Workplace Issues
Sue Allen has built a successful career as a tractor trailer driver, teacher and advocateBig wheels, big successTransportation industry veteran Sue Allen has broken through the glass windshield. SHARON ASCHAIEK -- Special to the Toronto Sun |
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In a trade that has historically has been less than hospitable to women, Allen has managed to build a successful career as a tractor trailer driver, teacher and advocate.
"I never thought there was anything strange about wanting to drive a tractor-trailer," says Allen, 43. "I've always had a pretty strong sense of who I am and what I want to do in this world."
Allen's interest in tractor-trailer driving stems back to her childhood in Kearney, Ont., a small town northeast of Huntsville, when, at the age of six, she'd watch trucks deliver goods to her mother's general store.
The interest in trucks stuck and after high school, Allen enrolled in truck driver training school.
UNDETERRED
Allen's first job in the field involved moving furniture to locations throughout Ontario and Quebec. A couple of years later, she began delivering general merchandise within eastern Ontario.
She says it was often hard working in an almost entirely male-dominated field, and an often hyper macho one at that, but she was undeterred.
"There were many men who weren't OK with me in the industry, but I'm the kind of person where if you push me, I have to push back," she says. "When someone's telling you you can't do something, it's amazing how you find the resources in yourself that allow you to excel."
In 1995, after driving for seven years, Allen decided to switch gears and try teaching. She became a certified fleet driver trainer through the Ontario Safety League, a traffic safety organization, and was hired by Humber College's Transportation Training Centre in Etobicoke.
For six hours a day, five days a week for four to five weeks, Allen taught students in a rig about 70 feet long and about 13.5 feet high, training them on the practical aspects of the job. The biggest challenge, she says, was getting students to change bad driving habits they'd built up over years behind the wheel.
"As long as they were holding onto those habits, the truck wouldn't move because it had to be driven in a precise way," she says. "That's where personal growth and the spark of professionalism started. When students transcended a particular behaviour, the truck would move the way it was meant to move."
While teaching, Allen began moonlighting in the entertainment industry, where she worked on different films and TV shows as a driver, hauling set components or trailers, or driving around talent.
MOVIES
She so enjoyed the work that she left Humber for three years to pursue it full time. During that time, she worked on productions such as Pushing Tin with John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton and Anjelina Jolie, and Murder at 1600 with Wesley Snipes.
Currently, Allen is writing a book called What's Driving You? about driver psychology and road rage, based on her experiences on the road.
She's also enjoying her new job as Women in Skilled Trades co-ordinator at Centennial College's School of Transportation, which involves promoting opportunities within the trades, particularly transportation, to women.
Says Allen: "No matter what area of transportation you start out in, as long as you have that firm foundation, you never know where your career may lead."
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