New career - about to start CDL school

Maverick Transportation LLC
Maverick Transportation offers local, dedicated, and OTR truck driving opportunities with best-in-class pay, training, and safety. Learn about their …

 

HMD at one time, was hiring new cdl school grads. Now the website shows 12 mos. experience required. If you like this company, apply anyway and call the company also and let them know you want a driving job.
With your construction background and strong work history, you might be hired.

• Flatbed Trucking Jobs at HMD Trucking
  You are the person we are looking for! Apply today to become an HMD company driver and a member of our growing family. Interested in gettin…
  
  
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The point I am making is not you should be hired at your first employer and only then look around for the CDL school. The point I am making is you FIRST research the trucking companies, find the one that hires people with your record (good, bad, WTF), has a schedule (or whatever fits what you need to do the job for 12 months) and once you have all of that sorted out, you ask the employer which CDL school do they get their new drivers.

The fundamental flaw 90% of newbie make is assuming they can work for a year at every company that hires newbies. Trucking companies are not like fast-food restaurants that sell hamburgers. Some have better hamburgers and some have worse hamburgers, but whatever it's edible and reasonable value. As a newbie, working for a company that only allows drivers home-time every few months is NOT the same as a company where drivers are back to the terminal every 5-6 days. The companies that require drivers to stay out weeks or months also don't run the same areas, they often run everywhere. The drivers getting home every 5-6 days are NOT going everywhere they are staying mostly in a 500-1,000 radius of the terminal. Trucking companies don't pay the same. They aren't all equally honest and reliable with driver pay, etc. EVERY trucking company will have a mistake with driver pay, but not getting anywhere near the pay you expected, based on miles etc, for weeks and months, goes a long way to deciding for you if you will be a truck driver or leave the industry.

From the outside all trucking companies appear similar. From the inside there is a bug difference between the types of companies. In normal life as a human and future employee of a company in most industries you spent your childhood going through grade school, high school, and whatever comes afterwards. You have adults and relatives in various industries and for various employers. During your education phase you can't help but learn some of what it means to be an employee, and employee at ABC, and employee in your area for XYZ. It's not like that with trucking. Unless you have a truck driver in the family it's most likely you have zero info about the industry and employers, so they seem all alike. It's not true. I am trying to get newbies to break out of this "they're all alike" mindset. You don't even have the same odds of staying with a trucking company for a year at every trucking company. There are many drivers that make a career out of trucking and work for whatever random trucking company is hiring the same day they leave a previous employer. There are other drivers that work with very very few companies over their career. What I'm saying is you have to know you very well, and you need to know the employer as well as possible to have any chance of not being just another newbie that leaves the industry permanently long before you work 180 days in the industry. 80% of newbies are out of the industry between day 1 and day 180 in the industry. This is largely a function of the "they're all the same" model. Employers have similarities and drivers have similarities. But there is a lot of variation in both. Neither are just "blank slates" that can be molded into anything with the standard training.

This industry provides A LOT LESS TRAINING than most any other job I ever worked. I got a lot fo training to work at McDs. I got lots of talk about trucking and the regulations and the hours of service, etc and worked for very good companies. Even they leave tons and tons of valuable and crucial info out of training. If you aren't getting the pay you were led to believe, have too much or not enough time off, and you have lots of problems at customers or with the truck without much help it will make it very hard to stay in trucking. Inadequate research and preparation also makes it more likely a newbie falls into the job-hopping merry-go round where you work for bad companies, quite and work for a worse company, quit and work for a worse company, etc, etc until you leave trucking.

You need an accurate self-assessment of how you deal with stress, can you work long hours for days or weeks in real life, how o you respond to surprises on one of your bad days, how much money is necessary for your future, how do you deal with issues that seem to keep happening and don't seem to be solved. All of the pay, work life, and psychological issue in a job. You need a good personal inventory for those plus the details about companies that do and don't fit with your personal inventory. Some companies DO just hire meat in the seat. Some drivers are just meat in the seat so any random company is probably about the same as the last few "meat in the seat" employers they had. Most drivers have some expectations or family or goals or something besides the job that needs to fit into their work life. I'm strongly suggesting you know you and you know the company before you work for them instead of assuming "they're all alike".

If you want to be OTR and stay out for long periods you probably need to consider companies that equip the truck with a big power inverter, a real fridge, APU, etc. Not every company does that. Doing a 34 hour reset every 8 days in a truck with no amenities and working for a company that doesn't pay for a hotel is going to be pretty miserable. When you pick an employer, or they pick you, you've just signed up for what they provide whether you know what that is or not. You need to know what they provide and what you need. An "I'll work anywhere under any conditions" approach isn't a realistic plan for newbies that have no history of prolonged hard work and no personal inventory, so they don't know they are more like a Princess than ironworker. The job is more often like working 2 full-time jobs per week, due to hours of service HOS.

 

EVERYBODY likes the open road. It's the other 97% of the job that makes this industry hard. Trucking isn't getting paid to have a long car trip to a nice place. It's dealing with A-holes in cars, customers, truck stops, etc and being delayed, delayed, delayed, and still having to be on-time while everyone that delayed you is telling the people at the other end YOU ARE WHAT CAUSED THE DELAY.

 

Make sure your recruiter has an American accent.