At a small carrier, one dispatcher does everything: finds loads, assigns them, tracks trucks, answers drivers and sends invoices. At larger carriers the work splits up. Load planners match freight to trucks, customer service talks to shippers, and the driver manager owns the relationship with a set of drivers, usually somewhere between 30 and 60 trucks. That set of trucks is called your board.
Your day runs on the board. Every truck is either loaded, empty, on a break, at a shipper or receiver, broken down or at home. You check where each truck is, what hours each driver has left, what they're doing next and whether anything is going wrong. Problems come in all day: a driver stuck at a dock, a truck with a warning light, a load that won't make its appointment, a paycheck that looks short.
Most messages come through the truck's onboard system (people still call these macros, after the old Qualcomm units), texts and phone calls. You'll talk to drivers, planners, customer service, the shop, the safety department, payroll and sometimes the customer, often within the same hour.
You're judged on a few things: how many miles and how much revenue your trucks produce, whether loads deliver on time, whether your drivers stay safe and legal, and whether your drivers stay with the company. That last one is the hardest and matters most. A driver who quits takes a truck off the road until someone new is hired and trained.
The job pays for being organized, calm and straight with people. You don't need to have driven a truck, but you need to respect that the driver is the one out there doing it. Most drivers who leave a carrier say their dispatcher or driver manager was part of the reason.
On the desk
At a large carrier, who usually decides which freight goes on which truck?
More info
Terms in this lesson
Driver manager (DM)
Looks after a group of drivers: loads, hours, home time, pay questions and problems. Also called a fleet manager.
Dispatcher
Assigns loads and tracks trucks. At small carriers it's the same job as DM.
Load planner
Matches freight to trucks across the fleet.
Board
The trucks and drivers a driver manager runs.
Macro
A message sent through the truck's onboard system, often a fixed form like 'arrived at shipper'.
Retention
Keeping drivers. The opposite is turnover.
The scenario answers
At a large carrier, who usually decides which freight goes on which truck? The load planner. Planners match loads to trucks across the whole fleet. The driver manager feeds them what each driver needs (hours, home time, preferences) and owns the driver relationship.
What does 'your board' mean on a dispatch desk? The group of trucks and drivers you're responsible for. Your board is your set of trucks. People say things like 'I've got 45 on my board' or 'my board is all empty in Texas.'
Which of these is usually the hardest measure for a driver manager to hit, and the one that costs the company most when it's missed? Keeping drivers from quitting. Every driver who leaves is a truck that sits until someone is hired and trained, plus the cost of recruiting. Driver retention is the measure that separates good driver managers from the rest.
A driver messages that he's been at the receiver for four hours and they still haven't unloaded him. Whose problem is it? Yours, working with customer service and the customer. The driver is on your board, so you own getting it moving: tell customer service, get detention started, check whether his next load needs replanning. Passing it off and forgetting it is how drivers learn not to trust you.
General training, not legal or compliance advice. Rules are the US federal ones (FMCSA) as of 2026; check the current text and your company’s policies.