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  • 26/07/2023
Greater Manchester residents had the chance to experience life as a bus driver today (July 26) as part of a special engagement day to mark the launch of a new training programme.

The Route to Success Bus Experience Day was held at Rochdale Football Club's Crown Oil Arena between 10am and 4pm.

People were offered the chance to drive a bus under the guidance of a trainer and learn more about the new Route to Success scheme.

The scheme is being delivered on behalf on Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) as part of the Skills Bootcamps programme, and aims to encourage more people into bus driving careers.

Route to Success will be taking on more than 100 new bus drivers through a 16-week course for free and everyone who completes the course will be guaranteed a job interview with an operator.

We got a chance to get involved with the bus experience day and try out the unique opportunity of driving a bus for ourselves!

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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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