Thinking about being a swift mentor

How would the trainee know? By definition he's in training and thus learning.....

 

@FerrissWheel is a flatbed mentor and @Lepton1 is a previous swift mentor.
these are the only ones that I know of.

 

With ten months at swift I would be planning my exit strategy. In two months you will find many better paying options. And also options that are going to give you a more well equipped truck.

For what it’s worth I’ll use Magnum as an example because I know the pay scale.

With one year of experience you will start at .47 per mile with up to 8.5 cpm in bonuses. They are pretty easy to hit too. My normal bonus is 7.5 to 8 cents per mile and would be higher if I tried harder.

Our trucks also all come with an 1800 watt inverter, tripack apu and a fridge. Plus sat tv is available for 5 bucks a month.

I do about 75k and don’t train. Many of our other drivers do better. And I know at least one of our trainers who has been here a long time did well over 100k.

Thats just one option. You can go pull doubles for a company like old dominion and do 100k pretty easy as a wild run driver. And some tanker jobs can get you over 100k as well.

If you stay at swift your leaving money and probably job satisfaction on the table.

 

To answer your question.

All miles the truck runs, plus a weekly training bonus (100$. At least for a flat mentor, may be different on different fleets) After like 6 months and the student is still with the company you get a bonus on the students rank 250 for bronze, 1000 if they become Platinum.

I trained students for about 2 years then dissappeared into dedicated stuff and stopped . Now im back at it again. And i do not run as hard as i once did, cause im not far from the Flat pay cap. And with my personal rank bonus .57 cpm, so yeah.

Weve had raises since last i trained students, but even then i i nearly broke 6 digits. Flatbed students tend to be of a higher quality than the reefer students i was training when i first started. That being said, i do alot of super solo with them now, cause Im always gonna be up when a load is being picked up or delivered, due to the obvious fact that im not going to sleep between my student and a load unless i know its done right. And then still, if ive observed good habits of thier actual driving ability.

For my part, i actually do enjoy mentoring. And wondered at first if i should. My DM at the time pushed me to do so, and my mentor was,,, not great. And i had heard so many horror stories, figured i could at least do better than that. Ive had only 1 student fail out of like 20 or so. And he did 300hrs before he got to me. Ive had many call me to thank me for teaching them so much, since many of my students go on to help out people that werent trained so well, sometimes a week or two off the truck. And many have kept in touch, and ive got to see them expand thier carreer.

One of my students now moves heavy Machinary, i trained him in reefer, but he found a local open deck job and didnt know anything about flatbed much less OSOW, so he called me while i was doing runs and i taught him that too. Got another running coast to coast in her own truck. And many others that have found thier niche. Its rewarding.

But trust me if i did not enjoy doing it, the pay would not convince me.

I learned more from training others than i did by learning the ropes myself. Cause when you got someone who just aint picking it up, and you gotta find a new approach, it causes you to reach deep to help them out.