A wannabe trucker with questions.

Need to go to a cdl school first and gi bill covers some. I went to Miami and gi bill covered travel, hotel and everything.the apprenticeship is once you go with a company, the people I'm with have it and I get bah from their home terminal for a year while doing that which is like 850 a month.

 

Trucking can be a very rewarding career. But it is a little different than the military lifestyle as I found out after I left the Marine Corp years ago. Not sure of your situation in your personal life but if your 1000 miles away from home and a personal situation arises it will be tuff to deal with as well. I personally love driving but I am jumping out of it for a year or so for the second time to work in a different field and then come back and finish up. As far as your GI Bill there are several company's that will aid you with moving forward with OJT or putting you in school. Just need to find the right one that fits. You may not want to tie yourself to one of these company's that will require you to stay with them for the advantage of training you. Just be careful and pick wisely. You should get plenty of advice here on that.

 

Well let me be the first to say!
"Thank You for your Service"
Now to the questions at hand, there are several Vets on here on a regular basis who have done EXACTLY what you are trying to do, I would suggest that you see where those threads of the forum are located, You may find some that come in here, But most of the information will be found on the specific threads from the Companies that do this.
Now if you were me or if I was you, I would go to your community college and get the training there and then pick a better then most to go to, There are weveral mentioned here that will take you straight out of school run you through their training program, they will send you with a trainer for certain skills to be learned and then they will put you through the test for you to test out and get in your own truck, I would also go into your profile and enter in where you are located, We don't want address names and phone numbers but just a general location as to what part of the country that you are in. I hope this helps.

 

Just check with the Community Colleges in your state, the one that I went to is currently $1,312 for a 10.5 week course. Seems like I saw a Community College in Cedar Rapids, IA that did a CDL in 30 days. If you control your own loan you will likely be able to earn 10 cents per mile or more than what the company schools will pay when you take an entire year or two to pay back working for them for less.

 

Living near Chicago you have many good options as to trucking companies to work for. Consider a tanker company for consistantly good paychecks. Schneider tanker division and Superior Carriers hire new CDL school graduates. Schneider has some type of veteran program, not sure about Superior Carriers; call and ask. You will need the tanker/hazmat endorsements, TWIC, passport. At the top of this page click on "CDL Practice Tests" to study for the endorsements. They are the same questions you will have when you test at the DMV. If you talk to someone at these two companies, ask if they recognize Harper Community College as a good school. Schneider probably will, but not sure of Superior Carriers.

 

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I'm really not trying to discount all of the other advise that you will receive in this thread... but, just look at this post. It's spot on man. In your area, there are so many trucking companies. Everything from local to regional to OTR. Literally one of the best spots to be. Regardless, sound advice from Chinatown. I've never met the guy, but he really seems to know his ####.

unloader

 

I'll second every single word of the post above...every single word! ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^