Impossible to get a good apprentice

Jennehy

What is gone wrong with the youth today, tried a few lads on trial but they have no go in them. Giving out about getting dirty, working hours, glued to their phone and just standing around.

gifted

Jennehy wrote: »

What is gone wrong with the youth today, tried a few lads on trial but they have no go in them. Giving out about getting dirty, working hours, glued to their phone and just standing around.

Sure I'm like that every day and I'm qualified 28 years lol lol

Paul_Mc1988

Too much love island is sizzling their brains away leaving them with the concentration span of a two year old

Sleeper12

Ban the phone till breaks if you can't get any good out of them otherwise. You'll be doing them a favour as they can't be learning from you if they are at the phone all the time.

Conservatory

Any decent lad would be in a different industry to be honest. With the ease of getting into college and stuff most lads getting apprenticeships now we’re booted out of their bed by their mammy that morning because she got him an apprenticeship

Jackdaw89

Apprentices nowadays are soft, weak and cheeky little shîts. We get allot in through our doors and most of them are complete wasters and unfortunately it’s my job to try and bring them along or send them packing. They’ll talk **** all day then when you give out to them they are on the verge of tears.
18/19 year old boys that can actually do a days work are few and far between most lads now go home watch YouTube then come in the next day and hurt themselves trying to replicate what some yank done online with hobbyists machine.

TheDriver

We're (I'm in school management) trying to promote trades to get good guys into it. It's a fabulous set of professions that would suit a good few lads (unfortunately girls don't seem interested) so it's important to promote it equally alongside college courses and CAO points and focus them into trades that would suit each individual after their leaving cert. I can spot straight away the ones who would be good workers and learners vs ones who think apprenticeship would be a stereotypical doss.

Dtp1979

All of this is true. Young lads these days are soft little molly coddled babies. Mammy pays them pocket money for sitting on their hole playing the x box or taking selfies for Snapchat. A lot of it is down to parents raising these little brats. They’re lazy and couldn’t work to save their lives.
I had one guy quit cause it was too stressful, after 3 days. Another lad came in asking Me what were these things on his hand......they were blisters, from using the kango for 30 mins. I shjt you not.
There are very few out there that are any good.

micks_address

Dtp1979 wrote: »

All of this is true. Young lads these days are soft little molly coddled babies. Mammy pays them pocket money for sitting on their hole playing the x box or taking selfies for Snapchat. A lot of it is down to parents raising these little brats. They’re lazy and couldn’t work to save their lives.
I had one guy quit cause it was too stressful, after 3 days. Another lad came in asking Me what were these things on his hand......they were blisters, from using the kango for 30 mins. I shjt you not.
There are very few out there that are any good.

Agree with most of what's been said here. However had an electrician in recently and he treated his apprentice like absolute dirt. Belittled everything he did and gave out to him non stop. I thought the lad was his son till he went to get some parts and we got chatting. Lad finished up the job very well on his own. Now I'm not saying all apprentices get same treatment but I wouldn't want my son working for someone with that kind of behaviour. Didn't seem like a healthy leaning environment.
Cheers,
Mick

micks_address

micks_address wrote: »

Agree with most of what's been said here. However had an electrician in recently and he treated his apprentice like absolute dirt. Belittled everything he did and gave out to him non stop. I thought the lad was his son till he went to get some parts and we got chatting. Lad finished up the job very well on his own. Now I'm not saying all apprentices get same treatment but I wouldn't want my son working for someone with that kind of behaviour. Didn't seem like a healthy leaning environment.
Cheers,
Mick

I think I met the same fella but funny enough it was the apprentice who knew how to wire the boiler properly.

Sleeper12

My own son is 23 and has a with me close to four years now. We're both autistic. He can't nor will ever be able to drive so we are in the van all day together. Both being autistic we barely talk at all in the van but very comfortable silence for us.

Again due to the autism he's a big softy and is definitely Molly coddled. He listens to music all day on the headphones. I tell him I'm going to the attic and when I shout down to do this or that. He'll nod in agreement and off I go. When I shout down to him I greeted with silence. It'll turn out that he was nodding to the music and not in agreement at all!

Luckily most of the work I do is stress free and easy to do.

