Fontana Orientation Sept 11th

Received my marching papers today, lol

Looking foward to joining the team.

Want to thank everyone on this forum who helped me in making this decision. Thanks!!

Hope to meet you out there some day.

Take care!

 

I'll try to update this thread regularly as I proceed through orientation.

 

Checked into Best Western in Ontario. First one out of my orientation class to check in, I counted 11 on the list the lady at the front desk had. Waiting for my roommate and just chillin. The bus picks us up at 5:25 am for a 6 am start to the festivities in Fontana OC tomorrow, Sept 11th. Certainly a humbling day to begin a new career!!

 

First day of orientation in the books! There are 12 people in our class, 2 of them have driven before but for less than 6 months.

Day began with bus picking us up from the hotel at 5:25. Class began at 6. We all did our PWS - Pre Work Screening, which was pretty simple. I am 42, 6 ft and overweight and I had no problem with any of it. Everyone passed it in my class.

While people were doing the PWS, which took from 8 until 11:00 for everyone to get through, we did a 49 question open book quiz on the FMCSA. And we started reading in our Big Books, Schneider 'Bible'.

Lunch was 11 to 12. They give you coupons good for $7.00 worth of free food. There were 5 of us in the class that will be based out of Fontana, so we had lunch with our recruiter and the OC Regional manager. Lots of good questions and answers.

After lunch we did alot of paperwork, that lasted until 2:00. Then they took us back to the hotel.

Tomorrow we start off at 5:25 pick-up again. We are going to do logs and then go out to the trucks and start learning pre-trip, uncoupling, driving, etc. We were told tomorrow would go until 4 or so, guess we will see.

Overall impressions so far are positive, everyone at Schneider has a very positive attitude and are friendly. Will post more tomorrow.

 

Here's the recap on the second day of orientation:

Bus picked 12 of us up from hotel at 5:25, class began at 6 am. We did HOS and paper log book training from 6 until 9 am. Several breaks scattered in there. At 9:15 we met our driving instructors, who are the ones who actually take us out on the road for training while we are at the OC and they will be with us while we practice all of our skills. I talked to my instructor, Dolly, until 10, then we had lunch until 11:30.

At 11:30 we got on the bus to go across the yard to start training on the trucks. The instructors broke us into 3 groups of 4 and we rotated through these stations:

Coupling/uncoupling/pre-trip/air-brake - Schneider has their own rules, policies, and methods for these that go above and beyond what the DOT or DMV require. You have to learn to do it the Schneider way.

Backing practice - drove a 53' tractor-trailer around the yard and practiced 45 degree backing into 3 seperate spots - one with barrels, one between trailers, and one between trailers with limited pull-up room. We also practiced doing a drive-thru parking scenario between two trailers.

Simulator practice - worked on shifting the way Schneider wants us to do it and also proper gear selection for going down grades.

We started keeping a paper log to keep track of our hours worked, lots of practice. All of this was over at 3:30 and we took the bus back to the hotel.

Thoughts for the day - overall very happy with my choice to go with Schneider. Everyone has been professional, approachable, and just all around nice. We were told today that we will have a skills test either on Friday or Saturday we must pass, or we go home. The test includes everything I listed above, plus a detailed road test with our instructors. If we pass that test, then we go out with our Training Engineer on Sunday for our OTR training.

I'll keep you updated!!