How much time for hired drivers to reach level 10?

[derrrr]

How much time should it take for a hired driver to reach level 10.0 (all skills maxed out)?

I'm at 198 in-game days and the closest ones are still missing about 8-10 skill points. It seems to be taking forever for them to skill up.

I don't usually quick travel (did it like 5 times). I've spent a good time in the ferry lately. Do those have any effect?

[Madkine]

Quick travel and ferry make game time pass faster in real time is all. But yes drivers take quite a long time to max out on all skills.

[Steve Pitts]

It varies somewhat, depending on how you assigned skill points and whether or not the driver has spent a lot of time sitting on ferries instead of developing, but roughly 300 days for a level 2 or 3 driver to develop to level 36.

[derrrr]

Most of the drivers were assigned the first points to unlock valuable and fragile cargo and important and urgent deliveries. I tried to do as the game says in the description of the skills page. Then I would balance it neglecting eco-driving. ADR would be assigned only if the the driver was in a garage / city that had the material.

A couple drivers I assigned one point in valuable and fragile and the rest all on distance. These did poorly.

How can I tell if a driver is taking the ferry when it's not the best option?

[Steve Pitts]

Your original question prompted me to write some code to research this (something that has been on my to do list for some time) and what I've discovered thus far is that 300 days is on the high end - I have some drivers who took that long or a little longer, but most of those were UK based (where the ferry problem definitely applies) or in Stochholm or Rotterdam (both garages I eventually shut down because of the problem). The mean for the first 94 drivers I hired who reached level 36 from level 4 or less (I've only researched this up to v1.35 which is the release where employee behaviour was changed to obsess on longest distance trips) is just over 253 in game days with the shortest being 221 and the longest 322. I intend to complete the exercise across the remaining data later this evening.

As to the question regarding ferries, any driver close to a long distance ferry route will tend to spend a certain amount of their time using it, and the lower their long distance skill the worse it tends to be (my drivers in Rotterdam would spend hours going back and forth to cities in the UK, spending 8 or 11 hours out of commission whilst driving 300kms or less, and those in Stockholm would do the same to and from Poland via a 19 hour ferry ride in each direction). Now some of that is mitigated by a reduced need for sleep, which might explain why it is the drivers in Glasgow and Manchester that are all the slowest developers. I would imagine that places like Barcelona, Bilbao, Valencia or Santander would be even worse, but I've not bothered placing any garages in Iberia yet.

Update: processing the rest of the data did not make a lot of difference, the number of drivers that started at level 4 or less and reached level 36 goes up to 106 and the mean to just over 256. Unfortunately the eight most recently employed low level drivers are all just shy of level 36 and thus I cannot readily see whether the more recent versions, and the change to driver behaviour in relation to distance, make any significant difference.

[derrrr]

Thanks for the feedback!

All my long distance drivers in Barcelona and Bilbao only take a short ferry (specifically when they go to Kouvola, wich is a 3000km+ trip). Seems reasonable.

The new ones in Palermo take the ferry to Valencia almost every time.

[derrrr]

It took 262 days for my first driver to reach rating 10. A couple more will do "shortly" (if I ferry around). My drivers started at 0.8 or only a little above. The only exception I recall is Oscar.

How can you tell for how long a driver has been hired? The figure above is total in-game days. I don't remember how soon I started adding drivers.

[cliff60]

It also depends on if they find return jobs or not. They will look for jobs to take them back to their home garage from the city they dropped off in and they get XP for that as well. but if they dont find a return job they return empty earning no XP.

[Wakou22]

I have noticed a jump in my hired drivers progress by setting them to get "some" eco-driving points. All of my drivers were "stuck" on lvl 5. I set a couple of them to Eco-driving, and as soon as they had one at least one point there, they moved up lvls...

[Madkine]

The formula for their level is: (Max skill + Min Skill)/1.2