My name’s Zeeyad, I’ve worked at WA Freight Group for almost two and a half years now.
We come in in the morning, it’d be about 5 or 6 o’clock in the morning.
We come in and go through the pre-start checklist for the forklifts.
So for the first round we go to the tyres and check each tyre
Inspect the wheel nuts for looseness or any missing.
Now we just start the forklift.
If there’s a fault with the forklift we’ll usually put a cross in the checklist
and then down in the comments section we’ll just list what the fault is
and that will get fixed as soon as possible.
Now we check the general condition and then the
final thing to do before we shut it off is indicate whether it’s operational or non-operational
and in this case it is.
The ones we use in this depot are diesel operated.
So firstly the first lever we have here is for obviously lifting the forks upwards and down.
The second lever, as you can see, is tilting it up as we pull it back,
and that’s the maximum it will go; and down as we push it forwards.
The third lever is to side shift – moves the whole tynes either left or right.
And the forth lever we have on the end is to close our tynes.
And on the other side the simple gear lever
‘up’ is to go forwards, in the middle is in neutral and downwards is to reverse.
So, I want you to grab those three pallets - the two small white ones and the black one directly behind it
load it onto that truck right there for us, if you could, thanks.
To get the forklift ticket before I came to this job,
I went to an outside company and did a two-day course.
We have a written section and then an actual manual section where
we go out onto the forklift and train up on the skills required to work at a place like this.
For myself, I hadn’t had a lot of experience before I came to this job,
so it was a matter of getting onto the fork, getting experience,
getting a feel for the forklift before,
you know you had the right skills to be loading trucks and doing the daily requirements we need here.
We did get supervision for the beginning and we’d
start off with the smaller jobs out the back,
away from the hustle and bustle of the trucks
coming in and out and loading up the odd items
that the more experienced forklift operator would have to do.
You have to be an aware person: aware of your surroundings.
You know the forklift can be a dangerous vehicle if used incorrectly.
You have to make sure you know exactly where everything is around you at all times.
So, a few of the things we really need to watch out
for: everything is exactly the same but a lot bigger.
It’s a lot higher, when you’re raising you’ve got to be very careful
of most importantly high voltage lines – power lines and so forth.
The tynes stick out a lot longer. They’re a lot wider.
You know the dangers of the rear-end swing with the small forklift?
We’ve got exactly the same thing here with the big one,
obviously just on a bigger scale.
The controls are absolutely no different as far as the steering wheel goes.
The fork controls are exactly the same here as you’d find on the smaller forklift.
The noticeable thing here, of course, is that you’ll notice
that we’ve actually got a gauge here that will tell us how much we’re actually carrying.
Pretty straightforward as far as that goes?
Now look we’ll actually get you up and go and have a play.
Take the handbrake off, stick it into gear, stick it forward.
There are a lot of jobs out there that require forklift operators and obviously there
are a lot of companies that need the skills and you need your forklift ticket.
You do use the same fork ticket. It’s in the same sort of code.
You can go up to the 16-tonne that we have here.
Okay park brake’s off, hit the brake button, shut it down. Kick the oscillator switch off.
I am actually a uni student studying accounting.
This job ties in well with being able to work around university
and keeping the hours the hours are flexible for me.
It does get me through with the money I need to get through uni.
I didn’t think that much of it in the beginning before I got into it,
but once I did, it is a… it’s more fulfilling
than I initially thought before I got into it.
And now, being in it, it’s quite a good job to be in.