Concrete mixer and rusty/newbie driver

Hey there everyone,

Little backstory before I get to the meat and potatoes. I got my CDL A with tanker/hazmat back around May 2014. Drove with USA Truck for about 3 months OTR and HATED it. Mostly due to the huge amounts of stress driving inner city traffic in unknown areas. Anyways, I quit at USA and took a local job driving a vacuum truck for a subcontractor at an ExxonMobil refinery (I live in SE TX, refineries everywhere). The job wasn't bad and the pay was decent, but man was I bored. All we did was skim oil off the top of a waste pond. Got bored there and decided I was going to return to college and have been doing so since January 2015.

Been in college for nearly 2 years now and nothing to show for it but some college credits, and huge amounts of financial and academic stress. And it would be ANOTHER 2 and a half years to get my #### degree.

So here's where I get to the point of this. A buddy of mine works for Martin Marietta and says they need mixer drivers. Says the pay starts around $18-$20/hr, all the overtime you want, home daily of course, paid holidays and vacation, pension retirement, rain pay at 8hrs per rain out day, full benefits, etc.

Now here's the deal. The job sounds great I won't lie, but if I get back into trucking what I'd ultimately like to end up doing is running a local dedicated tanker route (which there are a lot in this area), BUT most of those prefer 2 years or so driving experience. So would a tanker company even consider mixer truck experience? I'm sure there are some similarities between a mixer and a tanker, but also a LOT of differences. My main concern being that a concrete mixer is fixed to the frame, easy backing, hell you even have a backup camera, also a mixer is much shorter and easier to manuever in traffic. Even if I worked concrete for 2 years I feel like I would still have so little experience driving an actual tractor/trailer combination. So even with 2 years of driving a mixer I feel like I still wouldn't have the experience needed to drive a tanker.

All thoughts and advice are appreciated lol. Thanks.

 

Another option I see is Trimac. They have a job advertising local hauls of isoprene out of the gulf coast, 1400 miles/week. I realize it probably wouldn't be home daily, but it's not quite OTR. Would that kind of job be hourly or cpm? Says they hire recent grads, so I don't see why they wouldn't hire someone like me who's just a bit rusty. Plus I've already got my tanker,haz and TWIC.

 

Well I've got the hookup and know I can get the mixer job. My dilemma is would I ever be able to get on with a good tanker company if most my experience is driving a mixer? Also Trimac has a local route that seems to be an option. Not sure what I should do.