What to look for in an online training provider

Mark Murrell

It’s now 2025, which means I’ve officially been designing and building learning management systems (LMS) for 25 years. Much has changed in that time, and technology and the Internet have allowed us to develop online training tools we wouldn’t have imagined in the early 2000s.

When we launched CarriersEdge in 2005, online training for trucking companies wasn’t a thing. While other blue and white collared industries were using online systems to help in their training and educational programs, the trucking industry did it the old-fashioned way by training employees in a classroom-type setting. While in-person training remains an essential piece of a comprehensive training program in trucking, the use of online training has become the norm among fleets as learning management has advanced and become more available in the industry.

In fact, while scoring the 2025 edition of the Best Fleet to Drive For, for the first time ever in the 17 years we’ve produced the program, online training was the default training method across participating fleets.

As fleets increasingly rely on online training activities, choosing the right online system to support your operation and its safety goals is essential. When you select an online training provider, you should demo or trial the service to see if what’s offered is easy for users to manage and what tools you can use to deliver training courses to your employees effectively. In trucking, a few industry-specific features you should look out for include:

Compliance and audit support

Support for compliance tracking and audits is critical in trucking. With multiple enforcement agencies and insurance reps regularly wanting to verify training records and history, fleets need to be able to pull up training records quickly. Those records need to be accurate, and they should be detailed as well.

While many blue-collar learning management systems track compliance – whether users are currently up to date with required training – trucking needs more than that. Fleets often need to show that drivers were compliant at specific points in the past or have never been out of compliance. That goes well beyond what’s available in most general-purpose LMS.

The base assumption for all types of online systems is that a human is deciding the training requirements for a given population of workers, but in trucking, that’s no longer the case. With telematics and dashcams highlighting gaps in driver skills and knowledge, machines are increasingly involved in the process, and fleets need ways to integrate them easily.

A trucking LMS must recognize that human administrators and outside systems will be identifying training needs. There also needs to be ways for fleets to get both groups working together towards the same goal. Auto-assigning training is necessary, but the human managers need to be in the loop, so they always know what’s happening.

Managing driver options

It’s not uncommon for drivers to get moved from one fleet manager to another as their routes change. Most learning management systems assume workers are fairly static in their locations and roles, so they have minimal features to streamline the process of making changes.

To effectively serve the trucking industry, online systems need to make it easy to change not only manager and location assignments but also training requirements. If a driver moves from one customer to another or moves from regional to local or cross-border work, the types of training they need will change, too. The online system needs to handle that and automatically update the assignments consistently and reliably.

Driver turnover management

All blue-collar environments have employee turnover to deal with, but trucking is unique because a significant percentage of those exits often return at some point in the future. Fleets commonly delete accounts when drivers leave, but when those people return, it’s better to have the old account saved rather than having to create a brand new one.

Since that driver likely completed training during the previous employment, that history should come back, too. Forcing every returning driver to go through all the training they’ve already completed again because the previous history got wiped when they left, is a waste of time.

A trucking LMS needs to seamlessly handle drivers quitting and returning, making it easy to remove accounts when drivers leave, reactivate when they return, and retain all training history accurately to expedite onboarding.

Even if those drivers don’t return, that history may be needed in the future for lawsuits or when audits come up. It’s critical to keep it available but not clutter up the interface with records for people not currently employed at the fleet.

Drivers, safety and ops

Safety and operations teams often oversee drivers together. Ops teams may be responsible for the individual drivers (acting as the direct managers for them), but safety managers also play a role in overseeing safety programs and outlining what should be done to stay compliant and minimize the fleet’s risk profile. Learning management for trucking needs to recognize and support all three groups effectively. Safety managers may be the ones setting up the training programs and deciding when and what training drivers need to complete, but the operations team needs to be in the loop. They need to know what’s required of their drivers and when and what courses drivers are completing. The LMS needs to be easy for anyone to use so that all teams can see where drivers are at in their training, pull records, or input information when they need to without a lot of manual work.

Using an online system to help manage aspects of your overall safety program should make life easier as an administrator. If it’s too complex or doesn’t offer the right tools to more efficiently manage tasks, you’re using the wrong one. When deciding on which provider to use, make sure the capabilities offered will assist you in reaching your safety goals.

The rising complexity of cargo theft

Joem Ohr

Cargo crime is no longer a problem confined to physical break-ins or rogue insiders. It has evolved into a sophisticated threat ecosystem where traditional theft intersects with cybercrime, organized fraud, and international criminal networks.

