What a New CDL Can’t Tell a Carrier About the Driver Holding It

Andrew Poliakoff:

The CDL as a document, you really want that to be an indicator of confidence for carriers so that when they see the CDL, they say, “Okay, categorically, this is a person I can hire. They have the right competencies. They’re proficient in all of the different maneuvers and actions that are required.” But that has really not been the case for some time. I think there are a lot of eyeballs in this space going, “Well, gosh, what is the value or the certainty of the credential that a CDL offers now?”

Carlo Solórzano:

Welcome to Don’t Get Played, a podcast from Cisive. This show is for talent acquisition leaders and people managers who care about trust at work. How it’s built. How it’s measured. And how leaders design systems that hold up when speed, risk, and accountability collide.

I’m Carlo Solórzano, Senior Director for Cisive Driver iQ.

A commercial driver’s license is supposed to mean something. When a carrier sees one, the assumption is simple. This person was trained. This person is ready. But from 2022 until late 2025, the system behind that license had almost no oversight. And in trucking, the cost of a bad assumption shows up on public highways.

My guest today is Andrew Poliakoff, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Training Association. Andrew represents CDL training schools, and his organization has spent years pushing for real oversight of how drivers get trained.

We talk about how federal training standards meant to clean up the industry ended up opening the door to CDL mills. We get into the gap between a minimum standard and a driver who is actually ready for the road. And we look at what’s changing now, including new federal requirements for schools that want onto the training registry.

A license is only as trustworthy as the training behind it. Right now, carriers can’t take that training for granted.

Let’s get started!

Andrew, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here today.

Andrew Poliakoff:

Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about these important issues in the industry.

Carlo Solórzano:

Absolutely. Well, let’s just jump right in then. When a carrier sees a fresh CDL, what do you think they think it tells them versus what does it actually tell them?

Andrew Poliakoff:

Well, this is something that’s, I think by many people been called the era of the great recertification, right? So that’s an easy question and with a complicated answer, but apparently we’ve got some time to discuss it. So I’ll sort of hop into that. So, when carriers, let’s say in a perfect world, in a utopian vision of the licensing system for commercial drivers, you would anticipate that a CDL would indicate to them that categorically that individual had the right amount of skills, they’d been trained properly, et cetera.

In the era that we have been operating in, certainly for the past couple of years, that really hasn’t been the case because there’s been really a proliferation of CDL mills, bad actors, unlicensed folks who have proliferated onto this Training Provider Registry. And I anticipate many of your listeners are aware of the Training Provider Registry.

But I’ll just back up and give a little bit of history. In February of 2022, finally, after really almost a decade of attempts by the United States Congress and by the FMCSA, there were minimum training standards that were promulgated and became federal law in 2022. Minimum training standards for commercial drivers, first of its kind, really quite necessary to bring all of those, many states were operating in different ways. There really needed to have a national, federal standard.

And so that all takes place on this Training Provider Registry. But you would anticipate that when that registry was set up, that it, you know, was working well. I think that’s what people would hope and anticipate.

However, it is the case that there was not much oversight, if any, from really February of 2022 until the end part of 2025. And so for those really about three years, there was just a deluge of CDL mills, two- and three-day training providers in that space that have been training people maybe just to pass the test, barely.

And so the CDL as a document, you really want that to be an indicator of confidence for carriers so that they, when they see the CDL, they say, okay, categorically, this is a person I can hire. They have the right competencies. They’re proficient in all of the different maneuvers and actions that are required. But that has really not been the case for some time.

I’m the executive director, I believe, as you mentioned, of the Commercial Vehicle Training Association. We really have a particular, you know, set of standards here at this organization, have been almost in our 30th year of operation. And so we would really, I think, point folks towards working with individuals that are, have gone to a CVTA school or a school that is part of the National Association of Publicly Funded Truck Driving Schools. That’s a incredibly long-winded answer, and I’m sure we’re gonna talk about what the FMCSA is doing now to improve that oversight.

But let’s just say that things have gotten really complicated. They really have, and there have been some, you know, court cases on this subject, not just involving carriers, but also involving brokers. And I think there are a lot of eyeballs in this space going, well, gosh, what is the value or the certainty of the credential that a CDL offers now?

Carlo Solórzano:

Thank you for that. And certainly we need all that context and all that detail because it is a complicated set of circumstances in which we find ourselves. And so, no easy answers, you know, no CliffsNotes answer will do here. And so thank you.

