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Recently, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) announced it had allocated $1 million in grant money to help train veterans for jobs in the transportation industry, and specifically to become truck drivers, according to Anthony Foxx, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation.
“The transportation industry provides a unique opportunity for military families and veterans to utilize skills they developed in the service, and we hope these grants will lead to more veterans joining the ranks of our country’s commercial vehicle drivers,” said Foxx.
The grant money will go to six colleges across the U.S. as part of the Commercial Motor Vehicle Operator Safety Training grant program.
More than 300,000 jobs in the trucking industry will open up by 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the FMCSA hails trucking as an in “high demand job.”
The money is to be used for things like permitting states to consider military experience in commercial licensing tests and offering opportunities for industry job fairs, and that around 300 veterans could be trained as drivers, at roughly $3,300 per vet, according to FMCSA administrator Anne Ferro.
In 2011, the FMCSA confirmed a rule that gave states the power to waive the skills test portion of the CDL test if an applicant had two years of safe driving in the military equivalent of a commercial motor vehicle.
The six college to which the grant money is going are:
1. Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen, Wash., $131,041
2. Long Beach Community College District, in Long Beach, Calif., $211,733
3. Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College in Orangeburg, S.C., $150,000
4. Lone Star College in Woodlands, Texas, $184,260
5. Century College in White Bear Lake, Minn., $120,000
6. Joliet Junior College in Joliet, Ill., $176,427
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