I saw an interesting job advert the other day. It wasn’t even the job which was that interesting – it was just a middle-of-the-road warehouse manager position.
What was interesting was the final skill required in order to be suitable for the job.
The usual pre-requisites were listed as being required for the job, qualification, previous experience; you know the drill.
Then bizarrely it ended with the line ‘A fork lift licence would be adventurous’.
Now I mean no disrespect to any of the fork lift truck operators I have come across over the years but one word I could never have described them as is adventurous.
At first – like I imagine you have – I thought it was a mistake but then I thought a bit more about it.
The dictionary definition of adventurous is ‘inclined or willing to engage in adventures’ or ‘full of risk; requiring courage’.
I can think of a few who would fit into the second category, although I’m not so sure about the courage.
There is a certain amount of risk involved in spinning a forklift around as many times as possible before you get too dizzy and fall out and a degree of risk in lifting a colleague up on your forks and driving them around a warehouse – although the courage is with the suspended warehouse worker rather than the driver.
I am of course doing fork lift drivers a disservice here as I have worked with some whose work and behaviour is exemplary, although one such driver did once drop a pallet worth of widescreen TVs from a great height.
You would imagine he was engaged in an adventure all of his own when he broke that one to the boss and he would have needed to call upon a pretty stiff dose of courage.
It is, of course, hypocritical of me to criticise fork lift truck drivers when it is something I can’t do myself. I know it is a complex skill and one day soon I will learn it for myself, not least because I want to know what it’s like to spin as many times as possible before I get too dizzy and fall out.
So, on balance, it looks like adventurous may have been the right word to use in the advert because many competent fork lift drivers fall into that category.
I can’t discount however, the theory that really the recruiter meant to say advantageous and mistyped it but frankly that would have made this column rather dull if it were the case.
Warehouse & Logistics News
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