Heavy Duty Trucking has honored four under-40 trucking professionals as 2025 Emerging Leaders. A former driver creating a custom driver simulator. A safety manager with an industrial engineering degree reinventing driver onboarding. A data guy designing a carbon-reduction program for customers from the ground up. A former military cop turning a toxic shop into a place technicians want to work.

That’s the kind of leadership we see in these next-generation changemakers. HDT's 2025 Emerging Leaders are:

• Sean Diehl, market research analyst A. Duie Pyle

• Erika Nolan, corporate safety quality assurance manager, Werner Enterprises

• Chelsea Seger, shift maintenance supervisor, Waste Management

• Dylan West, safety training and compliance manager, Key Oil (part of Keystops LLC)

These influential young professionals are definitely going places. At the same time, they’re expanding what it means to be a trucking leader.

They’re as comfortable talking about artificial intelligence, carbon emissions, or mental health as they are talking about brake jobs or backing classes.

Proactively Seeking New Solutions to Trucking Challenges

All four have looked at something that isn’t working at their companies and come up with a better solution.

• Diehl tackled the problem of vague, one-size-fits-all carbon calculators and helped design a more accurate, shipment-specific emissions model for customers.

• Nolan realized training for driver leaders was little more than repurposed driver orientation slides and rebuilt onboarding and driver-leader training.

• Seger confronted a toxic shop culture and transformed her team into a group that even cooks dinner together.

• West created better solutions for expensive driver simulators and for the paperwork that comes with mandatory yearly inspections.

Communication: More Important Than Ever in Leadership

Communication is a key theme among these four leaders.

Diehl translated complex carbon emissions math into a customer-friendly product and worked to make sure shippers and internal teams could understand and buy in.

Nolan emphasizes communicating with drivers on a peer-to-peer level and the importance of explaining the “why” behind changes, whether it’s a training change or a tablet update.

Seger pushes for mental health awareness and emotional intelligence in leadership.

West wants drivers to feel they can walk into the safety office and say, “I messed up,” knowing that the focus will be on coaching and improvement, not punishment.

Emerging Leaders Illustrate New Paths into Trucking

HDT’s 2025 Emerging Leaders come from different backgrounds.

One has a degree in industrial engineering, another in information systems. One is a former driver and mobile mechanic. And one is prior military law enforcement who liked working with vehicles, so she went to vocational school to become a technician.

None of them grew up planning a career in trucking, but all of them have found it rewarding (sometimes surprisingly so). And they’re thinking about how to bring in the next generation and what it will take for them to want to stay.

Diehl was “pleasantly surprised” by the complexities and challenges of the less-than-truckload industry. “There's a lot of really fun problems to work on and work in.”

Young Leaders Bringing in More Young Talent to Trucking

Both Seger and West prefer hiring less experienced, younger drivers and technicians straight out of CDL or vo-tech programs. That way, they can hire for attitude, then teach them the skills they need, instead of trying to un-teach bad habits picked up elsewhere.

Seger mentors younger technicians as part of her work with the Technology & Maintenance Council. She is pushing for more attention to mental health and leading with emotional intelligence as keys to attracting and keeping younger people in trucking.

West works closely with a local community college’s CDL program and with the Next Generation in Trucking Association, better known as Next Gen Trucking.

Nolan wants more people to choose trucking as an intentional career, in an industry a lot of people “happenstance into.” Her own entry was through school partnerships and internships with companies such as FedEx and U.S. Cargo (part of Pitt Ohio).

She believes there’s a lot of value in fleets building those kinds of academic partnerships. At Werner, she’s mentored a summer intern herself, helping “somebody who had no familiarity with the supply chain industry … see the broader picture of how their degree was still correlating to this.”