After 18 years of driving a truck for Walmart, Scotty Wells pumped the brakes and took on a manager role.
Knowing he was the reigning Walmart national truck driving champion, company officials felt he was the perfect person to teach the trade.
In October 2022, the eastern Tennessee native moved to Seymour to run Region 5 and do onboarding at the regional training center. Onboarding is a weeklong evaluation process to become a Walmart truck driver.
Wells and his boss, Fritz Keel, then started Fleet Development and designed the Associate-to-Driver program.
“We said, ‘Well, why can’t we take the driver shortage from the industry?’” Wells said. “It’s what we’ve been fighting for the last two, three years was there was just not a lot of people coming into the truck driving industry. It’s so hard to get in, so there’s a driver shortage. The newer generation, it’s not an appealing job to be gone driving a truck all week long.”
The idea is to give associates an opportunity to come out of their role at a distribution or transportation center or Walmart or Sam’s Club store and become a Walmart truck driver.
“It is the most desired truck driving position in America,” Wells said. “To be a Walmart driver is just that prestige that you have to be the best of the best, and that’s what we call them, so it’s very hard. When I hired in 18 years ago, they said the odds of you getting into Walmart were less than the odds of you getting into Harvard. That’s how hard it was to be a Walmart truck driver.”
Wells said he did proof of concepts in Dallas, Texas, and Dover, Delaware, and after seeing those work, Associate-to-Driver was rolled out to the rest of the company’s fleet. There are now seven facilities across the nation, including Seymour, that offer the program.
For the first cohort for Region 5, which covers from Coldwater, Michigan, to Midway, Tennessee, 900 associates applied. Only 11 were chosen for the program, and nine of them completed the 12-week program.
Associates within a 50-mile radius of a participating transportation office are eligible for the program. By the beginning of 2024, that’s changing to a 250-mile radius to make it available to more associates across the country who want to become Walmart drivers.
In the program, participants learn driving from the best of the best, guiding them to approach all parts of the job focusing on the values of safety, courtesy and pride, according to walmart.com.
For several years in a row, Wells said Walmart has been awarded America’s safest fleet by the American Trucking Associations.
“We’re the safest private fleet in America. We pride ourselves on that, so it takes the special, best of the best driver to become a Walmart driver,” he said. “It’s not just hand you a set of keys and tell you to go drive a truck. It doesn’t work that way here. If they are willing to learn and learn the trade to be a truck driver, I can teach them the professional, right Walmart way to do it.”
After they complete the training course and earn their commercial driver’s license, they become a private fleet Walmart driver.
“Just from our experience now, these drivers are better drivers, safer drivers,” Wells said. “The numbers are astronomically different from a guy that we’ve hired a year ago to a guy that has been out on his own from Associate-to-Driver. The numbers are just mind-boggling of how good these drivers are because they’ve been trained by the best.”
Perhaps the biggest win for associates? It doesn’t cost them anything to enter the program. They are paid as Walmart associates during the training.
“The opportunity is there because it costs you $6,000 to $8,000 to go to a truck driving school just to get your license. They really don’t do any training with you,” Wells said. “Here, you’re getting the training from the best drivers in the world to become a professional Walmart driver, we pay them while they are here, we feed them, everything is paid for. It’s an amazing opportunity.”
In the end, they also will make more money.
“It’s going to change their career,” Wells said. “They go from the warehouse making $50,000, $60,000, $65,000 a year, go home every night to a first-year Walmart driver right now is advertised at $110,000 a year, so they can almost double their salary.”
As of July, 191 associates have completed the program. Overall, Walmart has 14,000 drivers, and Wells said the goal by February 2024 is to have 15,000. They hope the Associate-to-Driver program will help with that.
Ed Lyons of Kokomo was among the nine from Region 5 who graduated with the first cohort in Seymour.
He said he was a temporary hire-on with Walmart in 2014, and then he became a cashier the next year and worked his way up through the ranks to a coach position. He worked at stores in Wabash, Rochester and Kokomo.
“I always wanted to be a manager, so that was always the goal,” Lyons said. “Then I found out about the Associate-to-Driver program about a year ago. I had always wanted to be a truck driver because both my father and my grandfather were truck drivers, so I wanted to continue on with the family legacy.”
Once he was accepted into the program, he said it began with studying the CDL learner’s permit book, and each participant had to get their permit to move on. Then three weeks were spent learning the basic knowledge of driving a tractor and a trailer — pretrip, backing courses, straight line backing, parallel parking and offset backing — to be able to get their CDL.
Lyons said he was fortunate to pass the CDL test on his first try. Then the participants continued to hone in on their skills, took longer trips on the road and drove more freely before going through Walmart’s backing course.
“Walmart has its own pretrip that’s a little bit more in-depth than what the state would like, so we learned all of that, as well, before we were even able to graduate,” he said.
The last week, they had to do three different types of drives: City route, country route and highway route.
The graduation ceremony was July 28. Lyons said it was nice to wear his Walmart truck driver uniform for the first time, receive a diploma and have family and friends in attendance.
“All in all, it’s just a very honoring thing to be able to do,” he said. “It really hit me emotionally because both my grandfather and my father are no longer here, so it was just a very emotionally impacting moment for me to be able to go up onstage and get my certificate stating I am now a Walmart fleet driver. There was a lot of pride there.”
Upon returning to his home distribution center in Gas City, Lyons said he was paired with a certified driver trainer, who rode along to verify he was doing everything safely and properly. He had to be with the CDT for six to eight weeks and have at least 12,000 miles to be able to drive on his own.
For the first day on his own, Lyons said his general transportation manager asked about taking a grocery load to his last Walmart store in Kokomo, docking it there and letting associates look at the truck and see what he’s doing now.
“That would mean a lot to me to be able to go back to where I came from and show them, ‘Hey, look at me now. Look at what I’m able to do now in just that short amount of time,’” he said.
The second cohort currently is going through the Associate-to-Driver program. Wells said in Region 5, he had more than 600 associates apply, and 23 were chosen. They will graduate Nov. 3.
The third cohort will start Nov. 6. Registration recently opened, and Wells already has more than 1,300 applicants from Region 5.
The plan is to have four cohorts a year at each of the seven training facilities, he said.
“Across the fleet, that will average out into right at 500-something drivers into our fleet every year through Associate-to-Driver,” Wells said.
While it has been an adjustment for Wells to go from driving all those years to training drivers, he loves what he does now.
“It has been fun. It really has. It has been a blessing. It has been a real good ride,” he said. “I love this company. The things and the opportunities it provides for its associates, it’s just second to none. They are a great company. They really are.”
Thank a truck driver
National Truck Driver Appreciation Week 2023 is Sept. 10 to 16.
Celebrated annually by American Trucking Associations, it’s an important time for America to thank all of the professional truck drivers for their hard work and commitment in undertaking one of our economy’s most demanding and important jobs, according to ntdaw.trucking.org.
This weeklong celebration honors the professional truck drivers who deliver America’s freight safely and securely every day. These 3.49 million professional men and women not only deliver our goods safely, securely and on time, but they also keep our highways safe.