Profile For Clarence F.

Take everything I mention with a grain of salt. Since I'm still technically on permit only. But I'll share a bit of my experience alongside that of a friend of mine who went to private school and just finished his 1st week at Schneider.

My buddy started at a private school on July 23rd, same day I started at Jim Palmer in house training.

My buddy got his cdl in 4 weeks or so and arrived in Dallas for Schneider training with 30 miles driving experience. He's going out with a trainer for a short stint shortly. Then will come back for evaluation.

In the meantime, I've put 12k miles or so on, bumped a few docks, all with trainers, and just got back to test out before going on the final 30k miles as a "B" seat with one of my trainers in a team environment.

I was surprised with being brought in to test Friday morning. I felt like I needed some shifting work. Especially since I had just come off an automatic. Well I aced the backing exercises with only 1 point on the 90. And scored perfect on pretrip and brake test. Then screwed the pooch on the driving test doing a emergency pullover, and while I put the splitter down for pull out, I lugged it hard because I didn't grab neutral, coasted more than a trailer length being flustered trying to recover and grab a gear. Knowing I auto failed, I told the state tester I'd like to complete the course. When we got back he said if not for the bonehead mistake, I'd pass easily. So I'll practice here for a week and retest.

But when I go back out with my cdl with my trainer, I'll be far more prepared than my buddy is with his cdl and 30 miles under his belt.

Further, after 30k miles with the trainer, when I go solo, I'll be more prepared. I will be a rookie obviously, but more prepared than my buddy who might be solo in just a few weeks.

I'm happy I went company school. I'll be just a bit safer when I go solo.

Honestly, almost every major carrier out there has increased their pay recently, and many of them significantly this year. Just in the past few months, not including the ones already mentioned:

• TMC Transport
• PAM Transport
• CRST
• Jim Palmer
• Wil-Trans
• Veriha Trucking

I could be wrong. I'm only 8 days into my D seat training, but I believe for Jim Palmer Trucking, it's now 45 cpms before mileage bonus on regional. We've done 3k+ miles in that 8 days also. I'm not looking at exact numbers but it's a reasonable close guess.