Built in the Midwest

Josh recently asked a group of high school seniors what they wanted to do after graduation, and very few of them had an answer. So we spent a day at Michigan Tech's Mind Trekkers STEM festival at the U.P. State Fairgrounds in Escanaba, where seventh graders from Delta and Schoolcraft counties get their hands on science, engineering, and the trades years before anyone asks them that question. Betwe...

Part 2 of our CDL Q&A picks up right where we left off, and Josh still hasn't seen a single question before RJ reads it. The first one sounds simple: if you want to be home every night, which license should you get? Josh's answer might not be the one you expect, and from there we get into the training argument that keeps showing up in our comments, what changes the first winter you drive a sem...

Diesel is breaking records, and the headlines make trucking look like the last industry anyone should walk into right now. Josh just got back from a trucking conference in Dallas, and what he heard from the carriers doing the hiring doesn't line up with what you're reading. RJ brought questions from people who are on the fence about getting a CDL, and Josh hadn't seen a single one of them before w...

Emil LaFave has taught heavy equipment at North Country for 23 years. He ran his first machine at about 15, a backhoe hooked onto the back of a front-end loader on his family's farm, and he's been moving dirt and fixing whatever broke ever since. Before he taught, he spent 43 years in trucking. Before that, he hauled logs out of the woods with a team of horses and prayed for cold nights so the swa...

Kyle Montgomery spent about ten years as a contract lineman. Now he's the lead line instructor at North Country Electrical Line School in Escanaba. He got into the trade almost by accident. He'd done five years in the Coast Guard, come home, and watched the paper mill he was working at close with a chain across the fence. A while later a line crew pulled into his parents' yard to change out a pole...

Kat's daughter took a career quiz at school, and the top answer came back as magician. Kat's first reaction was a question: where are the trades? She's usually the first face students see when they walk into Midwest Truck Driving School, so she hears the questions people bring in with them, from DOT physicals to whether it's all going to be okay. WHAT WE GET INTO What Kat tells students who show u...

Mac has taught people to drive trucks for 26 years. He kept paper logs before regulators replaced them with electronic devices, he watched the pre-trip exam turn into a test you can fail on the spot, and he watched schools get held to standards nobody enforced when he started. He noticed something else along the way. The more the industry says it needs drivers, the harder it makes getting licensed...

Nyeannie Reeves came to line school straight out of the Army Reserves, with zero climbing experience and a fear of falling he didn't know he had until he was about six feet off the ground. Four months later he's running pole top rescue against a four-minute clock. Near the end of the conversation he shares something almost nobody in his class knows, and why he thinks it might matter to somebody wh...

He turned 18 a few weeks before the course started, then drove three hours to a school he'd only ever seen in videos. An hour before we recorded this, he passed his final test. But the part that stuck with us happened years earlier — back when most of his classmates hadn't worked a day in their lives. Blake sat down with us the same afternoon he earned his Class A. We talked about the four jobs he...

Most CDL endorsements come down to a written test at the Secretary of State. Thirty questions, a small fee, and a new letter on your license. This episode breaks down how that little letter actually changes what the job looks like. Josh sits down with Bill Oglesby to walk through all six endorsements — what each one lets you do, what it takes to get, and what changes about your day once you have i...

If you have a record and you've wondered whether a CDL is worth trying for, watch this one. Matt carries a long list of felony convictions. He says so around forty minutes in, and he says it so you don't decide your own situation puts you out of reach. He earned the CDL. Then roughly a hundred companies turned him down. Matt spent months acing interviews and driving home without a job before he wo...

This is a Q&A episode about the questions people getting into trucking don't think to ask. Not what it pays or how long training takes, but the ones that actually decide whether this works out over a full career: what automation is really doing, which kinds of trucking are most exposed, and who to trust when everyone talking to you has something to gain. Josh has held a CDL for about sixteen y...

Penny had vacation days to burn and a husband who drove truck, so she climbed into the passenger seat for a week just to see what it was like. Eleven states later she was doing math she did not like the answer to — she was wearing herself out as a CNA while he was getting paid to watch the country go by. She came home and started looking up schools. WHAT WE GET INTO The moment on a ride-along that...

