After months of planning and preparation the first group of successful new recruits have recently started their car driving examiner training.

This is really exciting news and I want to tell you more about all the work that has gone into making this happen and the next steps.

Before we launched the recruitment campaign, we identified all the places we had gaps and decided that a national campaign would be needed to help us reduce waiting times.

As elements of the examiner training is done in a car, we were unable to start training until COVID restrictions had eased.

Since this time, we have been able to train up 31 examiners from previous recruitment campaigns and they are now carrying out 7 driving tests a day as we were pre-pandemic.

To help speed up the training, make it easier to access and safeguard our training programme from COVID restrictions we have:

  • created regional training sites
  • increased our internal training resource
  • made parts of the driving examiner training course online

As a road safety organisation, our main priority continues to be assessing the standards of learner drivers to ensure we keep our roads and those who use them safe. Our new and existing driving examiners play a vital role in doing this.

These roles offer flexible working hours, both full and part time including evening and weekend working opportunities.

Regional training sites

We set up the training from regional sites to make it easier for recruits by reducing travel.

We are offering new examiner training from sites in:

  • Bishopbriggs
  • Chadderton
  • Gosforth
  • Garretts Green
  • Llantrisant
  • Avonmouth
  • Portsmouth
  • Norwich
  • Gillingham
  • Slough

Training also now involves successful applicants spending more time at their designated test centres, so they get to know colleagues, shadow their work, receive support and mentoring, and are not away from home for the full duration of the training.

Increased our internal training resource

We are currently training more trainers so that by the autumn we can train more new examiners.

Online training

We have designed the new entrant course so that courses can overlap.

The course lasts for 6 weeks, with 2 weeks of training carried out online. The online part of the course includes training to:

  • explain and share the policies they need to understand and the types of work they will doing as an examiner
  • introduce them to working for DVSA
  • help the new recruits demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of the test phrases and the basic control aspects that they need to understand and use as an examiner
  • assess their knowledge and understanding with tests and assessments

This means that we’ll be able to run a new entrant course every 4 weeks.

Each new examiner will have a mentor who will support them with any questions or queries they have in the initial period when they start doing tests.

Where we are with recruitment

We are planning to recruit over 300 new driving examiners.

So far, 78 recruits have started training or have training booked, and we are expecting the first tranche to be carrying out driving tests from early August.

We have also made job offers to 119 others and invited them for training as soon as possible.

What’s next?

We’ve reviewed where we still have gaps and will run the next stage of our campaign to recruit 109 examiners at specific locations over the summer.