Couriers and Messengers

Tasks

Core Tasks Include:

• Walk, ride bicycles, drive vehicles, or use public conveyances in order to reach destinations to deliver messages or materials.
• Load vehicles with listed goods, ensuring goods are loaded correctly and taking precautions with hazardous goods.
• Unload and sort items collected along delivery routes.
• Receive messages or materials to be delivered, and information on recipients, such as names, addresses, telephone numbers, and delivery instructions, communicated via telephone, two-way radio, or in person.
• Plan and follow the most efficient routes for delivering goods.
• Deliver messages and items, such as newspapers, documents, and packages, between establishment departments, and to other establishments and private homes.
• Sort items to be delivered according to the delivery route.

Supplemental Tasks Include:

• Obtain signatures and payments, or arrange for recipients to make payments.
• Record information, such as items received and delivered and recipients' responses to messages.
• Check with home offices after completed deliveries, in order to confirm deliveries and collections and to receive instructions for other deliveries.
• Perform routine maintenance on delivery vehicles, such as monitoring fluid levels and replenishing fuel.
• Call by telephone in order to deliver verbal messages.
• Open, sort, and distribute incoming mail.
• Perform general office or clerical work such as filing materials, operating duplicating machines, or running errands.
• Collect, seal, and stamp outgoing mail, using postage meters and envelope sealers.
• Unload goods from large trucks, and load them onto smaller delivery vehicles.

The data sources for the information displayed here include: O*NET™ 16.0.