chainsaw course

ronaldo84

hi i am an unemployed carpenter. i am out of a job about a month now. i have looked in to doing a 5 day chainsaw course with coillte it costs nearly €700 and have to provide chain safe gloves trousers and helmet and visor which will cost another few hundred euro. my question is am i wasteing time and money?? what are my chances of getting employment??

David brown

see is there anyone in ur area sub contracting for esb cutting timbr under powr lines and try thm 4 job.they need all them certs ur talkin about.u dont need them 4 farm work;)

Rovi

If you intend operating a chainsaw for hire or reward, you'll have to have the qualifications.
It would be insanity for a person to hire someone for chainsaw work who doesn't have both the proper qualifications AND adequate insurance.

Rinker

If you're out of work over 6 months FAS give you €500 towards this course. Friend of mine was into them yesterday about it.
You could look at doing a hedgelaying course as there seems to be a bit of work in that at the moment. You'd need a chainsaw licence to do that work too.

Rinker

Sorry just re read your post- I'm not 100% about how long you have to be unemployed to get the money from FAS.

reilig

Your local Social Welfare Placement officer would also have a fund to pay for a course and materials like this if there was potential for it to lead to a job for you. Not many people know that this is available and there is a much better chance of getting the money from Social Welfare than from FAS as Fas's funds are quite stretched at the moment.

The_Conductor

David brown wrote: »

see is there anyone in ur area sub contracting for esb cutting timbr under powr lines and try thm 4 job.they need all them certs ur talkin about.u dont need them 4 farm work;)

Less of the text-speak please David.

Also- just to clarify- subcontracting for farm work requires that the operator has appropriate insurance cover (or else the farmer or landowner could be deemed responsible should they come to any harm).

Contracting or subcontracting for anyone with dangerous machinery- without the appropriate skills to use the machinery, or insurance cover, should anything go wrong- is insanity.

teepee

I Think your talking about going down the road of tree surgery , ive looked and the wages are crap , staring out , hard to know what to go at , i did the chainsaw course , was a great week cost 1100 euro . would love to do it for a living but its just not there .
Sure theres lads out there willing to knock trees such so they can get the timber

Git101

ronaldo84 wrote: »

hi i am an unemployed carpenter. i am out of a job about a month now. i have looked in to doing a 5 day chainsaw course with coillte it costs nearly €700 and have to provide chain safe gloves trousers and helmet and visor which will cost another few hundred euro. my question is am i wasteing time and money?? what are my chances of getting employment??

Some things to consider

Your chances of employment will be drastically reduced if you do not have a recgonised "certificate of competence" for chainsaw use, such as NPTC City & Guilds CS30 & CS31.
I suspect that if you undertake the course you mentioned for that price you will receive a Coillte "cert of attendance". This is not recgonised by anybody, even Coillte require their contractors to have NPTC City & Guilds certification :rolleyes:

The tree industry doesn't seem to have been hit as hard as some others by the recession, trees keep growing.
There are also numerous small scale forestry plantations due for thinning now so there would be a reasonable chance of employment.

ronaldo84 wrote: »

and have to provide chain safe gloves trousers and helmet and visor which will cost another few hundred euro

Some chainsaw training companies will loan or hire the equipment for training.

smccarrick wrote: »

Also- just to clarify- subcontracting for farm work requires that the operator has appropriate insurance cover (or else the farmer or landowner could be deemed responsible should they come to any harm).

Contracting or subcontracting for anyone with dangerous machinery- without the appropriate skills to use the machinery, or insurance cover, should anything go wrong- is insanity.

As far as I know it is still possible to get insurance in Ireland without recgonised qualifications, although I suspect this will stop soon.

So you can have insurance without qualifications and qualifications without insurance.
As smccarrick rightly points out sub contractors should have both.