Whether you are already licenced or looking to get your forklift licence, there are many industries where you can get a job as forklift driver. In short, if there is goods or materials movement involved, it is likely that there is a job for forklift operator. In this article we will look at forklift career perspective in 3 certain industries:

1. Material Fabrication
2. Plastic Injection Molding
3. Retail Warehousing

Forklift Operators in Metal Fabrication Industry

Businesses that deal in heavy materials need to move metal to and from fabrication shops. The material is moved with large CNS machines or trucks. As such, these businesses often have requirement for qualified forklift operators to load and unload the metal.

Also, Metal shops that fabricate raw material or manufacture parts use forklifts to load and unload the metal. These jobs require extreme precaution by forklift operator as the heavy metals can cause serious injury and/or damage to the machine and surrounding properties if handled improperly.

The materials are extremely heavy and as such forklifts are almost ‘a must’ for these loads.

Forklift Operator in Plastic Injection Molding Industry

For plastic injection molding industry, it is all about plastic as the name suggests. The plastic comes in large bins from its suppliers and like many other loads they are set on pallets for transportation. The pallets are stored vertically to save floor space. When plastic is needed for molding, it is the forklift operator’s job to get the right bin from the storage space and set them high above the funnel from where row plastic is injected for processing.

When plastic is processed, it is set on pallet and handed over to the forklift operator to either store in dispatch area or directly load them to the trucks to ship them out.

Forklift Operator’s role in Retail Warehousing

Large companies like Safeway and Coles store that have large inventory in their warehouses need forklift operators to load and unload their stock.

Forklift operator is responsible to safely store all the inward goods sent from suppliers. Such warehouses are very large and have a very sophisticated storage system. The forklift operator needs to move each pallet to the right section.

Similarly, when required, the stock is transported to their retail stores. The forklift operator is handed with various delivery dockets throughout the day to pick the correct pallets and load them to the tuck.

As such, large retail warehouse work can be very busy throughout the day and requires enormous amount of accuracy due to the high volume and quantity of the goods loaded and unloaded daily.

This was another article in ‘forklift driver – career perspective’ series from Go Workplace Training. We hope it was useful for you.