Jimmy Rigdon, Meridian Community College’s commercial truck driving coordinator, has led the program for 17 years and he says the demand for drivers is as great as ever.
“Everyone is needing drivers right now, everyone, it takes forever to get a package and one of the problems is there’s no drivers,” Rigdon said. “You had a bunch of drivers retire and that’s what we’re trying to do is fill that hole. You know, get drivers out there, safe drivers as quick as possible.”
Rigdon says that MCC started the program after seeing a need for local drivers and after taking the eight-week course the student can get straight to work.
“We’ll take a person that’s never driven a large vehicle at all and at the end of the eight weeks have them where they can drive a semi-truck with a 53-foot trailer,” Rigdon said. “We have a state-of-the-art simulator, we can teach them to drive in the mountains, if it’s snowing, as far as the simulator we can teach them to drive in the snow. just any kind of scenario you can think of, we can do it. We have companies that come in here once a week at least trying to recruit our students in. I’d say at least 95 percent of our students have a job before they ever finish this program. You can work local delivering timber, log truck drivers. You can drive across country delivering produce, steel. It’s unlimited what you can do once you come through our eight-week program.”
Rigdon says the course sells itself, because of the demand for graduates of the course.
“You’re going to be in class eight weeks and once you leave this program, there will be just endless jobs out there,” Rigdon said. “You can look at any paper, you can get on the internet and search it, it’s just jobs galore as far as trucking industry jobs. In eight weeks, you can have a new skill, a new career, and be making an immediate paycheck.”
Credit: Source link
