Welcome from Richard Simpson, Editor

Welcome to fastFORWARD, the website and magazine for training and careers in the logistics and road transport industry.

British logistics is both successful and troubled. Successful, because it is the fifth-largest commercial sector in the world's fourth-largest economy, and troubled because it suffers from a poor public image, and immense difficulties in attracting and retaining suitable employees.

Add to this a seemingly ever-increasing burden of legislation, and it would seem that it is doomed to eventual collapse as no qualified individuals come forward to replace those who leave for reasons of age, health, or just acceptance that they can no longer hack it in this brave new world of NVQs and CPCs.

But, it doesn't have to be like that. The emergence of recognised qualifications beyond the bare minimum needed to allow people to at least do the job legally and safely, if not very efficiently, means that a decent formal career structure may soon follow.

In truth, many people were put off entering the industry at grass-roots level because they thought that being a truck driver, a warehouse clerk or a technician was a dead-end job, with little prospect of progress. As it happens, they were wrong. Many of those right at the top of logistics companies, big transport operators and franchised dealerships had actually started behind a steering-wheel or a goods-inwards hatch, or twirling spanners in a workshop pit. Transport has always been a world where the brave and hard-working individual with a bit of entrepreneurial sprit could get on. What was lacking for many was a well-defined career path.

Now all that is set to change. Governments, both at national level and across the European Union, now seems at last to understand what we have been telling them for years: that without logistics, business stops, followed within days by the collapse of modern society.

Government's attempt to regulate and encourage good practice may seem clumsy and bureaucratic, but they do provide progressive thinkers in the industry with all kinds of opportunities to get ahead: