National Guard Training Soldiers to Become Future Truck Drivers
This story appears in the April 12 print edition of Transport Topics.
The U.S. National Guard is ramping up its truck driver training program, which could help ease long-term driver shortages.
Under the “Drive the Guard” program, current Guard members or new recruits can receive tuition money or GI Bill benefits to enroll in driving schools for training that earns them commercial driver licenses and jobs in the private sector.
“It is going to become a huge source of new drivers at a time when demand is picking up,” said K. Michael O’Connell, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Training Association, which is a group of 180 driver schools.
The CVTA’s nonprofit foundation is the National Guard’s partner in the program, which began last year as a test that since then has shown it gets soldiers truck driving jobs, McConnell said.
Drive the Guard also meets a “critical” military need, said Lt. Col. Maureen Weigl, who handles the program from her post at the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Va.
It behooves the Guard, Weigl said, “to do this partnership so that we can get folks who have . . . qualifications, and they’re not just driving military vehicles one weekend a month” but gaining experience driving full time.
The program “is putting soldiers behind the wheel while they’re in uniform and helping them qualify for full-time employment as a truck driver” in civilian life, Weigl said.
Drive The Guard is open to soldiers who have completed basic training and some advanced combat training.
In most cases, the Guard will keep the soldiers on active duty while they work toward their CDLs, which means they get per-diem military payments while training, McConnell said.
The Guard currently trains truck drivers, McConnell said, “but at the end of that training, they’re not employable because they don’t have a CDL.”
Commercial driver schools participating in the program, McConnell said, will provide each soldier entering with a “pre-hire letter” from a trucking firm attesting that it is hiring, McConnell said.
In the past six weeks, he added, firms have begun reaching out to schools and to the association seeking drivers as the economic recovery takes hold.
As part of the program to recruit soldiers, Drive The Guard has tailored 50 large tractor-trailer units to the job, specially painting them with Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s picture across the side.
The recruitment trailers are parked outside NASCAR events, sports stadiums, county fairs and driver training schools.
