City’s CDL Apprentice Program surpasses 100-graduate milestone as demand for trash collection rises

SAN ANTONIO – Tayler Lang mentioned using a side-load truck now looks like 2d nature.

“You can whip it just like you drive a regular car,” Lang mentioned. “When you get in the groove of things and you’re just picking them up and down and doing it maybe 1,200 times a day.”

Lang is an worker with the City of San Antonio’s Solid Waste Management Department. But simply months in the past, she used to be an apprentice throughout the town’s Commercial Driver License (CDL) apprenticeship program.

“It took me maybe about three months or so,” Lang mentioned. “I’m learning a little bit more in-depth about my city because I’m actually in the neighborhoods learning the areas.”

Lang is amongst greater than 100 individuals who have finished that program. Since its get started in 2018, without equal objective has all the time been to offer town with workforce who’ve a CDL.

“It’s easier for us to fill in those vacancies and bring in a new generation of drivers for the Solid Waste Department,” Rick Masters, a supervisor for town’s Solid Waste Management Department, mentioned. “San Antonio is growing and it’s not going to stop. We have to keep up with the growth throughout the city.”

Certain cars, like trash collection vans, require drivers to have CDLs.

“We have to keep our city clean. It’s a tough job,” Masters mentioned. “In order to, to keep up with the demand and the hard work we do, we have to make sure that we retain our employees, keep the programs like the apprenticeship program running so we can keep up with the demand of hard work here.”

This 100-graduate milestone comes as the demand for trash collection around the town is on the upward thrust.

Just q4, Solid Waste Management introduced an academic marketing campaign as a way to forestall unlawful dumping as town allotted part one million bucks within the new price range to lend a hand crews with apparatus.

The incentives for those that select to stick with town once you have their CDL come with well being advantages, a retirement program, and an opportunity to transport up throughout the company or town, as neatly as a gradual activity.

For beginning pay and open positions within the apprenticeship program, click here.