What Makes A Good Bulldozer Operator Great?

It used to be said that when it came to heavy equipment operators bulldozer operators where a dime a dozen. These days, the opposite is almost true with most new operators looking at the more technical equipment such as excavators and road graders. There are still a lot of good bulldozer operators out there, and their ranks are slowly growing as new operators join them. Great operators are harder to come by these days, especially as our older operators start to retire. So if there are good operators around, what makes a great operator?

There is really only one way to become a great operator – and that’s through experience. However, experience alone will not suffice unless that experience has been one long learning curve. And that really is what makes a great operator – someone who treats every job as a learning experience. Every piece of dirt reacts differently. There are buried rocks, tree stumps, and all sorts of odds and ends. A recent story was more than interesting – a bulldozer unearthed a buried car, and yes, it had been stolen ten years earlier and buried – that was certainly a learning experience for that operator.

It’s true of most heavy equipment now. Every job has the potential for a new experience and that alone offers the opportunity to learn something new. A good bulldozer operator starts by laying a good skills foundation. This can only be achieved by completing a good quality heavy equipment training program. Follow that up with relevant work that allows you to build on that training and you’re well on the way to becoming a good bulldozer operator.

If you can continue to learn, rather than just turning up each day to do a day’s work, then you’ll quickly become a great operator – someone who can work on a variety of different surfaces, under a variety of different conditions, using different bulldozers each time. That’s experience that’s been put to good use – and a great operator in the making.