Comments By Michael P.

This is my first job out of CDL school. There 3 of us in training, 2 of us have our CDL and one has his permit. For the first hour or so we help the permitted guy with his pre-trip. After that we go drive around the city for a few hours, switching on and off so we all get a chance to drive. After lunch we work on backing for about an hour and a half. The permitted guy does his CDL test backs while me and the other guy grab another tractor and trailer and switch off backing to different docks at the terminal.

We've been in training for about three weeks so at this point it feels like a bit much, but after all the nightmare scenarios that I've heard of guys just getting thrown to the wolves I very much appreciate the extra time. Especially being able to practice hitting docks since the the road test prior to being hired here was the first time I had ever done it. I feel a lot more confident that when I'm out in the real world, I'll be able to handle more difficult docking situations now.

I have nothing of value to add to the conversation, but I do have a question.... What does OTR look like in UK? Southern England to Northern Ireland is 15 hours. How often do you get home time over there?

Hi all,

I've been in school for 4 weeks. The first was in the classroom where we used a program called Bumper to Bumper to study and they gave us a pre-highlighted manual to highlight our books from. There was no actual teaching by the "instructor." For me this was fine because I just memorized the pre-tests since the questions were the same as at the DMV, but I did expect some sort of instructor led discussions or something.

At the start of the second week I had my permit so I went out to the pad. The pad consists of north, south, and middle sections. The middle section is purely used for straight back the first day you're on the pad and the truck sits the rest of the time for people to practice pre-trip. The south-side is used for offset practice and straight back for your test. The north-side is set up so you do an offset, back through the cones and then do blindside parallel. The north-side is also used for the offset/blindside parallel tests. Both sides on any given day have between 10 and 14 students and they send 8-12 students (4 per truck) twice a day on the road to practice shifting and such. I've been out 4 times in 3 weeks.

They started us in the middle and went over pre-trip one time. Then they taught us straight back the rest of the day. Since then, everyday we just read our scripts and run through pre-trip with other students before going to the side of the pad that we're currently assigned to. I've been on the south-side doing offsets for three weeks because there are too many people on the north-side. Luckily, the instructor on my side has started to rearrange the cones on the south-side to let me and a few others work on parallel though so I at least still feel like I'm progressing.

I feel like there are just far too many students on both sides of the pad. Tonight I got one time in the truck in 3.5 hours because I'm on the offset side and we had a several new students that don't have any idea what they're doing. Was this how your schools were ran too or has my school over-extended themselves?

TL;DR: I'm getting 2-4 turns a day to practice backing maneuvers. Is this normal?

No one at my school can seem to get me a straight answer. I got my permit on Monday and the DMV told me that I couldn't test for double/triples or Hazmat until I had my license. One of the guys in my class said I could test before that and yet another said that I had to do finger printing and background checks before testing. The school said it could all be done at the DMV prior to getting my CDL.

Can someone that's done it recently tell me what I should do first? I'd like to get the ball rolling on it asap! This is in Arizona if that matters.

Got my permit and tanker endorsement on Monday before class. Monday we did straight backs all day.

Tuesday to Friday we did offset backing. There were quite a few guys that were starting there second week doing offsets so I was a bit nervous. By Friday afternoon though I was able to hit all of my attempts without any help from the instructor. I really don't see why some of the guys that were out there before me are still having issues. Next week I'm eligible to go on the road and hopefully will be moved over to the parallel parking side.

I'm slowly learning the pre-trip. I know where everything is, I'm just trying to get the verbiage down now. Hopefully by Wednesday next week I'll have it.

Day 3 - I decided to start by taking the practice tests for General Knowledge, Air Brakes, and Combination Vehicles. I scored 73%, 92%, and 75% respectively so I feel like I'm in a pretty good position to pass the exams for real on Friday.

Day 2 was a lot like Day 1. All computer based training. I'm trying to get through all the modules as quick as I can so Thursday I can focus on practice tests and really hone in what I need to study. I wish they would have given me this stuff last week so I could have more time to study.

I was eligible for the WIOA grant.

Are you attending this school in your own, or is a company sending you?

Just started today, 9/27. After attendance 8 of went to a classroom and went through a 10-15 minute orientation. We were handed an AZ CDL A manual as well as a highlighters and a binder with each page of the manual already highlighted. We were told to copy the highlights to make studying easier and that we would need to have our permits by Friday. It took me about 3 hours to finish the highlights.

After lunch we were given iPads and told to go to easycdl-online.com/b2b and go through the program. Holy hell, this is going to be a slog. The videos are read at a... very.... slow... pace. It's almost painful and there is no way to speed up the voiceovers. We were told there is approx 60 hours of videos and these also need to be completed by Friday. So that's 60 hours plus time to study the CDL guide.. by friday. Not sure how I'm going to get this done and I'm wondering if this is how other schools operate.

Thanks for the responses! Sounds like it's not going to be as big of an issue as I thought it would be. I'm going to go with whatever school sounds like they offer the best training and not worry about the transmission.