Watkins Shepard review from a newbie team

My wife and I selected Watkins Shepard as our first company out of truck driving school because they were the only company that did not require us to split up and be trained by a stranger for 8 weeks before getting our own truck. We went to orientation /training in Missoula Montana starting in April of 2014 and it lasted 2 weeks. I thought the training was excellent, especially Kelby and at the end of our two weeks we were handed the keys to a Freightliner with an automatic transmission and only 14,000 miles on the odometer. We started off at $0.31 a mile split and by the time we quit at the one-year mark we were up to $0.44 a mile split. Our average monthly mileage for the year was about 17,000 miles and we went home for probably about 4 to 5 days each month. We probably could have made more if we had never gone home as they give you bonuses for staying out longer. My only real complaint about Watkins & Shepard is that they screwed us out of our tuition reimbursement. They claimed that our receipt for paying tuition with cash at Community College wasn't good enough for them which was total BS but not having to go out on the road and be "trained" by strangers for 2 months was worth losing out on the bonus. Both of us had driven before in the past and we were confident we could handle it without having somebody hold our hand for 8 weeks. If you are new drivers that are not very confident in your skills you may want to look elsewhere but for us this was the perfect fit. They have terminals all over the country and you can get lots of miles if you're proactive and let the dispatchers know you will be in their area and when. They were just bought out by Snider and from what I can tell nothing has changed so I thought I would give my thumbs up to this company as they treated us well and we were able to get a year of experience driving an almost new tractor. The trailers though can be quite old and you may have to learn a few tricks on adjusting your tandems. Dispatch support was pretty good and the shop support was excellent.

 

yeah that was May of 2015 when we got $0.31 a mile. It went up to $0.35 a mile the next month because they gave everybody a raise. There was also some bonuses for fuel mileage that you could get or if you attend if you stay out longer than two weeks they give you a bonus for that each extra week.

 

We went to Secured Land Transport. We got about a 30% pay increase and we're driving about half as many miles.