And we’re gonna dive in and, heck, maybe this becomes a, you know, one of a handful of conversations that we end up having as, you know, things continue to shake out and get cleared up, you know, as we kind of clean up this mess that’s been created.

Andrew Poliakoff:

Indeed.

Carlo Solórzano:

Kind of going to the entry-level driver training rules, what do you think those fixed and what did they leave open?

Andrew Poliakoff:

What’s curious is that a lot of states had existing regulations, but many have none. That may surprise some of your listeners that there, I think at this point, are maybe about 10 states that have no regulatory requirements or oversight in the states as to what constitutes valid training. So it certainly solved the question of what to do in those states, right, that had no oversight.

I think at the same time, one of the key pieces that it attempted to put in motion was, believe it or not, the eradication of those two- and three-day training locations and the CDL mills, right? Because they were allowed to operate, you know, in sort of the Wild West of pre-ELDT CDL training.

But owing to, I guess, what you want to consider maybe the law of unintended consequences in this sort of a multivariable equation, that what ended up being the part of the final rule that was actually the law, and what is still currently the law, is that organizations could self-certify onto that Training Provider Registry without providing their course outlines, their curriculum, their documents indicating that they’re properly licensed with the state to do training in that state. And so instead of fixing the problem, it actually exacerbated and increased the problem by providing an entry point that didn’t have any of the criteria and document requirements that were anticipated as part of the one main purposes of the rule.

So yes, you have training standards, but any standards that are unenforced are really of little to no value. So what you saw was a great deal of excitement on the part of all the training providers that are the high-quality ones that belong to the Commercial Vehicle Training Association or publicly funded going, oh my goodness, not only is this not what we wanted, it is turned into the opposite of what we wanted.

That a lot of that has really gotten fixed in a very energetic way over the last year. But that’s what it was intended to fix. And what it actually really increased, it increased the sort of negative elements that it had been intended to fix, which is alarming to say it. And everyone that we’ve discussed this with over the many years that CVTA has been fighting to create that oversight and enforcement, everyone that we talk to is shocked to a person. Just happy we’re now getting to the other side of things now and really finally seeing some enforcement.

Carlo Solórzano:

Yeah, I’ve heard it described as good intentions gone awry at first stab, right? Because it did lead to additional problems, as you’ve outlined. So when we talk about, you know, CDL licensure, where do you think, like, minimum kind of ends and, like, real driver readiness begins? And how do we sort of bridge that gap?

Andrew Poliakoff:

Well, so let’s just also back up a bit on what this means. At the end of the day, minimum training standards are just that. They really are the minimum. And that is not the goal of the high-quality schools, because if it were, you’re really setting these folks at a disadvantage. So this proficiency concept is built into the rule.

And what that means is that when an individual comes to take training, they are being assessed, not just for some hours standard. Okay, well, you did, you know, 10 hours of hands-on behind-the-wheel training, or 15 or eight or whatever. ’Cause all of those numbers were very disparate across the states, which still have those requirements.

But CVTA schools are looking at a person and saying, you know, I’m not just sort of rolling the dice here, so we’re going to train you in such a way where, eh, I think Johnny over there is ready to take the skills test and get his CDL. This is like, no, this person is ready to go, right? Because at the end of the day, they’re not being trained just so they can hang their CDL or graduation diploma on the wall. They’re getting trained so that they can be safe and they can be hireable, right? That’s really the point.

All CVTA schools have this goal of making sure that folks are gonna be hired. Most people that are going to CVTA schools are really receiving pre-hire letters and are aware of what carrier they’re going to even before they graduate. And then once they do graduate, they’re headed there.

So minimum training standards, I would say to answer your question more succinctly, it’s really, is that individual proficient and are they hireable in such a manner that they are ready to go have a great career at one of these great carriers that hires entry-level drivers. We are not saying that this person is a masterclass, you know, full-on master of being a truck driver. At these carriers, they’re gonna go and take finishing training, right, before that carrier is confident that they’re ready to be out on the road, you know, often alone.

But I’d say that, you know, like any great skilled trade, like trucking is, it’s gonna take you many years to become really a master of your craft. So folks are getting students ready to be proficient and hireable, but there is still a long road in front of them to become masters of this skilled trade.

Carlo Solórzano:

You used an example of a good CDL school in that last answer. So let’s talk about, you know, the CDL mill, right? The yin to the yang, if you will. And let’s talk about what a CDL mill looks like from the outside and maybe even from the inside, right? Let’s get into the nitty-gritty.

