YRC Driver training - Roadsidedown's journey

I haven’t heard anything about the bailout. Dock life seems to be very terminal focused. The national company is so far removed it hardly factors in. Not all YRC terminals are flooded with freight. Some guys from the Midwest cities say they are way down. Most of the guys here are very conservative. There seems to be a general consensus that the economic bubble of our country is near to bursting. One guy was saying he saw the exact same fantastical run up in freight volume just before 2000 and 2008.

Personally I don’t care. The whole world has got looney tunes and diabolical and I don’t follow the news much or worry about things I can’t control. Step 1 is get trained and Class A. World falls apart in November at least I am a step up in marketable skills to provide for my family. If somehow we teeter along for a year then I have the golden one year hand stamp and my opportunities vastly improve. So far YRC has been good to me and I deeply respect the guys I work with. One day at a time.

 

Hooray! Finally got an official welcome to driver training email. I had checked in with the recruiter and she was still missing some paperwork fir me to get registered. So I did ANOTHER drug test, and sent a copy of my receipt from TSA fingerprinting for hazmat. I took care of all that within a couple of hours and checked again this morning and still some confusion. So I sent screen shots of FMCSA status etc and finally got the OK. October 25 the driver training starts at 8:00am.

I am finishing my fifth week on the dock. After the second week I got bumped to the 2am-10:30am shift with Thursdays off.

It was kind of disruptive for my family activities as I was expecting daytime M-F for everything: dock, training and eventual P&D routes. But when the training date was pushed out I list my “he’s just a driver status” on the dock and had to work like a real dock guy. Yesterday it was pointed out my load metrics were lagging and could I do better? Sure but no one told me about efficiency tactics or productivity metrics in dock training since I am “just a driver” passing through.

LESSONS:
* Stay in frequent contact with the recruiter. The terminal knows little about their driver training program and only the recruiter can register you for training. Keep pinging and asking what more needs to be sent in until you have the actual “Welcome to driver training” email.

* While efforts are made to load your P&D truck in the order of planned stops, the reality is that due to crowded dock space it may be a bit, or massively, mixed up and you will have to change the order of the deliveries as you go along and discover what are the next few pallets then accessible. Different dock loaders have different levels of regard for route sequence. The primary metric they are measured on is how much freight did they move and what percentage went directly into the next trailer and how versus staged on the dock. Condition of freight, damage, securement, delivery sequences are far distant in importance. So as a driver, appreciate any useable order you do get and don’t curse the loaders too harshly for randomness.

* The dock is informal and driven mostly by going over and talking with senior guys. Don’t expect super accurate paperwork or computer status. The good thing at least in Portland is everyone on the dock is helpful and pretty knowledgeable if you aren’t an ### and ask in a friendly way for help or information. Everyone really does try to do a good job so it is pretty rare to see a difficulty arise from actual intent.

* Forklifts are amazing equipment. If a driver needs freight moved around or move some tricky pieces, it will be far, far faster to ask a dock worker to do it. With only familiarization training on them a truck driver can spend quite a bit of time fumbling around with a real risk of damaging freight. Most of them will help you immediately or in five minutes after they move the current waybill load they are working on. Plus a truck driver may have to spend more time than that just hunting down an available lift.

 

Put in my last day on the dock shift today. Goodbye 2am starts! Rest up over the weekend and start driver training 8am Monday. It was a good experience and I’m sure the things I learned on the dock will help me as a P&D driver.
I’ll post here more frequently next week as training progresses.

 

START OF DRIVER TRAINING!
Days 1-2
Wow, I finally am in the actual training class. First day is meet and greet, policies, hazmat, videos, starting an hours log book, etc. There are 8 students: 3 Oregon, 2 Washington, 1 Indiana, 1 Colorado, 1 California from either YRC or Reddaway. Training is by both YRC and Reddaway trainers at the Reddaway terminal just a few miles from the YRC terminal.

