information on knight

Unless you are pure $$$ hungry, I suggest that you dont do it! For all the reasons that you mentioned, but YOU have to deal with any incidents by your trainee, etc. Most co.s will 'flatter' you with giving you the 'opportunity' to be one..but Swift for ex. would make you a trainer with 4 mos exp and a clean record...dont think that the avg trainer lasts any more than 1-3 trainees

 

I won't run my truck as a team truck. It would be as a solo, I'm on duty the entire time my trainee drives. And the truck never moves unless I'm in the passenger seat or outside supervising them backing up.. I might drive for an hour or two a day, but the truck will be run solo unless my trainee proves they can handle it by themselves. That's the only way to train. I'd make sure they know how to write down directions and use a map before they use a GPS. And since I'm awake while my trainee is I'm there always to provide guidance and instructions. That's how you train, not have a trainee as a team doing team runs and I can't sleep with a truck in motion. Tried that a few years back. Not gonna happen again, ever.

 

Guess that means you will only get 2 hrs sleep (11 + 11 hrs each driving shift) a day on long runs, which is what they want teams for! If Knight classifies you as a 'team truck' and schedules loads as such, you wont have any choice on loads & delivery times. You wont be making any more $$ than solo if you run as you say!....good luck with that...

BTW, if they catch you as the trainer riding in the passenger seat up front when you cross scales and they stop you---your log book better have you 'On Duty'...

Personally, if I'm in a truck, I've got to be driving...dont trust anyone else! Even if in the sleeper with someone else driving who is experienced, any quick maneuvers wake me up. Hard to really get good sleep team driving..

 

You get paid extra if you got a trainee. But that's my point. I'd be a trainer, this person is a trainee. Not a team truck and I'd refuse all team loads.

As for on duty not driving, I'm the trainer, of course I'd be on duty. And when the new HOS takes effect it'll change the whole passenger seat rule anyways. I'm personally looking forward to it.

 

How does Squire work..is it pure 'training' and freight comes 2nd? that started after I left.

 

Yea there's two kinds of training companies. The horrible ones that disguise the trainer/trainee as a cheap team and call it training and the ones that run the truck as a solo operation. Squires either one or the other but I have no idea which. I spent a week on my traininers truck with Schneider and that was plenty of time to get what I needed and hit the road.

 

When I started, my trainer had 30 yrs experience, and the co. tried to run us as an experienced team. But he was smart about how we ran, as trainees esp. sleeping in moving trucks can become 'dangerous' as not getting good sleep starting out. So then we could only run 10 hrs on, and thus after 20 hrs total running ('paper' logs), shut down for a good 4 hrs sleep w/o the truck running. That way could just nap in the sleeper when the other drove and run 'safe.' BTW, I went out after 2 weeks w/him..a good trainer means everything starting out!

 

I really lucked out as well. I'm still friends with my teainer to this day. At the time he had just started his 20th year driving. Learned a lot that week and for years I got myself out of jams by asking myself what he would do. It's amazing what some of these companies like Knight have done to this profession. My first year on the road was flat out FUN and I loved every minute of it. Even today I would say I enjoy this job more than most but half of my loads are going back home and I'm pretty sure that has something to do with it.

 

The industry changed a lot after my first 3 yrs in with all the new regs, logbook changes, more trucks than truck stops could handle; and then when came over to Knight which was in the process of going from a driver's co. (where good driver's were treated like 'gold') to the bottom-line bean counters running it (thx to Swift and competition for cheap freight). My last couple of years there werent any fun, as I was on my 20th (?) DM who didnt know how to run drivers and wimped over to other terminal DM's, etc. Breaking in a new DM every couple of months was painful for all the drivers under him, as he also 'suffered' too in getting up to speed!!

 

My DM was all about the company. A real company man. You had to ask him several times, then beg for any accessorial pay earned. I eventually learned they didn't really pay for anything except loaded miles. A DM's success is based on revenue, not how happy their drivers are or how well they run. Its really a crappy system and and anyone that thinks they are happy at Knight is just fooling themselves. The weekly orientation was like they were herding cattle into that place. I caught the tail end of the good years.