As you might guess, I'm pretty jaded on the whole truck mechanic thing. I actually made it almost 26 years in that line of work. Honestly, most people don't make it much past diesel school. I've raised my family on it, I can fix most anything. If you become good at it, you'll always have a job. I've never been laid off a day in my life. You can't just think you're good at fixing stuff. You need good reading, writing, communication and computer skills. You have to enjoy continually learning new things. After school, the initiative to learn is mostly all up to you. You don't start out making much money, but you will need to build up maybe a 10 to 15 thousand dollar set of tools. If you don't start out at a good place to work, you can get stuck doing grunt work and never getting the chance to progress in the field. As I said, transportation companies don't have to pay overtime, trucks are mostly back at the shop on nights and weekends, so that's when you'll likely end up working. If you work at a dealership or independent repair shop, the competition in certain areas can be brutal. Labor rates for repairing your ATV, boat motor, or snowmobile by usually some young punk kid is over $100 an hour. People think you screwing them for charging even near that much for working on their $120,000 truck. If you work for an actual trucking company, YOU WILL BE AN UNWANTED NECESSITY. Also, it's hard, dirty, dangerous work. At 46 years old, I wanted to make a change before I was too old to get hired for anything else. I do probably have a little higher standard of living than someone with no skills making the same amount of money. I spend much less on vehicles and all kinds of repairs than most other people. Also, I was lucky, I worked Monday through Friday day shift, for the last 21 years.
The first rule in being good at something is...YOU GOTTA WANNA. To make it in the truck repair industry long term, you gotta wanna...real bad.
Nice job! 
