Another Newbie with a question lol

There are many companies that train and hire their graduates. Your best bet is to scour these forums about those companies, read everything you can about their students, drivers, instructors, trainers, failures, successes, good and bad points. Go to all the company websites and do the same. There is an enormous amount of information out there. All you have to do is pull it in. At some point, you will get a mental image that will mean something to you. It will take you months to form the picture because there are all kinds of perspectives, but it will be worth it.

Good luck to you, BiggDog.

 

Do like I did, spend hours searching this forum, you can figure out a lot on your own.

 

Biggdog i said in another post that if u can afford to you would be much better off finding ur own certified cdl school. u can save almost half what a company sponsored school will cost and u will not be committed to the company so if they treat u like crap u can find another co.

 

In many cases, that is not true anymore. Examples: My local CDL school is $4,995 for the CDL-A training. Assuming that I pay a company's full costs, Swift's would cost $3,900, CR England's would be $2,995 (but they have many one-day-only or one-week-only specials that can drop the price to $995), Stevens would cost about $3,600, FFE's would cost about $3,000, and Prime's would cost $1,760. And all of them can be "worked off." Every candidate must make his/her own decisions about what's right. For me, since all companies will "treat you like crap" to one extent or another, why would I pay for something that I can get for "time served?"

 

I hear CR England is the worst trucking company to work for.

 

Don't most of these companies charge you a high interest rate on top of these costs? Prime and FFE I know do not but as an example CRE's site says 18% interest.

 

Of the 5 you mentioned in your posts, I would look first at Prime. I wouldn't look at C R England at all!

 

Here ya go, it's called Trucking Company DAC Reports. Start reading through all those, or at least have a look at all the possibilities. I just completed my CDL school this past Tuesday. Some of the companies that recruited from the school:

• Schneider
• Covenant (team)
• Werner
• TMC
• TransAm
• Swift
• Keim

If you have the ability to get your CDL from a school, and not a trucking company school, I would recommend it. That way you're not tied to a contract/loan to the trucking company for a couple years, or at least until you've worked long enough to fulfill the pay-back obligation. Once you have your CDL then you will have more freedom to choose who you want to drive for.

 

The ones that charge interest do so only if you don't completely pay it off. No matter if you get your CDL from a private school or a trucking academy, you definitely want to stay with your first company for a full year, no matter how stressful and frustrated you get...and you will get stressed and frustrated.