Would you recommend trucking?

Unless its home nightly , I wouldnt recommend trucking to my worst enemy . Hell , i think they should train convicts to drive and that would be how they did thier sentence.
Theres a reason for those adds - its called a turn over rate that no other job / skill can come within 50 percentage points of , and theres a crap load of GOOD reasons why people leave .
Like trucks ? then become a diesel mechanic .

 

Check Millis Transfer in Burleson,TX. This company provides cdl school and a job with Millis Transfer.

 

I'd always recommend going back to college to learn something more lucrative

 

You only get out of it, what you put in. Cutting your teeth on the crappy jobs is just a fact of life. If you limit yourself, you ain't gonna find the sweet stuff. By reading thru posts all over this site, I am just waisting my time typing. Everybody just wants to #####, talk badly and turn you away. Good luck to ya!

 

No I wouldn't recommend trucking to anyone that doesn't already have a strong desire to do it. The stress is not well appreciated by people outside the industry. "How hard can it be you sit down all day and have air conditioning?". Car drivers make it their mission to kill you because your life and theirs is much less important than sending a cat emoji in a text message while they tailgate in the left lane until 3 inches before their exit. "You have plenty of time to go from Here to There, it's only that far (holding fingers apart) on the map." Or ""hey our directions used to be correct. We only forgot 2 low bridges between the highway and the customer." And everybody's favorite "Honey when will you be home? You've missed this, that, and the other occasion and I'm getting tired of it."

Your job is to stuff 10 pounds of work into a 5 pound bag and call it Hours of Service because you're a Professional. If you're single, already divorced, empty nest and OK with living like a stray dog, try it out. It's much harder than you will imagine and pay for newbies is SOMEWHERE between $30k-50k depending on a lot of factors. Your only chance of being home on weekends (12-36 hours) is if you get hired by a company close to your house and they already get their drivers home that often. If you crave being alone and traveling it's pretty good if you work for a good company. If you are a social person and well-connected to family or non-work life you will have a hard time and you will be one stupid car driver away from an accident that can wreck your time in this industry.

It CAN be a lifeline, but you better have a plan on how to transition out of trucking because once you are in it you are often characterized as NOTHING but a truck driver and the job will isolate you from most of the world around you except for a dispatcher and people on the end of your phone.

Sorry to be dark. It helped me, but it also can trap you or wreck you easily.

 

Don't go to college unless college is a NECESSARY requirement for the career. "Everyone in the career has a degree" isn't a good reason. Colleges have degrees on thousands of useless fields and all college accomplishes for many people is a big fat unpayable student loan debt. The shipping clerk at my customer owes $80k, dropped out after 6 years, and is making $11/hr. My local university is full of future Sports Agents, Mass Communication/TV News Anchors, Music Producers. They graduate about 20,000 of them every Fall. There aren't 20,000 working professionals in the entire country in all three fields combined.

It took me 15 years to pay my loans off and I did that after remaining in my trained field for only 2 years. Trucking paid off my loans, not my degrees.

 

Hvac is my trade and I pull hopper bottoms during picking season here on the weekends. It would recommend you at least give it another look. In most cases it's an average wage of 20.00 an hr. A good chiller man can bring home upwards to 40 an hour. You will most likely be able to find a good job working with chillers after school because they can mold you so to speak. I have 17yrs of experience in the field from residential to heavy commerical.

 

You will do well to take up something else. People here talked about welding. That would be one option.

We would not want to get back into trucking now since there has been many changes that we find abhorrant. Such as cameras facing the driver inside the cab. Sheesh, give me a camera facing the pretty thing in dispatch then LOL. It just aint gonna happen.

The second reason is the inflow of immigrants from Middle East. It's reaching a point that our culture will change or take another course entirely versus what we have seen and learned from the ww1 days of trucking. We grew up not far from a truckstop dating back to the 50's and for almost half our life we were basking in stories, the equiptment and the food etc. All of that is gone.

When we stopped after 9-11 due to wear and tear plus medical reasons, there was enough of a problem with lazy drivers, urine bottles and so forth for us to consider getting out. Fast forward to today, just getting a CDL then getting access to a Base, Port or Airfield anywhere requires even more Credentials (TWIC) and crossing into Canada requires a Passport (Someone can correct me) compared to pre-9-11.

Then there is the dispatch and your log books. God help you if you are fired because you drove legally only to be a hour late somewhere due to logs.

 

When I was a teen, I had a grass cutting business. I had a 1970 Dodge Fargo pickup truck without power steering, I pulled a converted tent trailer to haul my garden tractor. Backing up a vehicle with arm strong steering and a short wheel base trailer was a real challenge. But I believe it was good practice for years later when I started to drive semi truck. I never had an issue with backing up a trailer, and now I do it pulling two trailers (super b-train).
So if you haven't done it: do you have access to a vehicle with a hitch and some king of trailer? It's no semi truck but the physics are the same. The longer the trailer the slower it reacts to the tow vehicle.
I have a camping trailer, it's amazing to see the fun people have backing into camping sites. I just zip it right in there no problem.

 

What are we gonna do, when we have talked enough of the younger people out of it? No doubts its not the same world a lot of us came out here to. I too am not happy about it. And some of the things pointed out above, would turn anyone off. I guess I been sheltered a little, since I own my own trucks and unless I read it somewhere(Landline Magazine), I don't know what some of the companies have been doing. But I do know, and can't speak for everyone, I can't be out here forever, and I have to have someone to pass that torch to. And we are gonna be joining the masses being homeless, hungry, and naked if nobody is willing to move them trucks. There are good driving jobs to be had out here if one is willing to dig past the flashy ads of the super carriers. But, I think that may require to much effort for some....