Well congratulations you managed to get through CDL school in one piece, managed to get your CDL and found a company that will take a chance on a new driver so the next step in your career is orientation. Of course new driver orientation is going to differ from company to company but in this particular article we will take a look at the process I went through with Schneider National back in 2015.
First Day
The first day I arrived at the terminal in Ontario Canada and had to go through a basic driver physical. The physical was basically a series of movements that were associated with hooking and unhooking a trailer while the medical professional monitored my blood pressure. The medical professional took down basic measurements such as height and weight. This area tends to get drivers obligated to go through a sleep apnea test if their neck measures past a certain limit. This was also the time that a drug test was taken which was through a hair sample which is very common in the trucking industry
The rest of the time was spent filling out all of the necessary paperwork to ensure that I would get paid plus copies of my drivers license, FAST card and/or passport
Hotel
Since the majority of the new drivers did not live near the terminal the company set up hotel rooms in a nearby town. Basically it was your standard hotel room that you would share with another driver. The company assumed that you would get breakfast at the hotel and that they would provide lunch at the terminal and you were responsible for getting your own dinner
Second Day
The second day at orientation was all spent in the classroom. This day we went through the company polices on basically everything. This was also the day we were introduced to the company’s ELD and also paper logs.
Various departments would visit the classroom and talk about their specific department such as the border cross team and what they did on a day to day basis or the safety team talking about the most common violations that they dealt with
Third Day
Well the drug tests would come back today and a driver would be sent home before he even touched a steering wheel. Of course his name was also sent to the drug clearing house so chances are his CDL was a complete waste of money.
Today was the day we actually began to drive a truck. The class was split in half so half would spend the morning in the truck with the other half in the classroom and in the afternoon it would switch
The driving section of the day was of course the most interesting. Found out real quickly that the truck that I drove at the CDL school was a piece of junk and it was much easier to drive a newer truck especially since I was driving manual at the time. It also became evident that some of the newer drivers had attended CDL mills and could barely get out of the parking lot
Fourth, Fifth And Sixth Days
The rest of the week was basically spent as a carbon copy of the third day alternating between the classroom and driving. With Schneider National and with a lot of megas it was done by watching video after video on the computer which was as stimulating as it sounds
On the final day was the driving test and if you passed then you were set up with a on the road trainer which would begin the next week. If you did not pass the test then you were kept back for another week. One of the drivers, and I use that word loosely here, was unable to pass the test after two additional weeks and was sent home.
Overall
I don’t really have any complaints by how the the new driver orientation was conducted. I found the driving to be the most useful part as there were skills that I did not learn or only briefly covered while I attended CDL school.
In case you were wondering of the ten drivers who began the week at orientation one was sent home for the drug test violation, the second was sent home after repeatedly failing the driving test. After six months five others quit and by the end of the first year I was the only one who remained with the company
