600 hour advanced truck driver training course.

Just my opinion...as far as ideas...go to the truckstops and personally ask O/O's...that would be much better...

 

my 2 cents.
Ok, so i have 1.5 years as a company driver, and I just now Bought my own truck....as in last week.
Do I feel qualified? heck no!!! But its time to roll the dice. From my perspective, I would LOVE to see this as a course I could take AFTER someone has a year or more under their belt. If it had been offered as that, I would have taken it before buying my truck. Your going to have a VERY hard time convincing 98% of the companies out there to take on a rookie O/O with only a couple months exp.
For example the company i lease to, Watkins shepard, will hire a newly graduated driver, but will NOT hire an O/O until they have at least 1 year exp. Expecting brokers and customers to welcome the same rookie with so little experience is simply not going to happen. You MIGHT be able to convince one of the CDL mill companies to take your graduates on, but then your going to have 90 or more percent of them failing due to having to work for a horrible company. Further, in my hunting for credit to get my truck, I ran into a brick wall from more than 3/4ths of the finance companies I talked to. they wanted to see at least 2 years OTR before they would be willing to finance my truck.....
So that puts a serious limit on what kind/age/condition truck your students are going to be able to get.

Honestly, I think you have a good idea, it just needs to be done differently.
Split it into a decent "basic" course, combining CDL and "real world" exp for 250 to 300 hours or so, then open another class to drivers who want to make the jump to O/O...... Limit that to people with more than 1 year exp.....

 

If you have experience booking freight and running a truck then you should know teaching someone hours to run a business on load board freight, is teaching them how to not make money. Maybe 5 percent of lads on load boards have a good rate on them, the other 95 percent is garbage, cheap cheap cheap. The best thing a prospective owner operator with no business background can do is enroll in an accredited school and take business management and administration classes. No offense intended to you, the hard truth is unless you have been a business college professor you are not qualified to teach someone how to run a business, no matter how successful you were in the trucking industry. Knowing how to do A, and knowing how to teach someone to do A, is not the same thing.

 

I have a very basic question for the OP. who is the "we" that you keep referring to? Do you own a CDL school already? Are you an employee of one? You said you have trucks that the students will use to run brokered loads. Do you own or work for a trucking company that will be starting its own CDL training program?

 

1) What is your location? What city and state are you out of? Do you take students from all over the United States and Canada?

2) Could you please put a complete history and resume of ALL your truck driving and business experiences here on the forum so that everyone can see and determine exactly what your deal is?

3) Have you ever had to answer to either the federal government or to any individual state government concerning your school or curriculum? If so, please answer fully. If the answer is "yes", and you give "yes" for an answer, you will positively have the respect of the forum readers of being honest.

4) Would you be willing to go through the channels of both being accredited and regulated by the federal government and the state that your school is in?

5) When students graduate from your school, do you help place them into jobs so that they can start earning a living?

 

To the OP:

I like your enthusiasm and optimism and hope you are successful. My advice is to have a good business plan. I am assuming your solicitation of advice to be part of that plan and not a cleverly disguised attempt to acquire students for a half-baked idea. Anyone who knows about business would have a solid business plan before opening the doors, right?

As a 28 year long business owner and former college teacher (besides being a current truck driver) I would suggest you narrow your focus a bit. At first glance it seems you're spreading yourself a bit thin trying to cover so much territory in one course. Pick a single aspect or topic then outline that course in its entirety .....and then refine the outline. Make several outlines that focus on the important aspects of what you wish to teach and you'll eventually have your comprehensive course even though it may not be teachable in the span of 600 hours. That's when you refine more and decide what's important. This "reductionist" approach has always worked for me in teaching though your creative process may differ from mine.

I haven't included specifics because I think the subject matter reveals those topics quite naturally here. All you need to do is search the threads in this great forum to find years of fantastic knowledge freely offered. This great bunch of people will gladly help make you successful so long as you don't BS them ! If you spew BS I guarantee you a stream of yellow DEF will befall your neatly-combed dreadlocks.

Hope that helps ! Good luck to you.

 

Your premise seems akin to teaching people to own run a restaurant, when they've never been in a restaurant. I don't see much of a market.

But I laughed at the premises of pet hotels and "The Christmas Store"... and look who's laughing now.

A rookie has enough on their plate learning to drive and manage a truck for a carrier, IMO.

 

You need to spend more time driving than anything else, add 200 hours of backing, setup real world situtations like World Variety Produce on Slauson in Los Angeles. They need to practice difficult to get into spaces, need to practice tight maneuvers.

Accounting classes can only do so much, as far as teaching about hookers, and there prior military one would think its been covered.

They need to drive, drive, drive. Teach them how to balance loads and axle out using actual loads. Load them deliver them unload, then drive some more.

What they need if you have not got it, is to drive frontwards, backwards, sop and do it some more.

 

I have seen this before, it wasn't in trucking but in another huge and diverse industry.

The OP is looking for suggestions so here is one to remember - 90% of being an O/O seems to come from experience. YOU CAN'T teach experience.

 

F

You would be surprised at the companies thar will put a 3-6 month driver in a L/P truck. Its predatory, but totally legal. ATS is the worst.