My experience at TransTech was overall very positive. I made friends with other students as well as the instructors. The instructors I had the pleasure of working with were great overall. One of them was a little rough and sometimes didn’t seem like they wanted to be there, but the other two were absolutely amazing and genuinely showed that they cared about our future with our CDL.
Enrollment was super easy, and I was fortunate with how I was able to fund my tuition. The enrollment process was straightforward: they emailed me an invoice, I paid it, and everything was good to go. Everyone I’ve talked to so far has been very nice and understanding.
My only gripe with the enrollment process was that, at the time I enrolled, I wasn’t given the option to pay the additional cost for manual training. I ended up going through the automatic program, which saved me around $500, but now I have to go back to the DMV with a manual truck to have the restriction removed from my license.
I do think the classroom portion of the course was a little lackluster. I was on the weekend schedule, and our instructor would sometimes put on videos and sit in the office. Personally, I would have preferred more hands-on teaching and interaction during the classroom portion.
The yard time was great. Once we all understood what was being asked of us, we started to figure things out, and the instructors became less hands-on as our confidence grew. Whenever you had a question, they were right there to answer it or find you an answer.
The road portion was a little shaky with one of the instructors. They clearly cared about making us good drivers, but personally, I don’t think teaching was their strongest skill. That doesn’t mean they were a bad instructor, and I still learned from them. I just felt that I learned better with the other instructors and their teaching styles.
I also feel like I could have gotten a little more road time. One or two of the weekends when we were supposed to be on the road were spent in the yard, which felt unnecessary to me. I had better luck learning the road portion in the truck with the other instructors because I personally responded better to the way they taught.
I did have to wait a while to get a spot at the DMV to take my Class A test. That isn’t necessarily TransTech’s fault. The DMV in Columbia is very busy, and there are multiple CDL schools booking their students for testing. Because of how backed up the DMV can get, you should expect that it may take a few weeks to get a test date. The school does a good job of helping students find other DMV locations in the area as well, so you may have the option of testing in places like Sumter or North Augusta.
Finally, TransTech is still relatively new to the area. They haven’t even been here for a year at the time I’m writing this review, so they are still working out some of the kinks and going through the growing pains that come with starting a business in a new area.
Overall, I definitely recommend giving TransTech a look if you’re considering getting your CDL. Every school is going to have its pros and cons, and no experience is going to be perfect. For me, the positives outweighed the negatives, and I’m glad I chose to go here.
If you’ve made it through my entire review, there’s one other thing I think is worth considering when choosing a CDL school: would you rather pay for your CDL yourself and potentially have a company like TMC or Schneider reimburse your tuition afterward, or would you rather get your CDL through a company and be committed to working for them for a certain number of miles or months? That’s something I would recommend researching before making your decision.