Career change, looking at trucking and need advise.

Can understand the person who said that newbies who get into truck driving "for a career change" or "think it would be interesting" don't stick with it. But in my case I've thought long and hard about it from the perspective this would actually be something I'd like doing....

There are a lot of unknown factors for a newbie though. One of my concerns is making it through training period and becoming a company driver OTR and then not getting enough miles / loads. I will want to work, don't need home time. Maybe I read one too many stories from people saying they didn't get enough miles, when in fact they caused that problem themselves.

I'm probably going to go the path with a company who trains to get the CDL, so whether that is Werner, Swift, CR England, Central, etc., will I really be getting the 2300 to 3000 miles a week, consistently?

 

I'm curious as to the answer to this as well....

 

I haven't run for a company OTR for awhile but I hear miles are slow OTR but then our economy is still struggling so that is going to be expected. Personally over the years I have learned to not worry about if one week is short or not..it is going to happen and it is going to happen in reverse... but over the course of a year it will even out. I found that making more cpm and running fewer miles equaled more paycheck, than when I first was driving running huge miles (think they thought me,myself and I meant there were 3 drivers in the truck!) and being paid peanuts. I am on dedicated pulling reefer doing semi regional runs as an o/o, and this year I have seen very few weeks over 2000 miles. When I started there in June 1011 til the first of this year my slow week was 2000 miles. The economy seems to be the direct cause of this slowdown.

 

Why do you say "they caused that problem themselves"? Freight slows down from time to time and for many reasons. That's neither a carrier's fault nor the driver's. Carriers can only dispatch loads their customers have called in. Not many carriers can honestly offer consistent weekly miles or pay. And that's actually a complaint we hear a lot: "They promised me miles. I haven't seen 'em."

 

Didn't manage their HOS properly.
Made their dispatcher angry for some reason.
Refusing certian loads to certian areas.
Wanting too much home time...and not near a shipping lane or terminal.
Driving for a lease oriented company as a company driver.

 

Well lets look at some of the facts from an accounting point of view.
When you sign one of these contracts, they essentially loan you the money for training and deduct of portion of that amount from every paycheck until the debt is settled. So the contract length generally ends up being between 18 and 30 months. This means they own you for that period of time. You can leave early, but if you leave, you owe the balance of the loan.

Now lets look at the pay. The pay starting out is low. We all know that so no surprises there. But the longer you stay, the better your pay rate gets. At most of these carriers you can expect a rate increase every 6 months for at least the first 18 or 24 months.

So what does this tell us from an accounting point of view? It tells us that if we look at any particular load, the company will make more money having the guy that's only been there for 3 months haul it than they will if the let the guy who has been there for 20 months take it. Now there are lots of other variables involved such as the risk of accidents/damage from sending drivers who are too green into more challenging conditions and so forth. But the at some point it becomes more profitable for the company to use the 3 month driver than it does for them to use the 20 month driver and thus the 20 month driver can expect to sit more waiting for loads. Also since the company is going to get their loan repaid by the driver whether he stays as employee or not, they really don't care if you quit. In fact, from an accounting point of view, its probably better for them if you do quit early. They get their loan money back sooner and you free up a truck that they can then put a new hire in at the lower new hire rate. Win/win for them if they can starve you enough to make you leave early.

I'm not going to claim this is what happens in every case or even in any case at all. But I present it as something anyone considering signing a training contract should consider. Remember, the recruiter can and will tell you ANYTHING., but the accountants dictate how the company is run. If the accountants decide its better to starve out the 15-24 month contract drivers, then that is exactly what the dispatchers are going to do. And in those cases, no amount of managing your HOS properly or staying on your dispatchers good side is going to help. Dispatchers want to keep their jobs too and if the higher ups want them to starve the 20 month rate drivers, then starve them is that they're going to do.

 

To the OP, I would like to add that what everyone else has said about becoming a driver being more of a lifestyle change than a career change is absolutely true. But for the most part, that only really applies to OTR drivers. I've never driven OTR. I did a little bit of regional driving when I first started and then got right into local work. From day one I've always worked mon-fri with weekends off just like most people do. For the OTR guys, its a lifestyle. For me, its a job pretty much like any other. I might the exception to the rule, but the point is, there are exceptions so what the others have said doesn't automatically have to be true. Just something else to consider.

 

I doubt very much that dispatchers are told to descretly favor lower paid newbs vs. higher paid veterans to save money. Moving freight is very hectic and they'll take the first available driver regardless. It's not like they have time to consciously select the guy making .30 cpm vs. the one making .40. That doesn't even factor into it.

Now I do agree that churning newbs is their business practice in that it keeps payroll down overall.
If you have 10,000 experienced drivers making average of .40 cpm vs. 10,000 newbies making average of .32, you're saving millions a year to the bottom line, even after you factor in the cost of massive training programs and higher insurance costs. This allows you to charge lower prices and be the most competitive and grow -- as most customers go for price first and foremost. That's how they got to be MEGA and why MEGA's are starters.

 

So wait, I'm confused. First you say it doesn't factor into it.

Then you say it does factor in. I'd say saving millions per year to the bottom line is motivation enough to cause supervisors to instruct dispatchers to favor the lower paid drivers. If that's too much work for the dispatchers to be practical, it probably isn't too much work for someone in IT to create software that does it for them by moving lower paid drivers to the top of the list automatically. The dispatcher gets a load and needs a driver near Chicago, he tells the software to show him who is will be empty near Chicago in the next 12 hours, then he starts at the top of the list and works his way down until the load is assigned. The software puts the lowest paid guys at the top of the list and the bottom line goes up because the lower paid guys get called first. Obviously this purely speculation on my part. But like you pointed out, we're talking millions of dollars difference here. When the stakes are that high, companies will do a lot, including creating custom software if need be, to make those savings happen.

The bottom line is this. There is no shortage of drivers on this forum and elsewhere who have gone through these mega-carrier training programs and lots of them report sitting more once they got closer to the end of their contract i.e. once they were being paid at a higher rate. Now that doesn't prove anything but it does make one wonder if there is something more that just coincidence behind it. I think you have to admit what I've presented above is at least plausible.

But regardless, I don't think anyone will dispute the claim that in general mega-carriers treat drivers like a business expense. You are not a human being to them and your wants and needs do not matter to them in the least. Therefore signing a contract which binds you to one of these companies for 24 or 30 months gives them even less motivation to treat you well. You can't quit without owing them more money than you are likely have so why should they bother to treat you well? For that reason alone I don't recommend anyone go the company paid training route. You're just inviting them to treat you like crap and most do.

 

Yes I could be wrong, but the dispatcher/DM's are usually so stressed out and overworked (and under-paid), that they're just trying to make it through the day. I can't imagine them being miro-managed to the point of selectively choosing drivers based on cpm rates...when your entire driver pool is averaging maybe .33. My point being it's averaged out to be as low as it can be, through attrition and a never ending stream of newbies anxiously waiting to take the wheel. I don't think they'd parse it down to one guy vs. another just for .04 CPM, all else being equal. Again I could be wrong. It's a very competitive business.