Andrew Poliakoff:

So CDL mills would be, I think probably the easiest way to describe them, and you can find these folks still operating. I think they’re getting more and more compact as they’re being removed by the FMCSA. We’d like to see even more of that. But at the end of the day, a CDL mill is really a place that is training and claiming to train folks an extraordinary short amount of time, often two days, three days of training.

They’re likely to not be licensed in the state. If there are education agencies that operate in that state, they’re almost certainly not licensed with them. They probably don’t have a brick-and-mortar location. They probably don’t have a training pad. They may be going and just using some sort of abandoned parking lot or public roadways, et cetera, for the backing maneuvers.

And to some degree, and we think of this in a consumer protection standpoint, a lot of times they are offering something too good to be true. For so many of us that have operated in this industry for some time, we may forget that a person that’s part of the general public may not comprehend why you can’t become a truck driver in three days or a week. You know, I think it’s very difficult for us to hear that and not think that it sets off alarm bells.

But if it’s too good to be true, it is. So I think at least for a member of the general public, certainly find someone that’s on the Training Provider Registry. You have to be on the Training Provider Registry to even put people into the system. So that’s step one. Step two would be, who’s hiring from this place, right?

Do a little bit of research and think about, okay, well, I see these big motor carriers on the highway. A lot of them are household names that you could, or that many of us are used to seeing all the time on the highways. And so ask about whether those major carriers are hiring from that school.

And if it’s too good to be true, it almost certainly is. If it doesn’t look like a school, right, if it doesn’t look like, you know, a place where there’s a dedicated classroom and, you know, a brick-and-mortar environment, and if it doesn’t look like a place that you imagine you’d be learning a trade, don’t do it. And yeah, that’s probably the best definition.

Carlo Solórzano:

Right. Does it pass the eye test? I suppose that one of the issues with that, however, is yes, any driver who legitimately wants to learn the craft and be a responsible driver can spot that, realize it doesn’t pass the eye test and move on.

But just as there are bad actors in the school realm, there are probably, you know, prospective students coming in looking for that shortcut, that, you know, that easy button, if you will. Safety repercussions be damned, right?

Andrew Poliakoff:

Well, I got bad news for whether you’re a student looking for an easy road there, or you are a school looking to benefit from that desire, that you really are at the top of the list where a federal agency that’s going full bore in terms of enforcement is looking to prevent you in that circumstance from joining this industry. So whether it’s the school or someone trying to, you know, get licensed in two or three days, that dog ain’t gonna hunt.

Carlo Solórzano:

Let’s flip the script a little bit and let’s talk about from the carrier’s perspective. Do you see carriers treating driver training school as, like, a real part of their screening process, and should they be?

Andrew Poliakoff:

I do, and we do. It is the case that many of these carriers do have lists of schools that they hire from and ones that they don’t. I would love to imagine that those, you know, we at CVTA certainly can’t make any statements around, you should only hire from CVTA schools, or publicly funded saying a similar thing, you know, for certain sort of compliance requirements.

But carriers are free to do what they want to do. And if they only wanna hire from CVTA schools, so be it, or publicly funded. I, you know, I think carriers are absolutely looking at this. They can’t afford to not be paying attention from a recruiting standpoint as to the quality of graduates that are coming out of different schools, period. I mean, they have to be doing their due diligence along the way to make sure that they hire people that are really competent on the way in.

Carlo Solórzano:

So what happens downstream when a poorly trained driver gets hired by one of these carriers?

Andrew Poliakoff:

Well, the likelihood, I think, that they’re gonna get hired by one of the CVTA member carriers is quite low. And I think there’s a very low likelihood that they will have been trained by a CVTA school. I would imagine that likelihood is about zero. So your question is, a poorly trained driver gets hired by a carrier that hires poorly trained drivers.

Chaos ensues, my friend. I mean, that is what has placed all of this attention on this space, and what we saw in, I think beginning around in August of 2025, that’s when the US Department of Transportation began paying great attention to some of these tragic accidents happening all across the country.

The focus really, I think, initially on the part of the USDOT was individuals who had no capacity to speak English and had been a part of some of these accidents. But then as the nation began, and the news cycle also began paying attention to these truck crashes, these heavy truck crashes, that’s when folks started to realize, wow, what is going on in this training space?

