JUD5716 - Reviews

  • Overall
  • Home Time
  • Equipment and Maintenance
  • Dispatchers and Managers
Pros
The people are mostly friendly but what is that worth when you’re routinely put in bad situations. My trainer’s truck seemed decent but had I been on my own idk what their other equipment is like.
Cons
Not as safety oriented as I thought, since my trainer instructed me to break the rules with eld logging. Less experienced, not as knowledgeable trainer. With barely 3 years of commercial driving my trainer was a fairly new driver himself with this being the only company he’d been with after he finished CDL school. Although he’d claim to be using a sleeper berth break exception more than once to drive more than 11 hrs when I asked him about it he said he didn’t understand it but knew it allow

I was in training and I was called one day and told I was being let go because my 45 degree backing needs work. To be honest I felt relieved to receive that call. As a new CDL school grad any company that’s expecting proficiency in your first week with little to no practice, no communication of expectations and within a rushed, chaotic and unstructured “training” environment probably shouldn’t be taken seriously. I brought the materials from my community college’s CDL school with me for training but outside of that with the PTI trainer I never trip planned and was immediately driving without instructions just following his garmin gps. I believe their training policy was that we weren’t supposed to be “team driving”, yet that’s exactly what we did. I was instructed to log my ELD status as sleeper berth for several hours even though I wasn’t at rest or ever actually in either sleeper berth [my trainer and I were opposite gender and so I was put (sometimes in sketchy) hotels nightly]. However I wasn’t getting to my hotel room until after midnight and even after 1am on some occasions and that’s with having been on the road since 8:30am-9am, yet I still had quick turnaround times to drive the next day. So I was exhausted my entire 1st week, chewing gum, drinking energy drinks, sitting leaning forward and driving with my window down to stay awake. Once during a traffic jam I was instructed to try and drive under 5mph while in heavy traffic because I guess that keeps my eld status as something other than driving. As a new CDL grad I wasn’t sure what should or shouldn’t be happening and in the moment I didn’t want to challenge my trainer although I quickly realized that this wasn’t training but rather I was extra labor for him to get more miles. Nevertheless ironically after 1 week and 1 evaluation I was let go for basically needing training. My trainer and I didn’t have any dedicated practice time for manuevers and I may have backed 3-4 times that week because I was mostly driving to and through different states, so of course my backing still needs work I’m new and inexperienced. This was definitely an eye opening experience of exactly what I don’t want to experience again. This showed me that as a new CDL grad I maybe taken advantage of early on but as best I can I’m going to try and find a company with a longer training schedule that actually seems to be invested in the success of it’s drivers.

Currently Employed at Company: No