If you're trying to get into a trade right now, you've probably gotten the same advice everyone gets. Be patient. Take what you can get. Get some adjacent experience first, stay close to home, wait for the right opening. It sounds like the responsible thing to do. Cole Martinsen took that advice for four years. He finished line school in nine months and then spent four more doing everything except...

WHY THIS ONE MATTERS Something happens when the paycheck gets bigger. A lineman finishes his apprenticeship. A driver moves up to a better lane. A operator finally hits the top of the scale. And for the first time in their life, there's money left over at the end of the month. Most people know exactly what to do with it. They go buy the truck. Or the four-wheeler, the side-by-side, the skid steer,...

Thinking about a truck driving career? This is part two of our Q&A with Josh Barron, director at Midwest Truck Driving School. We cover what your first year on the road is like, how to choose a CDL school, and whether the driver shortage is real. RJ asks the questions. Josh answers. We cover three things. First, how to evaluate a CDL school. Josh explains what separates a solid truck driving p...

A guy with twenty years on the road climbs into the cab for a road test, asks if he can float the gears, and proceeds to grind metal on metal the whole way down the block. That moment is the whole point of this episode. Experience isn't the same as doing it right, and a lot of what gets argued about online falls apart the second someone who teaches this for a living walks you through it. RJ pulled...

Trent Bellinger grew up being told the same thing a lot of kids hear — that college was the only road that led anywhere good. He went and got the degree. But somewhere along the way he figured out that the thing setting him apart wasn't the diploma, it was the 4,000 hours he'd already put in at his dad's shop. Now he runs career and technical education for two counties, and he's spending his days...

You want a stable career that pays well with room to grow — but with all the noise out there, it's hard to even know where to start. Johnny Rogers didn't have a map either. He left the Marine Corps at 28 and started over in the trades at the bottom. In this one we talk about the decision he made in a parking lot that set the next decade in motion, why he chose eight years in the Marines instead of...

He got his CDL nine years ago and went straight into one of the hardest, most dangerous corners of trucking there is. Kyle has hauled logs out of swamps, flipped a pup on its side, and trimmed loads with a chainsaw over his head — and he's still one of the youngest people left doing it. We sat down to talk about what the work actually takes, and why so few people his age are willing to do it. Kyle...

Josh Rouse came up through trucking, stepped away for a stretch, and got pulled back in by a buddy with an opening in operations. Two years on the board later, he moved into human resources and safety — and now handles the hiring, the safety tech, and the IT that ties it all together. A.M. Express is a locally owned, Escanaba-based carrier running vans, tankers, flatbeds, lowboys, and reefers acro...

This episode is for the kid being told he has one option. It's for the apprentice trying to figure out if going local is worth the pay cut. It's for the lineman wondering if the side hustle is real. Mike's career didn't follow a plan. It followed a series of decisions — and the ones that paid off weren't the ones anyone told him to make. WHAT WE GET INTO The guidance counselor conversation that in...

Quick heads up before you press play: we recorded this one inside a moving training truck during an active class day, so the audio gets scratchy in spots. We cleaned up what we could — some of it just is what it is when you record on the road. Bear with us. The conversation makes it worth it. THE PREVIEW This one's a behind-the-scenes episode. No table, no studio, no script — just a mic in the cab...

A high school CTE director drives a busload of students two hours each way to spend a day at a CDL school. Why? Because somewhere along the way, he figured out something most people building career pathways for young people miss — and it changes how you should think about every trade school you've ever seen. Josh had a chat with Linus Parr, who runs the Career and Technical Education programs at N...

Nine years ago, the average truck driving school student was 50. Today, they're 18-20. Why are high schoolers and career changers walking away from college and choosing skilled trades careers — truck driving, lineman work, heavy equipment operation — instead? In Episode 11 of Built in the Midwest, we sit down with Kyle Barron, Director of Admissions at Midwest Truck Driving School and North Countr...