Young new driver w/ questions

Depends on the company. Some require you to live within a certain drive time or mileage from a terminal.

Or they might park a few trucks at another company's terminal. For example, there's two trucks from a company based in Florida parked at our company terminal in Cincinnati. The guys told me they run all 48, and they get extra money for being "based" in Cincy.
I see them there once or twice a month.

There are also companies with a 48 state hiring area, but you could be looking at a looooong commute.

A lot of it is going to depend on where you can get hired. Good luck.

 

Go to your local unemployment office and see if you qualify for assistance. I was a displaced worker at the and they sent to a community college for my cdl. I didn't have to pay a dime.

 

Heya kid, welcome aboard. I tell pretty much everyone the same thing, and have said it a few times here. Always run safe and legal. Be prepared to get flak from your dispatcher, most of em are impatient almost spineless creatures. They care about one thing and one thing only: load picked up, load delivered. You're the one who is responsible for the load and the people around you.

When you go to take your cdl tests, they tell you that you can only get out to check X amount of times, only pull up and reset X amount of times. Make it through that and you'll be fine. Out in the real world, you can get out and look, you can pull forward as many times as you need to. I'd rather you pull forward thirty times than impale yourself on the wall or support pole, etc.

 

No, you don't have to live near the company. You living in Washington, can run all over the USA and the company may be headquartered on the east coast.
For example, Jim Palmer is headquartered in Montana, but I've seen their trucks in Florida, here in Las Vegas, and many other states; they run 48 states. When I lived in Tennessee, they had drivers from there.

 

I strongly recommend you find a company you want to work at for a long time and then decide how to get your CDL. Some companies only hire inexperienced drivers from certain schools they are familiar with. About half of trucking companies have Tuition Reimbursement for new drivers. EVERY CDL school will find someone to loan you money for school. You might qualify for a grant for trade school through your state unemployment office. Google WOIA or WIA.

You will not have time once you start CDL school to research good companies. CDL school will bring in a few recruiters and you will think those are your only choices, plus the companies that pay Google so they show up in the search results.

Your goal should be a good place to work, not jsut any ol company. Bad companies are hard to work for, put you in serious situations, and when you get tickets or get fired you have few good options left. You just volunteered for leaving trucking or working for renegade companies. It's better to work at McDonalds until you KNOW to have found a company you like & treats drivers well, than to rush into trucking.

You live in a beautiful part of the country.

 

Spineless vice ridden lice infested creatures in the office.

They need just one word Applied with respect and very good diplomacy. That word is...

No.

Applied carefully and backed by HOS evidence etc plus your own state of energy and tiredness etc will make a very good dispatcher in time for you.

Never say with your mouth what your ### cannot run to. If you say yes you will be there 1000 miles by sunrise tomorrow. You better be there.

 

As far as I know JP is usually pretty decent. You need your first year experience.