Seriously...what are my chances of getting a good trainer at school?

Respect,respect,respect,,,, if you don't it from your trainer ask for a new one.you can't possibly do your job effectively if your not trained property.

 

People who blame others for their failures do not take responsibility for their actions. I know a trucker very well who started with me and he quit a great company to go to another that he thought would be better and he makes half than what he used to with more maintenance involved. He never takes responsibility for his bad impulse decisions. He always goes for what look like simple get rich quick shortcuts in life without doing research first and winds up losing. He says that successful people like me are just lucky, without acknowledging our hard work and patience. My trainer wasn't that great, and I even showed him some things he didn't know as I am more tech savy and there were features on the qualcomm that I figured out that he never knew. So instead of worrying about your trainer, just focus on not hitting anything, and how to make it to your destination on time the rest you will learn in time.

 

Tell your company you want a trainer with yrs exp not a newbie for a trainer.Worked for me.

 

There's A 50 50 chance

 

Treat others with respect, and take responsibility for your actions. Yeah, you might get an @$$h°|€ for a trainer, if you can't deal with one on occasion this probably isn't the industry for you.

 

I went into trucking expecting everyone to be a holes and I am really surprised at how nice everyone is to me. Then again I do not wear a dirty wife beater and flip flops. I wear nice new clean clothes, make sure to keep clean shaven, smile, stand up straight and get treated with respect.

 

I would have to say your chances are 50/50, but it also depends on what company you're with (at least, to an extent.) Just after I finished my school, I was assigned to a phase one trainer who ... well, let's just say I don't know where in the world he is today and really don't care. As soon as we got out of the terminal, he let me know in no uncertain terms that the whole reason I was "on his truck" was to add miles and drive at night because he didn't like to. Of course, it was against company policy for new drivers to drive between the hours of 0200 and 0500 (as best I remember.) But I always, from the beginning, drove through the night.

My trainer, after the first day and he saw how I drove, would sleep like a baby (albeit a loud one) while I drove. I could sleep when he drove only when I was absolutely exhausted. Partly because of the way he drove, and partly because he'd have some stupid audio book playing way too loudly while he spit on the windshield from yelling and cursing at every other driver, including those who were going the opposite direction on the interstate. During my phase one, I had no accidents. My trainer had two. He tried to get me to falsify my logs for the first week until he finally figured out it wasn't going to happen. (After telling him no multiple times, I finally just started saying, "ok - let me send a macro to safety first just to make sure I won't get in trouble."

My phase two trainer had just finished his own phase two training and asked me more questions than I asked him. Halfway through my phase two, my trainer took home time and I was allowed to solo from Ohio down to Florida and back - so that was pretty cool. I actually finished my phase two early, which was also cool. When testing out of phase two, they put us all through a 2-hour class that actually lasted about 45 minutes and congratulated us on being trainers. I always refused to go pick up a student because... I was no trainer, regardless of what they said.

I had a friend who, in his phase one training, had an anxiety attack from his trainer yelling at him while he descended a mountain in the rain. He got out at the next truck stop and hasn't driven since (this was back in 2009).

I kept up with others in my class who had trainers in both phases that they had great respect and appreciation for and couldn't say enough good things about them.

It's hard to give an accurate estimate of your "chances" of getting a good trainer. The only thing you can really control is to determine what kind of student your trainer will get.

(As a side note: I hated my phase one trainer and was scared to death, at first, of driving all night. But it came to be that my favorite time to drive is through the night - there's nothing like driving into a beautiful dawn. And after driving through rush-hour evening traffic when I was still just learning to drive, traffic doesn't phase me at all anymore. I consider it my time to just slow down and relax and be able to look around a bit more. So my trainer sucked, but I did get some great benefits from it.)

 

I have had two trainers in my career. Both were great. Now I myself am a trainer and I doubt anybody will write horror stories about me. I have met many other trainers in my time here and while there are some I would prefer not to share a truck with, I have never met one that was bad at his job.

 

If you don't like your trainer demand another. Simple as that. I went through a total of seven and got two fired before I completed training. The last guy I had was awesome and got me done with enough confidence to final test.