Estimated annual supply chain losses from fraud, intercepted shipments, and cargo theft have reached an eye-watering $15-35 billion according to data from the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) agency. For today’s transportation leaders, understanding this complexity—and responding to it with a unified strategy—is no longer optional. It’s essential for survival in a high-risk logistics environment.

The spectrum of cargo crime now ranges from opportunistic pilferage to coordinated heists involving stolen identities, fake carriers, and manipulated telematics data. Increasingly, criminal organizations are targeting weak points in digital infrastructure—posing as legitimate brokers, intercepting sensitive shipment data, and using that intelligence to steal freight without ever setting foot near the loading dock.

In 2024 alone the industry saw a 27% increase in the number of reported cargo theft incidents over the previous year, according to CargoNet 2024 Supply Chain Risk Trends Analysis. While this is a significant increase, it unfortunately does not accurately represent the total scope of the issue as a significant number of incidents are not properly reported or investigated.

This evolution underscores a troubling reality: The transportation industry is now squarely in the crosshairs of cyber-enabled organized crime. The line between a cyber incident and a cargo theft event is increasingly blurred.

There is no silver bullet when it comes to solving the cargo crime epidemic, but the industry must align its response across the three interrelated spheres of responsibility.

Examples include, but are not limited to:

• Cybersecurity: Defend against account takeovers, identity theft, spoofed email communications, and data leaks that enable fraud and theft.
• Operational security: Verify trading partners and carrier identities, implement robust, consistent vetting procedures for all load assignments, and monitor for deviations in carrier behavior during dispatch, and have multiple verification methods and processes before any banking information is changed.
• Physical security: Use tamper-proof locks and tracking hardware, leverage geofencing and trailer immobilization technology, and partner with local law enforcement to monitor potential criminal activity in, or near, facilities and yards.

The cybersecurity controls that exist where these domains intersect hold the key to preventing cargo crime — cybersecurity controls support operational resilience, and physical safeguards often depend on cybersecurity systems or defenses to function securely and reliably. None of these practice areas can operate in a vacuum.

The cargo crime prevention ecosystem is vast and interconnected. Shippers, carriers, brokers, warehouse operators, technology vendors, insurers, regulators and law enforcement each hold a part of the solution — but no one entity holds all of it. For example, the complexities of the federal law enforcement system with its multiple agencies, task forces, and directives often self-limits its own effectiveness through unclear communication channels, competing priorities, and differences in prosecution thresholds. Add in those same nuances with state and local law enforcement — who are additionally hampered by jurisdictional limitations — and the issue becomes exponentially more complicated.

Effective prevention depends on synchronization of actions across many different entities. Cybersecurity experts must collaborate with fleet dispatch operations and broker’s carrier audit teams. Law enforcement must receive timely, accurate intelligence from private sector partners. Insurers and regulators must create incentives for proactive risk management and information sharing.

Transportation executives must understand that cargo theft is no longer just a security or financial liability issue, it is a business continuity and reputational risk issue as well.

A single fraudulent pickup can result in six or even seven-figure losses, potentially unrecoverable through insurance.

A successful telematics platform compromise could give thieves access to an entire fleet’s location data.

A compromise of credentials to transportation management system (TMS) or load board accounts can expose critical details about high-value shipments and customer details which can lead to impersonation and facilitate fraudulent pickups.

Broker or carrier impersonation schemes can destroy relationships built over decades with trusted carriers or customers.

To effectively address cargo crimes in the modern era, executives must champion a holistic approach to security within their organizations. This means funding a comprehensive combination of cyber, operational, and physical security initiatives to ensure successful mitigation of the risks associated with cyber-enabled cargo crime.

Establishing relationships across the prevention ecosystem is critical. Cybersecurity is a team sport—join intelligence-sharing networks, industry associations, and joint task forces or working groups. Communicating openly will break down traditional silos between internal departments leading to more reliable identification of risks in real-time across the organization.

Accountability is key to a successful security strategy—make risk ownership clear across all business units, not just IT or dispatch operations. Cyber-enabled cargo crime is a complex and fast-moving issue, but with decisive leadership, coordinated holistic defenses, and industry-wide collaboration, we can stay ahead of this growing challenge.

To this end, the National Motor Freight Traffic Association, Inc. (NMFTA) is working with both law enforcement and industry peers to research and develop cyber-enabled cargo crime mitigation strategies that will be released in June to support carriers, brokers, shippers and all other parties throughout the logistics supply chain.

Take decisive action now to ensure you protect your fleet/organization/company from these evolving threats.

Access free resources and learn more about the trucking industry’s only cybersecurity conference, NMFTA Cybersecurity Conference, by visiting www.nmfta.org/cybersecurity.