Truck Driving Is Still a Great Job

Truck Driving is Still a Great Job

Unemployment is one of the big stories of 2016. In the United States of America, the unemployment rate has been improving for several years, but seems to have stalled at just under 5%. That means that nearly 8 million adults who want to work are unable to find jobs. This doesn’t take into account people who aren’t looking for work at all, or who have given up the search. The US labor force participation rate is just over 62%. Not all of the remaining 38% of American adults would work if they had the opportunity, but many would. For people like this, truck driving may be an attractive employment option.

Trucking jobs are plentiful, almost regardless of where you happen to live. This is because trucks still transport most of the goods we live on, and they get delivered to every city and town across this giant country. No matter where you live, there are restaurants, groceries, and retail stores that have goods stocked by truck delivery. These happen every day of the year, making truck driving a reliable job for people in need of work.

Truck driving takes a reasonable amount of training to begin. Truck driving education is an investment of time and money, but it’s much more affordable than the schooling necessary for most other careers, like nursing for example. Different kinds of trucking jobs have different pay structures. Some truckers are salaried for certain amounts of mileage per day or week. Others are paid by the mile. Others have a combination of these two pay types.

Some truckers work long enough to buy their own rig, or have the resources to buy one from the beginning. Though there is more overhead and maintenance to worry about in this situation, these entrepreneurs are able to pay themselves much more per mile, in most cases. These types of drivers may be able to work themselves into an ownership and job creating position, where they own the trucks and other people drive them. 

Some people worry that with the advent of driverless cars, truck drivers will be on the way out of the job market. This may be true in the long run, but it will likely take decades before human truck driving is obsolete. This is because it takes a lot of money and time to change infrastructure systems and update technologies to fully replace human drivers. Many driving jobs require human skills and decision making. Other driving systems are much too expensive to replace with new technologies any time soon. These technologies don’t fully exist yet, anyway, and you can be sure they’ll take a lot of time to become ubiquitous once they do exist.

At the end of the day, truck driving is a job you should consider if you are unemployed. It’s a skill that you can learn in less time than you might think, and it can give you money and options that you probably don’t appreciate now. With jobs available all over the country, and no end in sight, truck driving is still one of the best ways to get a job in the USA.