tend to be able to remember a time before the internet, can recall Tony Blair being prime minister, and will know how to use a telephone with a dial.

This creates something of a problem. Within a window in the not-too-distant future, most of these people will be retiring. Much expertise could be lost to the industry and, it appears, not enough new blood is necessarily being recruited to replace them.

At the Association of Fleet Professionals (AFP), we’re working to resolve this brain drain in several ways, such as through our training arm, the AFP Fleet Academy, and our involvement in the planned fleet apprenticeship.

However, there’s also a new initiative that we believe could make a significant difference – our mentoring services.

Mentoring is a great way for experienced fleet managers to pass on knowledge and new entrants to fleet to gain it.

It creates strong relationships across different age groups and experience levels and is good for individuals and the profession as a whole.

So, we’ve been working on a whole range of options that provide different channels through which advice can be sought and knowledge shared.

At the core is what we are calling “light” and “full” mentoring, which are options designed to bring people together in a way that allows the sharing of skills and experience.

The former sees the mentee paired with an AFP board member or committee member, who will then spend an hour a month providing free mentoring, generally through a video call.

Our vision is that this is used to provide younger and less experienced fleet managers the opportunity to regularly check their overall approach to handling fleet issues.

The full mentoring service is more intensive, and includes regular coaching and ongoing support, as well as on-site meetings, if they are required.

We foresee this as something much more involved, but which stops short of providing hands-on style consultancy. Because of the time commitment involved on the part of the mentor, this is chargeable.

We have also created environments where fleet managers can access advice from other members.

A further form of face-to-face dialogue is the Fleet Operator Open Forum, which is a quarterly online relaxed discussion designed to enable fleet operator members to come together to talk about issues they are facing and hear the views and experience of others. These are vibrant and informative events.

Other routes to mentoring help include our fleet operator WhatsApp, which allows individuals to post questions informally and ask for advice from other professionals, and the members area of the AFP web site, where questions can be posted to ask the views and advice of others alongside a searchable database to check whether topics have already been covered.

Through this range of channels, we are hoping to provide the means for a generational exchange of information between younger and older fleet managers that will help to maintain and improve the huge amount of expertise held within the profession.

We’re always happy to hear from any fleet managers who would like to get involved in the initiative, whether as mentor and mentee.