Category - General

A reader has asked how I get any leisure time when my diary is open between 8am and 10pm 7 days a week. Perhaps this explanation will also help others who are wondering about becoming ADIs.

It hinges on the fact that work is never guaranteed or 100% reliable – and this is especially true when you first start.

When I qualified some years ago it was my intention to cast my net as widely as possible to get as much work as possible as quickly as possible. So for the first year I was covering almost all of Nottinghamshire and the south-east side of Derbyshire (including Derby itself). It worked, but I dropped Derbyshire and some of the north Nottinghamshire postcodes because it was getting increasingly difficult to get from one pupil to the next, especially when they were at opposite ends of my geographical range. But this is a partial digression.

The fact is that you can have 50 hours or more in your diary one week (and it does happen) and only about 20 hours the next. It’s just the way it is. The full weeks are just those where everyone wants a lesson at the same time and no one cancels, the quieter ones are where people just don’t book or you get cancellations (colds and flu, exams, holidays, Christmas, and so on). It averages out somewhere in between.

So, looking at the situation on the one hand, you have a wide open diary and people can book anywhere between 8am and 10pm Monday to Friday. More often than not (and with judicious diary management), you can get them to book 10-12 in the morning, 2-4pm, and 6-8pm or times thereabouts. Seven days of 6 hours gives you a 42 hour week, but you are more likely to get a few empty slots and so you’ll end up doing between 30-40 hours. This is on average, mind you. On a good (depending on how you look at it) week, you’ll get people wanting lessons who have to fit in around whoever is already booked, so you might get some early lesson in and book the others at 11-1. Or someone might have booked 7-9pm, which then frees up another 2 hour slot in the afternoon which then gets snapped up. It’s those kinds of weeks which give you the 50+.

On the other hand, though, the weeks where people cancel or just don’t book for some reason give you free time which is paid for by the other weeks.

I also blank out whole days when I feel like it (and before they are booked) and pupils have no trouble shifting around those. For example, I have a day off next week because I just felt like one. And I had one last week, and the week before. It’s just not a problem.

Although my diary is open 8am until 10pm, I have worked as late as 11pm and midnight before (so I could do a Pass Plus session in the dark around midsummer). I also sometimes start as early as 6.30am if a pupil has an early test booked and lives a little way out (done several of those during the winter). I also have a current pupil who originally preferred 7.30am lessons before college, but now does 9am instead.

Now, I am not a morning person – but I will do this simply because if I say ‘no’ then I might lose the work. To be honest, nowadays I could afford to say ‘no’, but the effect on my reputation might be a longer-lasting problem (good or bad), so I just do it. I enjoy it, anyway.

This job is not a 9-5 Monday to Friday affair. If you become an ADI and do it like that then you can expect to earn a little pocket money at best, but not a living – I think this is one reason why so many instructors are suffering. They just don’t give the customers what they want, so the customer finds someone who does.

So that’s basically it. Once you are established you can nudge pupils to fit in around your own availability – but you will always have to be flexible because sometimes they can’t be. If you stick rigidly to set hours you will always end up losing some work that you’d otherwise get (two of mine have recently said “my last instructor couldn’t do weekends” – so he (x2) lost them, and I got them!) I also see instructors boasting about how they tell the pupils when they can have lessons and have fixed slots in their diaries – all well and good until a pupil comes to you who finishes work at 3.45pm and so doesn’t fit into your 2-4 or 3-5 slot; but like I say, I get plenty like that. Some weeks you’ll be snowed under, others you’ll have free time.

The free time isn’t regular or predictable – not in large chunks, anyway – but it is there. You can book weeks off for annual holidays if you plan lessons and tests well ahead, but you must never let a pupil down (and you must realise you get no income at all for those weeks)

The big question is whether you want a job like this. And only you can decide if you do!

I noticed one of the Google ads that keeps cropping up on the right side of this blog trumpets:

Drving (sic) Instructors Wanted

If you’re going to advertise, at least check the spelling on your advertising copy!

Disclaimer: Any spelling mistakes (other than those on the Google ads) in this blog are typos, and I blame the computer.

When you are a driving instructor, one of the big problems you have to try and overcome with many of your pupils is their lack of awareness of what is around them. We teach them to look in the mirrors, but do they actually see what is in them? Unfortunately, they often do not, and you have to develop this basic skill to the best of your ability.

In learners, lack of awareness can partly manifest itself as changing lanes without looking (especially on roundabouts), or pulling out in front of traffic that is obviously coming straight at you (again, especially on roundabouts). For these reasons, an instructor has to be fully focused at all times to prevent dangerous bad decisions.

But passing the driving test is absolutely no guarantee that someone is going to drive safely or legally. It is definitely no guarantee that a new driver has the required awareness of what is going on around them – particularly behind them.

I saw two incidents today which illustrate this. The first was in Ruddington village, where the main street is a notorious bottleneck, especially where someone parks a 4×4 on yellow lines near to the Post Office, and also outside Grices Electrical – where parking on one side forces the road to a single lane. If traffic heading into Ruddington outside Grices keeps coming through (and it doesn’t have right of way since the parking is on its side), then the build up of traffic trying to get out blocks the road outside the Post Office, and everyone gets gridlocked. And this is exactly what happened today when some idiot outside Grices kept flashing traffic  through, oblivious to the chaos forming behind them.

The second incident was tonight, when I was going to pick up my last pupil for a 7pm lesson. Traffic was heavy because of at least two problems on major roads out of the city, and much of it was taking a detour along Bath Street towards the A52 at Trent Bridge. As a result, traffic was at a standstill down Bath Street and on to Huntingdon Street. Now, there is a small roundabout near Huntingdon Street and traffic was already backed up on to that – preventing vehicles going the other way from getting into St Anns. But this didn’t stop a silver VW Polo ( reg no. W331 OCH ) flashing another car on to the roundabout to block it, when that other car couldn’t go anywhere anyway – and neither could the Polo and those behind it now that the roundabout was blocked!

How these people manage to get their licences is beyond me. Goodness knows how they fare in normal life if they are as stupid as they seem to be behind the wheel!

Just happened to catch this situation today whilst driving down a country lane in Bunny:

[flv:/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/sheep_in_road.flv 480 360]

I did the right thing: stopped and turned off my engine. The sheep were incredibly well-behaved.

The driver bringing up the rear said he doesn’t use dogs because they cost more to feed than the 4×4 does.

(This was playing with my new in-car camera in 720p/60fps mode – motion blur is reduced, but you get a bit of outer-edge distortion)