Marathon Petroleum Transport Driver Thrives in New Career

Angel Reeves spent 15 years working as a mid-level manager in corporate America. She had a desk job while she raised her family, but she always felt like she wanted to get out and explore the world. She was tired of office politics and finally decided to try a new career that she’d always been interested in: truck driving. Since her children had grown up, she became an over-the-road truck driver, specializing in hauling freight long distances.

“I wasn’t sad that I made the choice to leave a sit-down desk job and move into something that I could get my hands dirty, keep moving, see different things every day,” said Reeves. “I wasn’t at the same desk, looking at the same faces, hearing the same voices every day.”

She loved the change in career but realized that she needed to be closer to home and to her family. She took a job driving for a package delivery company in Michigan that allowed her to be home every night. She was filling up her delivery van at a gas station and doing her usual safety checks when she met a fuel transport driver for Marathon Petroleum who was always on the lookout for good people to join the company and started up a conversation with her.

“He was so excited about what he was doing and the company he did it for that it made me say ‘Hmm. Maybe I should go and see what they are about,’” said Reeves. “I had been looking for a team and not a me situation, so it was very interesting.”

Reeves said that while the thought of hauling fuel scared her at first, the pay and the benefits package, which included a 401k employer match and a company pension plan, made it too good to resist a job offer.

During her training, she saw the company culture that was described from the beginning come to life. As she started to question if she could handle the responsibilities of transporting fuel, the team stepped up to keep her motivated.

“I was having a really bad couple of days feeling like I wasn’t getting it. ‘Am I going to make it as a transport driver?’ A couple of the guys sat down with me a said ‘Just settle down. Relax. It’s okay. You’ll get it. Ask questions. Take your time,’” Reeves said. “And having that, where it felt like my brothers put their arm around me and said ‘It’s going to be okay. We got your back.’ At the end of the training, I had probably more confidence transporting fuel than I ever did driving the box vans.”

Reeves has been with Marathon Petroleum for two years now and still loves the variety she gets at work every day and being home every night.

“I get to go to a store in Lansing today and a store in Detroit tomorrow. And I get to go to an ethanol plant in Marshall and then an ethanol plant in Albion, so it’s a lot of different places and a lot of different feelings. A lot of different roads. I love that part of it,” said Reeves. “And the culture. They take care of you as if you were their sister, brother, mother. They treat you like family.”