3 of the Best Skills to Have as a Truck Driver

There are many personality traits you can possess that will help you thrive as a truck driver, but fewer are more important than just being easy to work with.

There are many personality traits you can possess that will help you thrive as a truck driver, but fewer are more important than just being easy to work with. As a trucker, you spend long hours alone on the road. The person you talk to the most will probably be your dispatcher. If you build yourself a reputation as a driver who is easy to work with, your dispatcher will be more inclined to send more work your way.

Know How to Manage Your Time

Don’t make a habit of telling your dispatcher that you’re out of hours. If the timing of a delivery is flexible, make sure you’re on the road when traffic is light. If you’ve been working a lot of hours, make sure you’ve got a lot to show for it. If dispatchers don’t think you can manage your time well, they will just give the work to another driver. Also, the more work you get done, the more you get paid and isn’t more pay a good thing?

Be Willing to Do the Work that is Available

Over the course of your career as a truck driver, you are going to drive thousands of routes. You’re not going to like all of them. There will be traffic. There will be bad weather. There will be all sorts of things that you cannot control. What you need to do is build yourself a reputation as the driver that takes the loads that others don’t want. Make yourself flexible. Flexibility is one of the most valuable traits you can have in many occupations, and especially important as a truck driver.

Be On Time, Every Single Time

Always arriving on time is important for any job, but as a truck driver it could be the difference between having a job and not having a job. A driver who is always on time is a great representative of their company, providing a higher level of customer service. You save your dispatcher from having to answer angry calls from management and customers about drivers being late. One of the biggest benefits of always being on time is that you develop a positive reputation with your dispatcher. If they know that they can depend on you to always be on time, they will give you more and more work. Dispatchers favor drivers who do their jobs well.

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