Recruiting the Future of Alabama’s Trucking Workforce
As the representative body of Alabama’s trucking industry, the Alabama Trucking Association (ATA) was inspired by the success of Go Build Alabama and sought to establish a similar workforce development campaign to attract more people to pursue careers as commercial truck drivers and diesel technicians.
Awareness campaign and lead-generation strategy
Campaign messaging, ad creative, landing page, videos
500+ training program applications
For the past several decades, the trucking industry has struggled to fill high-demand jobs in commercial driving and diesel technology positions. It’s a nationwide issue that has serious implications, many of which were exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. This essential industry needed more drivers on the road and more diesel technicians to maintain the fleets, but it faced several challenges attracting people into these careers, especially among younger, diverse demographics.
Workforce development requires a long-term strategic focus, and before we could make a measurable impact on job openings in these two critical roles, we needed to solve the first problem: changing the way people thought about careers in commercial trucking.
Once we established the Careers in High Gear branding of ATA’s workforce development platform and formed partnerships with CDL and diesel technology programs at community colleges, we developed the first content campaign: The Real Faces of Alabama Trucking.
The concept for The Real Faces of Alabama Trucking centered on humanizing the role of commercial drivers and diesel technicians by telling the real stories of the people doing this work. We spotlighted young self-starters across different backgrounds by coordinating multi-location photo and video shoots.
We created a paid media strategy with placements across PPC, digital display, YouTube, OOH, and print. We also developed a careers landing page on the ATA’s website to drive traffic to the enrollment pages of our community college partners.
We piloted The Real Faces of Alabama Trucking campaign over three months, targeting geographic areas with proximity to our community college partner programs. In the three-month pilot, these programs received more than 500 responses for training requests.
Additionally, as a result of our work, the ATA received the Mike Russell Trucking Image Award from the American Trucking Associations.
