Why S&S Transport?
The company you decide to start your trucking career with is perhaps the most important decision you will make in your entire career. There is indeed a severe driver shortage in the trucking industry and there are no signs that it is going to lessen in the foreseeable future. A driver shortage means opportunity. It means career stability and competitive compensation, which to you means financial security. When starting out, you must understand the primary reasons for the driver shortage to avoid becoming part of the driver shortage statistics yourself. You can take full advantage of the shortage with a stable career in an industry that needs you and more just like you.
The driver shortage is not as much a need for drivers as it is a need for quality drivers. The primary factors in the quality driver shortage are:
Insurance – The insurance industry has an obvious financial interest in driver quality. They can and will raise rates accordingly for trucking companies who do not comply with their data driven standards. For example, drivers with less than two years experience are considered risky hires by insurance. Risk mitigation is what keeps insurance companies profitable. This acts like a funnel for entry to the career by closing doors to many of the best trucking jobs with stable companies until drivers reach that two years of experience level. This leaves the self-insured mega-carrier operations as the primary entry level positions available. Navigating the mega-carrier operations or smaller operations as a new driver can be hard and typically not financially rewarding. New drivers must reach this two-year experience level, while demonstrating safety, responsibility and stability before the best jobs become available to them.
Safety – Without a good professional driving record in your back pocket, your future training and the resources available to you are extremely important. Each accident or incident due to the lack of training, goes on your record. It isn’t hard to imagine what an accident or incident on your record looks like standing all alone without the benefit of years of good driving experience. You need to develop professional habits and this is hard to do without the proper training.
Smaller operations don’t have the resources to train properly, and mega operations struggle to provide enough trainers to handle the volume of new drivers in need of training. This lack of training puts your career at risk before you barely get started. Each incident makes it harder to land that better job and not landing that better job has ended trucking careers too soon.
Responsibility – Performance matters, clients are counting on you, you need to deliver not only safely but also on-time. Proper pre and post trip inspections must be conducted. The equipment has to be inspected to avoid breakdowns, violations, and to keep yourself moving and earning. This job isn’t as simple as putting it in gear and going, the job comes with responsibility. Clock management is important, as is avoiding moving violations. Being attentive to what is happening around you and how you conduct yourself with important clients are all part of the responsibility that comes with the job. This all goes back to the proper training. Many new driving careers have ended or been severely challenged due to the lack of the proper responsibility training.
Stability – There are a lot of trucking companies looking to hire drivers. With the shortage of quality drivers, the mega-carriers that employ thousands and thousands of drivers obviously have the hardest time filling all those seats. With that many trucks and drivers, they are going to need a lot of freight. Freight availability goes up and down with the market and when you have a lot of trucks to feed, as a driver you will feel every down because of the high volume. Even when freight is plentiful, it still requires a lot of freight to feed every driver in a large fleet. What does this mean for you? It means less miles and less income. The lack of significant income can force new professional truckers to leave the company quickly, in search of a better situation just to pay bills at home. Leaving a company early after just starting with a company can quickly destabilize your resume which will further limit your options. The good jobs, when given the choice between a stable resume and unstable resume, will choose the stable one every time. Even if you keep your safety record spotless, even if you demonstrate the required responsibility of getting the job done, job hopping in your career can become problematic. This can be the start of a trip down a rabbit hole for your career. Needing to leave a company due to lack of income, proper training, or getting lost in the large pool of drivers puts you in a rabbit hole of being only eligible for hire at companies, just like the last company you had left.
You must choose your first job well and commit to it, it is more important than you might realize. You need to know that the health of your trucking career starts right now, with the decision “What company do I begin with”?
S&S Transport is an exceptional choice. We are not too small and we are not too big. We are one of the very few companies our size that have created a training program that has been approved by insurance. The training spaces are limited but it is one of the top entry level positions you can find.
In a nutshell, you can earn a wage that is similar to what the experienced driver brings in, you will get individual attention because you won’t get lost in the pile of thousands of drivers that large carriers must try to keep track of nor will be left alone with at smaller companies that can’t afford training resources.