My orientation with Schneider

Day 5: First week complete. Today was extremely boring, lots of videos and a few multiple question tests that are the same as the chapters in the book. Some guy actually managed to fail and they simply had him keep doing it until he passed, so there's no pressure here. We were quickly briefed on how to move the tandems and went over some required black book paperwork in the trucks, then headed back to class and received our fuel cards. We got to play around on the simulators for handling different disaster scenarios, pretty cool. After that we learned how to send out our paper logs and the day was over.

Tomorrow I begin week 2 which will be my one on one, over the road training. I'm excited and super nervous!

 

Sorry there weren't any updates. I haven't had a single day off in 22 days and have been catching up on much needed sleep and the last couple days of 118 degree heat has been a mind killer.

Week 2 wasn't a great week for me. My trainer was fine, but there were a lot of things out of our control going wrong and it was entirely spent in the hole of hell that is California, plus some personal issues that made it hard for me to fully concentrate. Regardless, it was a priceless learning experience and I rather enjoyed the driving portion of the job, even if the scenery kinda sucked.

Week 3 has been pretty boring and uneventful which hasn't prompted me to give many updates. It has consisted of soft skills (qualcomm, trip planning, etc.), hard skills and presentations, also finishing up some required videos whenever we had time. Yesterday was our hard skills tests, cleverly disguised as practice, and today was our soft skills tests, which consisted of planning out a trip and using the qualcomm effectively. Tomorrow is graduation and I'm very much looking forward to going home! I believe 10 of the original 19 people remain.

All in all, Schneider seems like a good starter company and everyone has been incredibly nice and professional. I'm honestly very intimidated and anxious about starting this job, but I imagine only a fool wouldn't be. I'm not sure exactly what graduation consists of but I'll throw in another update shortly.

 

I did consider Swift and a few other companies. The main reason I chose Schneider over them is because I didn't want to get stuck teaming and making my trainer money while I sat on a lousy weekly salary for an extended period of time. Schneider does things very differently in that regard and it was more to my liking.

 

Final update regarding orientation.

Graduation was on Friday and went by pretty quickly. There were some short speeches by various people. Like a true graduation, we all got to suffer through the whole deal where your name is called and you walk up to shake hands with the big boys and collect your diploma while everyone applauds. After that we called our DBL (driver business leader, essentially a glorified dispatcher) and figured out transportation home to take a break. Some flew, others got rental cars, none were put on busses.

I'll be calling my DBL on Monday to figure out how and when I'm going to pick up my truck but for now I'm just enjoying my much needed break.