00:00 Greater Manchester residents had the chance to experience life as a bus driver today as
00:04 part of a special engagement day to mark the launch of a new training programme.
00:08 The Route to Success Bus Experience Day was held at Rochdale Football Club's Crown Oil Arena
00:14 between 10am and 4pm on Wednesday 26 July. People were offered the chance to drive a bus
00:20 under the guidance of a trainer and learn more about the new Route to Success scheme.
00:25 The scheme is being delivered on behalf of Greater Manchester Combined Authority
00:29 as part of the Skills Bootcamp programme and aims to encourage more people into bus driving careers.
00:35 Route to Success will be taking on more than 100 new bus drivers through a free
00:39 16-week course and everyone who completes the course will be guaranteed a job interview with
00:44 an operator. We got the chance to get involved with the bus experience day and try out the
00:49 unique opportunity of driving a bus for ourselves. So behind us is the programme for boot camp and
00:55 it's to support the driver shortage that we currently have in Greater Manchester of bus
01:00 drivers with the new franchising network starting to come through in the next few months. There's
01:06 about 600-700 vacancies for bus drivers in the region and this programme has been put together
01:11 to fund bus drivers to attract a different demographic of bus driver to the bus driving
01:16 industry and the course is fully funded so within the first 16 weeks of your programme
01:21 you'll go from not having a bus license to being a fully qualified bus driver. We're expecting
01:26 the kind of a majority of people to go into jobs because if you've got a license to drive a bus
01:31 in Manchester at the moment there is a job for you there. Some of the operating companies within
01:35 Manchester are currently offering signing on bonuses for the jobs that they have available
01:39 so if you go through this course you'll have the best possible chance of picking which operator
01:44 you go to. You have to be a resident of Greater Manchester and also you have to be 19 plus. Then
01:48 we do go through some initial assessment checks to make sure you've got some of the right levels
01:52 of eligibility and also one of the things you have to do on the course to become a driver is
01:57 pass a medical but that's a basic driving medical to just make sure you're fit and healthy to drive
02:02 a very large vehicle. The first week of the programme is come and understand what life of
02:06 a bus driver is like. Actually come and sit behind a 10.8 meter vehicle and go can I actually do this?
02:13 Have a drive around the car park and some people get to the end of that first week and go
02:16 sorry this isn't for me and that's absolutely fine but it's almost like you don't really know
02:20 until you've had a go. The weirdest thing about driving, well there's two things that I find weird
02:24 one is the braking, don't stamp your foot, you literally curl your toes over the top of the brake
02:30 to stop the vehicle and also the turning circle you almost like feel like you need to turn and
02:36 you need to turn but you turn at the last minute to make the corner so it's really it's a really
02:41 weird experience when you're driving it because it's not as you expect. You may not want to carry
02:46 on after the first week, it may not be the thing for you but actually with the change of the bus
02:50 network in Manchester, bus driving is a great career to get into and I was just talking to some
02:55 of the trainers who have gone from bus drivers now to trainers and now delivering this contract.
03:00 It's almost like a career for life if you want to get into it.
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