Trainer info

Trainers get an additional $40 a day while they have a student on the truck. That's really the only advantage besides the fact that they don't drive most of the time. From what I've seen a lot will sit in the passenger seat and read books while keeping an eye on your driving and giving pointers along the way.

When I was with my trainer it was mostly me driving unless I was overly tired for some reason. He drove for the first couple hours on day one and I drove mostly from that point on. We did have a few days where I would drive my entire 11 hours and then he would drive what ever was left of our 14 for the day. I think the most we covered was around 750 miles in one day.

 

I hope they do better than some companies do their drivers with training. It is a lot of headache to take on.

 

Trainers do get paid more and see more miles. To me the thing about trainers is you got to have a lot of patience and not stress things out. You got to have trust and try to sleep while the truck is in motion. I also have plans to become one to, but that will be with my plan to lease

 

With one major company they had a lot of rollovers with trainees. The trucks are almost run as team loads and trainers are sleep deprived.

 

SNI doesnt run trainers as a team. They are on duty while the student drives and are supposed to be riding shotgun also. I went through orientation about 6 weeks ago and my te was great. Thought about trying to do it myself after i had put the time in. Then i thought about how several folks in my class werent the brightest bulbs in the knife drawer, and i have a low level of patience for less than bright people. I think it would be an easy extra few bucks when you had a good student. othertimes the money wouldnt be near enough.

 

Husband has trained with the mega company and has had some of the not brightest bulbs in the box, I don't even know how they made it through class really to get a cdl in the first place. Then there are the ones who do not want to be responsible for anything but driving the straight road; no map planning, route planning, no clue where they were even going.

It sounds like the riding shotgun would be a lot better in my estimation, or at least for the 1st 3 - 4 weeks, then too when the truck is stopped everyone can get some sleep.

 

Some of the companies too may not let you train till you are there 6 mo to a year.

 

Should be at least a couple years!
At least one co. that I know of pays the trainer extra $$ for each trainee he trained every week for up to a year or until the trainee quits. That can come out to an extra $400-500 a week!
But they don't do much training and must have at least 5 (IIRC) years exp.Co.also has a low turnover, sorry.