i swept floors and did the sh*t work then progressed thro the tech system till finally getting indentured. the pay initially was terrible but there was the incentive of very good money at the end of the apprenticeship which has been proven as i posted earlier.
what i was taught in school was a waste of time because the text books and real on the job training (post apprenticeship) greatly differed.
i have put together multimillion dollar projectts and have supervised on some of the biggest jobs in australia.
i have supervised crews in all sorts of different climates and nationalities.
and i can catagorically say that the "tradesmen" sent out in the workforce today and over the last 10-15 years are not a patch on the previous generation.
skills are being lost that cannot be replaced. i am constantly amazed at the lack of knowledge that so called tradesmen have today. australia once had the best boilermakers in the world but this has been ditched.
the pre appreticeship scheme is a white wash to pull the wool over the population, so that they will believe that something is being done to rectify an appalling system
i cant remember the last time i came across a welder who had actually done an apprenticeship, they are all now what i call "six week wonders". they go do a welding couse for 6 weeks (i think its now 2) and they come out thinking they are gods gift to the trade. they learn nothing about the critical elements of the trade such as metalurgy or how to read a drawing. a welding ticket which was once the preserve of a tradesman or one who managed to get tradesmans rights (which took 7 years) is now available to anyone who can be bothered to sjhow up.
text books are fine - but you do not learn until you actually try it on the job.
now all major projects are being built in a modular form and imported from the phillipines, vietnam or korea and the reason for this is because the average aussie tradesman is indolent and any skills they once had are lost.
imho one way to solve this is to bring back the apprenticeship scheme pre hawke
its like trading - one does not learn from a book one learns when mistakes are made on the job