And I will tell you the reason for USDOT paying attention to that training space and not just the, you know, immigration status or the, you know, English capacity. That is because of CVTA’s ELDT Task Force, right? And this sort of drumbeat of cajoling, begging, persuading the USDOT to pay attention further back, sort of in the food chain of where are these people being trained? Are there folks that are really just rubber-stamping and pencil-whipping their training in this process, and then feeding them fraudulently into a licensing system?

To answer your question, though, that’s what happens. You know, an individual’s poorly trained and then goes to a carrier that hires poorly trained drivers. You’re gonna get accidents. You’re gonna get a whole lot of problems. I think the most noteworthy crash, I think it was in Florida in August of 2025, a semi did a U-turn,

Carlo Solórzano:

Yeah.

Andrew Poliakoff:

U-turn on the roadway, and another passenger vehicle drove under that, you know, the trailer, and multiple people were killed. But that’s the sort of just outrageous, risky, criminal behavior that you see when people aren’t trained properly.

Carlo Solórzano:

Absolutely. And sadly, that video has made the rounds, and it’s harrowing to watch, for sure.

Andrew Poliakoff:

Yes.

Carlo Solórzano:

You know, you and I both know some of these household-name carriers who we see all the time that are really intentional about the relationships that they build and nurture with the schools that they trust to provide quality graduates.

What advice do you have for carriers who don’t have that culture and that infrastructure within their organization, to get them to where they try and build partnerships with reputable schools? Do you have any advice for them?

Andrew Poliakoff:

The advice there is, I would begin cultivating relationships with schools that are members of CVTA or publicly funded. I would do that post-haste, to shore up and reduce your exposure to liability for hiring people that are not as likely. Again, you know, there are quality schools out there that aren’t members of these associations.

But what I would say at the same time is that one of the curiosities of the trucking industry is that many carriers do not hire entry-level drivers, right? There’s this peculiar arrangement where many carriers hire folks that have one year of clean driving record, or two years, but I think primarily one year of clean driving record.

And so the trucking industry has this sort of broader, more peculiar problem, which is that most of the trucking industry just thinks that, you know, good drivers sort of fall from the sky, right? Or spring forth from some sort of divine cause, when in fact it’s these great carriers that are CVTA member carriers that are hiring and then bringing these folks into the industry. And so that is a curiosity.

What I’m hopeful for is that this great recertification that’s going on, and at long last, perhaps with FMCSA’s enforcement efforts, we can actually arrive at a place where people can trust the CDL training and licensing space enough that these motor carriers can say, wow, I think I should be hiring entry-level drivers. They’re well trained. They’re licensed appropriately. And that’s a good part of my, you know, my fleet recruitment decision making.

This is this great cleanup that we’re witnessing now that we’re a part of, is moving in the right direction. And I think that it will continue to do so. I think that FMCSA is taking steps now to make sure that some of these cleanup concepts are codified into permanent federal law. And so they cannot be undone or changed or dismissed by future administrations. Not saying that anyone would do that, but having the sort of policy implementation things that are going on now be codified is important, and that’s what we’re seeing in this administration currently.

Carlo Solórzano:

Let’s talk about regulation and kind of where we go next. What changes on the regulatory side should carriers be watching?

Andrew Poliakoff:

So what we’re going to see, that folks may be aware of already, but FMCSA has proposed to codify the out-of-service penalty for failure to comply with English language proficiency requirements into federal law. So right now it is, the USDOT is essentially using an executive order and CVSA guidance to have folks who fail an ELP roadside check be taken out of service. That is not permanent law right now. So the proposal is that will be permanent.

The other one is that we do see on the horizon that the entry-level driver training rule will be revisited, that there will be a rulemaking to ramp up the documentation requirements to strengthen sort of initial process of preventing bad actors from coming onto that registry. There may be some other components that are in that as well. We’ll just have to wait and see.

But I will say that one of the biggest impressive things that’s taken shape at FMCSA really in the last, gosh, couple days really has been that FMCSA had their emergency information collection request approved, and all these things that CVTA’s ELDT Task Force have been asking for since 2022 are now some of the things that are gonna be required as part of this emergency collection request.

And so the folks wanting to be on that Training Provider Registry are gonna need to submit instructor qualification documents, course curriculum and outline, state licensure information, information on vehicles and training location. It’s not a requirement. Now, is FMCSA assessing a lot of that stuff once folks are already in the door? Yes, but all the better to have it really required on the way in.

