Posted: 10/7/2006 12:27:56 PM EDT
| Im thinking about making a career change. Any truckers out there? Anything i need to know before i apply. thanks |
Most important, make sure you are willing to be awayfrom home for long streches and if in a relationship, you SO can handle it. That being said, I love it. eve though im stuck in Lemar, PA doing a 34 hour reset |
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Go to a moving company and become a helper, But for the company, not freelance helper. Start out with a B and work your way up Go to a school and get one handed to you for a fair amount of money. Call a few trucking companies. I drove for 9 years. Just got tired of not being home. |
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Some companies will train you and get you your license. Then you have to work for them for a certain amout of time. That might be the best way for you to get started. Otherwise you can pay to go to one of those truck driver schools. Can you pass a drug test? I have never done a drug in my life but that don't stop "the man" from making me do 6-8 piss tests every year. You have a good driving record? Are you married? Most of those companies that will train you are going to stick you in a truck as soon as your legal and forget about you. What I usually suggest is get yourself a job with a company who owns trucks, not a trucking company. You know what I mean? There ain't a whole lot of those jobs left anymore. At least not like there used to be but thats where the money and home time are. |
Whatcha transporting -- pallets of depleted uranium to somebody in a swamp? 
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there are a few local companys every where, but the local jobs are taken by OTR drivers that want to get home. so having the choice the companys hire them with lots of experince as opposed to a new CDL holder |
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Why don't you become a cop when you get out of the military? I was Army, infantry. There wasn't a lot of jobs I could do when I got out so I pretty much had to become a stinking truck driver. I do have it better than most but if I had to do it over I think I choose a different path. |
| i recently decided after going most of my life wanting to be a cop that i no longer want too. Under paid and under appreciated althought i have a lot of respect far every single person who decide to take up that career. This past mounth i've been driving a dumptruck on my grandfathers farm and thought to myself i could do this. |
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That might be the way to go. If you could get a job with a local excavator you'd have your alone time (driving), and you'd get to go home at night. I don't know how you would get an excavator to hire you without a license though. I do know a couple gravel haulers that started out with their companies as labourers but it took them a year or so before they were in the trucks. SpecialK- I'm number 1 out of the 50 or so drivers we have. I pick out my own equipment. I decided that Evil Black Truck should have the unit number 556. I don't know how you blew that picture up enough to read it though. |
If you think you won't be underpaid and under appreciated as a truck driver, then good luck. |
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and thats why MI has shit ass roads |
I started off with Schneider National carriers because I didn't have a CDL. They SUCK, but out of all the companies that train drivers, they have the best training. 3 months after leaving the school I started driving for JB Hunt. They (like all big) companies have a bad reputation. But I'm home when I'm set to be home, sometimes early, never late so far and make in the mid 50s. If your wife doesn't have a career or solid job you might see about the two of you applying together and running team. If your wife has dealt with you being in the army, she can deal with you being a trucker, just make sure she doesn't hear any stories about Laredo.
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 Home every night, easy job, make more money than most truck drivers and can take time off as needed (company dependant). Zero fingerprinting, no time donated sitting to load or unload, no logbooks, no truckstops, no truckstop showers, no sleeper leapers, no DOT bs (normally). In MI you will have a little down time in the dead of winter, all the better to hunt with. 
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It's called a "Michigan Road Train" folks If you have a good life now, don't walk away from this idea... RUN!!! 
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But... but... my recuiter told me... 
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| Don't get me wrong, I like driving a truck, but the time away from home, dispatcher bitching not to idle so much, idiots at shippers and receivers, all of it builds on you. Personnally I grew up in a really effed up home. One thing I'm good at is taking shit. Plus, where I live cost of living is miniscule. The roughly 55 grand a year I make is enough to put me in the top 2% of wage earners from my highschool class (400+) |
Not quite, many LTL companies like to hire fresh drivers they can train the way they want em. OTR drivers and LTL drivers are very different, I know, I've done both and trained for both. I always hated trying to retrain an OTR driver used to counting his run in days to start looking at his run in minutes. Best advice I could give is don't become a trucker, if you're dead set on doing it then look into the larger LTL companies, start as a dock worker/ fueler, truck washer. If you have education bennies from the .mil, use that for driving school just to get your CDL, don't go to one of the OTR companies for training, the drivers they churn out are down right scary, the so called "training" is pathetic. |