Trucking Your Way to Success
How driving trucks post-graduation can lead to a rewarding, successful career.
By SPONSORED
One area of employment you might not have given much thought to while you’re in college, or right after you’ve earned your college degree, is truck driving.
This in-demand, decent paying profession can present opportunities for you to experience life on the open road, instead of feeling trapped in an office environment. It can help you start earning money right away to pay off college loans, and it can even help you pay for college while you’re still enrolled.
Some truck drivers use today’s tools like online college courses to earn their degrees while they work as a truck driver. Doing this takes dedication and self-discipline, but overwhelmingly drivers who have done this say that it’s worthwhile. Breaks taken along your route are the perfect time to get out a laptop and connect to the Internet to take courses, communicate with professors or take part in online chats.
Education Benefits Your Career as a Truck Driver
An education gives you many benefits, especially when you decide to stay with truck driving for a period of time. Accounting and math courses help you when you’re learning how to use new technologies for the job. When you earn a degree in Business Administration, you can eventually move into management positions or into back office jobs in many of the largest transport companies. Once you decide to put driving behind you, you may find jobs at trucking companies as software specialists, office managers, in data entry or as coordinators.
When you’ve taken courses in psychology or sociology, that helps you in the human interaction aspects of the job and within the industry.
Truck drivers deal with many types of people, which can make the job interesting and challenging. Having a good education helps you continue to grow professionally and personally.
The Future of Truck Driving
Many trucking companies have tried to make truck driving more appealing by featuring rewards programs, including financial rewards for excellence in driving and for areas like safety. Pay has increased in truck driving by about 17 percent since 2013, according to the National Transportation Institute data. The demand for safe, effective ways to transport goods keeps going up, increasing the amount of truck driving jobs becoming available.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the transportation industry is trying to attract younger workers, making this a good time to get into the profession. Trucking today employees about 10 million people. That’s expected to increase with increasing demand for goods that need to be shipped.
You Could Become a Business Owner
Trucking is one career field where you can begin as a driver, and work up to becoming a private business owner operator by purchasing your own truck. This would give you more flexibility to set your own schedule and be more independent. For many drivers, working for a company also offers enticing benefits. It’s up to you to decide which option works best for you.
