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The costs of job-hopping:
Drivers can find themselves
getting nowhere fast
out or rolling over 401(k) accounts or missing
out on employer contributions, either
because of the timing of the job-switch or
because they didn’t stay at the company
long enough to reach the employer contribution
threshold.
“A certain percentage of drivers, it
doesn’t click with them, the value and the
benefit they’re getting in staying with that
company long-term from, say an IRA or a
401(k),” Green said.
He and Mundy both commented that
many drivers don’t even start those kinds
of accounts.
“The seasoned, tenured drivers get it,”
Green said. “Unfortunately, there are these
nomadic, vagabond sorts of folks. All their
possessions are locked up in a car parked
at a friend’s house. They’re just hopping
from bonus to bonus. They are, for all intents
and purposes, homeless. Does a person
like that think long-term? Usually not.”
A lot of drivers go into trucking after other
careers fizzle, he added, so they don’t come
to the profession filled with optimism to begin
with. To them a perfectly acceptable form of conflict
resolution is simply to bail.
Green has heard plenty of stories about
drivers who literally quit on the spot, pulling their
trucks over en route and walking away.
Behavior like that goes beyond job-hopping
mentality, but it’s an extreme example of the impulsive
drive that can provide a brief feeling of
satisfaction and empowerment and fuels a certain
amount of job-hopping.
In the long run, jumping from job to job, especially
impulsively, can cost drivers in a way
they can’t really measure, Mundy said, and that’s
spending too much of your career at square one,
always being “the new guy.”
“Is it really a year’s worth of experience if
you held three jobs in that year and had to go
through three rounds of orientation?” she said.
“It would get tiresome to always be learning the
ropes, never getting in the groove anywhere.”
To make the most of a job, Green said, a
driver has to get past that “learning the rules”
stage so they can learn the operation, and just
as important if not more so, learn the people.
“The most successful drivers I see at any
company, they know how to work that company’s
network,” Green said. “They know how to submit
their paperwork properly. They know how to get
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