Want to know how things are going in the delivery business these days? About two minutes after picking up the telephone, the president of QuickDelivery Service Inc. in Schaumburg is asking a reporter whether he wants a job.
“We’ll take you on if you’re looking for a job at this point,” said Randy Seiler.
Not every company is so quick with a job offer. But the fact is this is a great time to pick up work with one of the delivery companies in and around Chicago.
“We’re growing like crazy,” said Seiler of his Schaumburg-based company. Just how crazy? “We have 90 drivers,” he said. “A year ago we had 60. And five years ago we maybe had 25 or 30 drivers.”
Other companies agree the job market for drivers is wide open. A big reason is the continued robust economy. As more goods are sold, more goods have to be delivered. And as business improves for everyone from architects to attorneys, so does the business of delivering blueprints, legal briefs and contracts.
Also, while technological advances have made it easier to transmit information via computers, there is also a growing concern over the security of those computers.
As a result, companies like Apex Courier Ltd. in Chicago continue to deliver original documents, said Qusai Mahmud, the company’s vice president.
Business is better not only for couriers who deliver small packages in cars–often their own–on short trips in and around the city, but for big rigs that pull much larger loads on much longer runs.
“With the economy healthy, there is a lot of stuff moving and that means we have got to have the drivers,” said Kent Politsch, a spokesman for Yellow Freight System in Overland Park, Kan.
“Just look through the classifieds and you can see there are more jobs out there,” said Phillip Koch at the Mega Driving School in Chicago.
For Koch, the need for more drivers has translated into a 15 percent increase in the number of students at the school in the first six months of this year compared with the first six months of 1997.
Those who get into the business can make a decent and sometimes very good living. Politsch said Yellow Freight’s top drivers, who are on the road six days a week, make more than $80,000 a year. Drivers working 3 1/2 to 4 days a week at the company are earning $40,000 a year, he said.
Locally, the drivers of smaller vehicles for companies like QuickDelivery don’t make as much. And while they can recoup money for mileage, they still must shell out their own money for gas and pay for any repairs if they are driving their own vehicles.
Still, some earn as much as $1,100 a week, said Seiler. To do that, Seiler said, the driver may have to put in about 60 hours. Both Seiler and Mahmud said the average driver makes about half that.
All of the companies interviewed said drivers must have a relatively clean driving record. Seiler, for example, said applicants cannot have more than three moving violations within the last three years, and cannot have any convictions for drunken driving or suspended licenses anywhere on their record.
Mahmud said Apex Courier checks the driving record of drivers every six months to make sure their employees keep clean.
Trucking companies require drivers have a commercial license. To get one of those, drivers typically enroll in a truck-driving school. The cost of tuition depends on a number of factors, including how much training a driver needs and the size of the truck he or she wants to drive. Calls to local truck-driving schools put the cost at anywhere from about $1,200 to $3,000.
Usually, it is the student who pays the tuition. But Koch said there are trucking companies that hire employees before they are trained and pay the $1,200 to $2,500 tuition at Mega Driving School.
Depending on the school’s relationship with trucking companies, even those students who pay for the courses that may take more than 200 hours to complete can expect to recoup that money quickly. “They often have a relationship with mom and pop (trucking companies) who call them and say, `I just lost another driver to a big company, I need one.’ “
And if the tuition sounds like a lot of money, Politsch pointed out that it pales in comparison with the cost of college, which often does not result in jobs as lucrative as truck driving.
But Politsch also has this warning for those thinking of spending thousands of dollars at a truck-driving school:
“The flip side of this is if the economy turns, those people who’ve chosen this career will have a harder time. Once the economy slows, we don’t need as many truck drivers.”
