what is a good company to start a career with

Good starting point, is FOR YOU to get a job ASAP.

Then your buddy can go to school. Get your experience someplace, any place and when he is done and has his CDL in hand, THEN come back here and ask where to go. From now till he graduate, what could be a great company now, can be a skank one later.

 

That's correct; you need to get started right now then he can join you when he graduates. Where is your location?

Schneider Bulk
SVTN
Decker Truck Line - reefer division
Abilene Motor Express
Pride Transport

Many others if you live in the hiring area; put your location on your profile.

 

None of them. You are a newbie. So newbies are as newbies do. They get on with whatever company will hire someone fresh out of school. They have no respect for you and will treat you accordingly. You are a nameless, faceless, nobody charged with getting the freight from Point A to Point B faster than safe without a peep out of your piehole. Get it? For this, you will be rewarded with, initially, less than Minimum Wage and, perhaps, for a good long while. This is you and your bud.

If you can survive the first year being treated like a Level One Inmate on wheels, and you have done it without drama of any kind or sort, I mean perfection, you may be ok to step from the worst exploitive bottom feeder to the next to worst expolitive bottom feeder.

Be careful on how much you and your bud pay for a so-called "CDL School" because let's say on Day 3,4, 5, you are out with your fat, unshaven, unshowered, undereducated, greasy trainer in say, Utah, or Anywheres, Nebraska, and you fall asleep for a nano-second in your 13th hour of driving, and dip the truck into the shoulder ditch, and first you and your trainer both fill your drawers full a pound of brown, and then you are crying crocodile tears because the freight is off-pallet and all over the Interstate, and the trainer keeps saying "we're done. "we're done" because, well.... you are done. You may, I said, may, get a busride home. You may be on your own, too. So have cash or a card. You will still be on the hook for paying school, the company, whoever and whatever got you in. So when you get back home, get down to Walmart or Mick D's pronto and apply.

If you make the job work and don't wreck and roll, and can stand the trainer stink, bad attitudes, foul language, and dispatchers yelling at you in your 13th hour of driving to "get the G-D d--mn load to Kansas City and DO IT NOW!" you may be ok and make a hard profession out of it. At that point, smaller, family-owned carriers, regionals, are generally not bad, but if they are leased on to say, a Schneider or Swift, you'll be back in the same boat with a different boss, that's all.

But go for it if this is what you want to do.

The only thing wrong with trucking is.......well, trucking.

 

Freymiller trucking

 

US Xpress, Old Dominion, Quest Global

 

You don't have work for a sleaze ball company because you're new, that may have been the case in the past idk, but there's plenty of well paying jobs, local, etc available to you right out of the gate.

Call companies you're interested in or check their website and see what schools they approve of and they'll take you straight from school. Leave those bottom feeders alone and let them rot away.