YRC started their training program in 2020 and then covid hit. At the beginning they had four training centers of which Portland was one. They now have 14 centers and are on track to graduate 500-600 students this year. Although California has two training centers the DMV is backed up over 2 months so it is faster to host people from there at other cities. Out of staters will then test in Kansas and get a Kansas license which can be converted to many other states. YRC is flying them in, putting them in a decent hotel, rental car, and per diem debit card.

This looks like a good program. They have their original training material plus the soon to be mandated federal 23 hrs of video training. They are OSHA and state certified trainers. They basically commit to ensure we get our CDL as long as we don't quit. In class there are two instructors for the eight students. Once we start driving in the yard and road it will be 1:1 instructor to student. The room next to us has about a dozen experienced drivers being trained as trainers and they will team up with us for our driving portion.

Day 2 we covered components of inspection and intro to pre-trip including familiarization with the trucks and trailers. Also we went out to the practice yard (lots of trucks and trailers reserved as trainers) and they had a few students start driving the trucks over and each doing a hook and drop to demonstrate the coupling procedures (FAL/LAF).

It looks like we should be done with the classroom and pre-trip instruction this first week. Then week 2 will be mostly hands-on pre-trip according to each state needs, and starting the backing maneuvers. We will all rotate through pre-trip, backing and then road sessions. Seems we will get a lot of hours behind the wheel. We have tons of time to ask the instructors questions in class and chatting during breaks. There is also a good amount of varied driving experience among the students such as box trucks, school buses, delivery, plus other dock workers, etc.

The instructors emphasize the class is just to train us to pass the DMV tests to get our CDL. The real road training will be the four weeks with an instructor at our job terminals running our routes whether line haul or city P&D. The three out of state students will go to Kansas to get their licenses, and then to their home terminal for the 4 weeks of instructor ride alongs.

YRC seems to be making a serious commitment to building a robust and permanent training program that will meet all govt. requirements as well as committed to helping students pass even if they have some difficulties. I'm not even sure there is a formal contract for repayment. I might have signed something, but it was irrelevant to me as I plan to stay here for at least a year of experience. No one has mentioned repayment obligation or schedule. At the terminal when they advertise driver training programs they make no mention of repayment obligation but the "contract" I did sign was just a registration asking for an apprenticeship training. So it is very low key and just seems to be part of how they do business.

I've read some of the digs at Yellow/YRC/Reddaway. Yeah their equipment may be a few years older than some outfits, but I haven't seen anything unsafe, just ugly. They constantly emphasize safety and reporting mechanical issues. Reddaway terminal is way nicer (cleaner, more organized, smaller, less hectic) than the YRC terminal. Some new tractors and trailers are coming in but having worked the docks it doesn't seem you need the latest whiz bang rig to deliver around the metro/county area. But I have heard other city terminals are run very differently so it may depend on the city whether YRC is the pits or an OK place to drive.

So far I am happy with my decision to go with YRC/Reddaway and appreciate the training I am getting. I'm confident I will be getting my Class A by late November and hitting the road soon with an instructor to teach me the ropes of the real world of P&D. There may be better training and pay out there for a newbie, but YRC is not a bad place to begin. I really appreciate the great people I have encountered on the dock and in training.

 

DAY 3
I had it verified by another student that we are not being charged tuition. He had a very pointed discussion about this with our recruiter and she confirmed there is no charge and no obligation for attending the YRC CDL academy. Pretty unusual these days.
If you are looking to get your CDL it doesn’t get cheaper than here at YRC. $17.80/hr, 40 hrs per week plus hotel, rental car and per dining if out of town, 4 weeks instruction and CDL test, then 4 weeks ride along coaching. Zero cost, zero commitment, paid for every hour.

Today was more intensive pre-trips down getting more rigs readied for next phase. Tomorrow we get a video on shifting then start rotation of 4 students each in a rig practicing hook and drop and backing maneuvers; two doing pretrip on their trucks, and two doing the federal training videos.