Career Shift: Truck Drivers

Throughout high school, I had a total of one teacher that suggested an alternative to a four year college degree. Unfortunately, I wish she had gone into more details about how to become an electrician, plumber, construction worker, or truck driver. She simply summed all these options up as going to vocational school. Going to a trade school.

She told us that a trade school only takes 2 years and offers paid training. However, being the brainwashed little teens that we were at the time, we were convinced that a four year college degree was the way to go. How naïve we were.

Recently, I've heard a report that the American Trucking Association is predicting a shortage of 50,000 truck drivers in the industry. This article from CNN Money has the title that companies are willing to pay truck drivers $73,000. Stumbling upon this headline was shocking. After all, I did a quick google search to look up the median salary for a truck driver. The statistic was as recent as 2012 and said that the median salary for a truck driver was only $38,200. There seems to be a large disconnect between these two articles.

I listened to Christopher Cantwell's radical agenda last week and heard that this one guy was offered a truck driving job that paid $60,000 a year. On a different episode of the same show, one caller was talking about how desperate companies were for truck drivers that they were taking almost everyone regardless of the quality of their driving.

I talked to my buddy the other day, and he was telling me his dad signed on with a company that is paying him a six figure salary. Of course, my friend's dad had been driving for close to ten years.

On a more personal note, I've seen trucks themselves painted with ads trying to recruit drivers and even stating how much a driver got paid per mile.

I'm not sure what is causing this shortage but I can understand why young people wouldn't want to drive tractor trailers. You can be away from home for several weeks at a time and your entire job is a commute that never ends. If there is a shortage, I can only assume that the workloads are very tough in this economy. But, if you don't have a wife or kids (and don't want them either), this could be the perfect opportunity for any man going his own way.

The training would include getting a commercial drivers license and I'm sure companies might require an extensive training program before delivering loads.

I think that driving trucks might be one of the better job opportunities out there. This might a period of a few years where a lot of money can be made driving trucks. Well, at least until tractor trailers become automated like the self driving Tesla cars.