So that emergency information collection request has been approved by the Office of Management and Budget on October 23rd, I believe it was. And that is part of a more broad rulemaking that FMCSA is going to do, which, I mean, the little procedural components of it are hanging out in, you know, dorky policy wonk websites that I visit. Why are you laughing, Carlo? But yeah, I can say that the administrator’s statements himself and also the little breadcrumbs of policy procedure all indicate that we are gonna get a full-on formal rulemaking on ELDT.

Carlo Solórzano:

Fantastic. That’s great news. And I’m laughing because I really rely upon people like yourself to be, you know, sifting through those dorky policy wonk websites and passing that information along to me, so that I can stay informed, because I don’t have the bandwidth or the intelligence to, you know, work my way through there. So thank...

Andrew Poliakoff:

Or perhaps more critically, the desire, which would, if you do not have the desire, you’re living a very good life. No, we’re all different people in this world, and some of that stuff is very exciting to me.

I will even take a moment to say, because as long as I’m free to fly my dorky policy wonk flag here, I will say that what’s interesting is that these information collection request documents are really the thing that got us to the bad place originally, right? Those ICRs, as they call them, that’s where, you know, the degradation of the requirements for coming onto that Training Provider Registry, that’s where all of that took place many years ago.

And so the fact that we, you know, I think the administrator and all of the staff at FMCSA should really be applauded for their actions now. But especially because I think it was very satisfying and almost poetic that, you know, we get this pendulum of oversight and enforcement just swinging back in the other direction, you know, with Administrator Barrs, you know, saying, oh, you want an information collection request out of us? We’re gonna give you an emergency one, and we’re gonna require all this stuff from these bad actors. So, like, sort of quintessential leader of the organization, you know, decades of law enforcement, doing the right thing. Very impressive.

Carlo Solórzano:

Love to see it. Okay, last question before I let you go. And it’s something I like to do toward the end of all my podcasts, which is have my guest give a call to action to the folks who listen in. And so, Andrew, what’s one thing that you would recommend a hiring leader start doing tomorrow?

Andrew Poliakoff:

I would recommend that a hiring leader tomorrow... Well, no, they should do it today. Forget tomorrow. Let’s start with that.

Carlo Solórzano:

Why wait till tomorrow?

Andrew Poliakoff:

Why wait till tomorrow? Go to cvta.org, commercialvehicletrainingassociation.org, and go look at the schools near you, right, that are doing this high-quality training. Go visit one. Pick up the phone if that’s not an organization you’re already working with.

If you’re saying, well, we hire people, you know, we’re not sure about hiring entry-level drivers. No, you should be looking at, the problem is you haven’t found any high-quality schools to be working with, because if you were, perhaps you would have a very different opinion on that.

So keep an open mind. I would take a look at CVTA schools, go see the level of quality that’s going on at one of those locations. It’ll knock your socks off. And these are great drivers, all these students. Shout out to my brother Mike, who’s a truck driver here in Virginia. We really need these great drivers on the roads doing the Lord’s work for all of us out there as great professionals in the industry.

Carlo Solórzano:

Absolutely. Shout out to your brother Mike and my brother Greg, who just retired last year from a career in truck driving. We need all these great drivers. Great call to action. Well done.

Thank you so much for joining us, Andrew. I knew it was gonna be a great conversation. I’ve never had a bad one with you, but putting some formal structure and a recording device around this maybe makes it even more special, ’cause other folks can listen in to all the wisdom you have to share. So thank you so much. Hope we get to do it again sometime.

Andrew Poliakoff:

Outstanding. I really appreciate it.

Carlo Solórzano:

A credential is a promise. As we talked about, for about 3 years, almost nobody was checking whether the CDL kept that promise.

Minimum training standards are exactly that. A minimum. A new driver can be proficient and hireable and still have years to go before mastering the trade.

The warning signs of a bad program are easy to spot once you know where to look. Two or three days of training. No classroom. No training pad. No major carriers hiring its graduates. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. And as enforcement catches up, carriers have a real opening. They can stop waiting for experienced drivers to fall from the sky. They can start building relationships with schools they trust.

Andrew, thank you for joining me, and for the years you’ve spent pushing for real oversight in driver training.

If you got value from this conversation, subscribe to Don’t Get Played on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. And share it with someone on your recruiting or safety team who decides which new drivers get the keys.

We’ll see you next time. And remember, in the meantime… don’t get played.