I am sorry for how long this is. The tl;dr is that I was obligated to resign from my job after having two "minor incidents" behind the wheel during my six-week training period, and I want to know if I can still find work.

I went to a CDL training school that was supposed to get you your CDL in four weeks, but I failed the test the first two times and barely passed by the skin of my teeth on my third attempt, taking around six weeks in total. Then got a job as a student driver at a company with a six-week training program. I probably drove around ten thousand miles with my trainers during this time. In the sixth week (kind of my fifth week, since my first week of training didn't count because my trainer was a little neurotic and let me do almost no driving), I had two incidents: one mirror strike with another semi on the highway (the police weren't involved because there was no room to pull over at the time, and the other driver probably didn't want to report it because he was likely partially at fault too) and one time I hit a traffic cone. My company, understandably, decided I was a liability and obligated me to resign (they were very specific that it would be on my record as a resignation, not a termination). I lost the job about one month ago now.

How these incidents were catalogued is a little confusing to me. There was no police report filed either time (I was relying on my trainer to tell me what to do), which I recognize may have been illegal but it's how it happened. When I was forced to resign, my company told me that they considered these to be "minor incidents" and that they may or may not decide to add them to my DAC report—I think the implication was that they likely wouldn't add them, but they wouldn't tell me one way or another. I don't think there's any point in me checking the report myself because they said they add things to the report after another company requests information.

I have been mentioning the mirror strike in my applications to other companies because I want to be honest, and if my company does decide to include one of my incidents on my DAC, it would be that one. Safe to say that including that incident is the reason I've been rejected by every place I've applied to so far, including Swift.

My company explicitly told me that the reason they offered me the chance to resign instead of terminating me is that they think I still have the potential to succeed as a trucker elsewhere and want me to have a chance to get hired by someone else, but they could have just been saying that to soften the blow.

I don't know if I'm just bad at operating a semi and am not going to improve, or if my struggles are within the normal range and I still have the potential to be a safe driver. Obviously safety matters the most, and I shouldn't be a trucker if I can't do it safely. I also don't know if the difference even matters, if I can't get a job.

I went through a program that paid for my CDL training school, so I haven't actually invested any money in this, only time. I could just give up on the whole thing, except that I don't have any other realistic career plans right now. I'm hoping to get a non-CDL package delivery job soon because I'm sick of being unemployed and don't want to operate a semi again without more training, but that's not a good long-term plan.

Thanks for reading. Any advice?