TheDriver

There's always going to be a minority small number of apprentice bosses that hit the hurley off the apprentices back and treats them mean, like a rite of passage. But that's hopefully few and far between. It's a big task to us all to get late teens interested in trades and schools need to advise these kids and promote apprendiceships as credible choices with a very good future with decent wage packets.

Vote4Napoleon

My apprenticeship was rough got a bollicking most days regardless of whether I did something wrong or not. "Why haven't yee that f--kin house finished yet" I was a 3rd year at the time wiring a house with a 4th year and a qualified lad, luckily I grew up on a farm without an explosive father so i generally just brushed it off but looking back I should have barked back and on a few occasions I believe I was entitled to give him a belt but hindsight and all that.

Vote4Napoleon

Vote4Napoleon wrote: »

My apprenticeship was rough got a bollicking most days regardless of whether I did something wrong or not. "Why haven't yee that f--kin house finished yet" I was a 3rd year at the time wiring a house with a 4th year and a qualified lad, luckily I grew up on a farm without an explosive father so i generally just brushed it off but looking back I should have barked back and on a few occasions I believe I was entitled to give him a belt but hindsight and all that.

Same as that.

I started my apprenticeship at 16 and worked in a depot with over 100 gas fitters and I could work with any of them on any given day so I experienced different styles of teaching including getting the odd slap :mad: but luckily if any fitter abused a apprentice he’d soon find himself getting a dig from his fellow Gas fitters.

I think there is a difference between discipline and abuse but now discipline is seen as abuse by some of the self entitled.

Carrickbeg

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room.

Socrates said that around 400BC.

Overheal

TBH I forget how I was connected to one guy and his construction company in Clare about 15 years ago now (jaysus) but he took me on a day in the life, and I made about 80 euro, it was a good haul at my young age.. most odd comments I remember from him that made me feel strange about working about him that are a bit of an aside was we were on the road and he'd remark that the sport/luxury cars we saw "looked like rolling penises" - I don't know if he had penis envy, money envy, or what. But anyway.

We went to about 3 jobs that day and from what I recall I was dropped off at the first site, an empty lot, and asked to begin clearing on my own. At that stage, I'm just a bit feckless and have no vision of what I'm supposed to be doing, so the work is slow. This was before smartphones so at least I wasn't at that. But I was made to feel as though I was going slowly. He comes back we haul off the trailer and then he takes us to a ditch on a back road where I was instructed to dump all the landscaping refuse - which I questioned personally the legality of, but decided speaking out wouldn't have been a wise decision 1 v 1.

He also stopped by a construction site and I was asked to walk around and "make myself useful" while he did some supervisory duties. I was on the 2nd floor of a build just getting in people's way, mostly. I felt kinda useless and it didn't help the self-esteem some better direction would have been noice.

I think the third site we tried to go to we couldn't do anything because the homeowner wasn't present.

I don't know - the guy I was working for struck me as gruff, as someone who didn't quite do things by regulation, and had a forced "man-talk" way about him the way he filled silence on the drive with talk of penis cars.

In general though, I hate manual labor and I am wagering the reason most people hate manual labor in our youth these days OP is because for the past generation or so there has been so much focus on white collar jobs - growing up kids aren't fed ideas about being road crew or plumbers or tradesmen, we're fed notions of getting rich and fat and happy pushing paper and being doctors and lawyers and programmers. Most kids grow up building nothing with our hands - so we don't understand there's a sense of self-reward in it. School's don't do projects or anything remotely hands-on, they do paperwork. There is a blind spot in the youth culture now for trades: plumbers, machinists, carpenters, ditch diggers, etc. - even my own Father (whom we no longer speak) growing up would address my struggling grades in school by using the scare tactic of telling me I would be a ditch-digger, and that's all I would make of myself. And, this was an Engineer. An Aeronautics Engineer. You would think he would have had more sense to suggest, you know, being a machinist or a technician; something that doesn't require stellar grades but pays well and is rewarding work, I now understand in hindsight, and now am disadvantaged by currently as I lack what could have been years of experience, now that I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering. But this is common in the culture: trades aren't seen as alternative solutions for kids that struggle in school for instance, they're seen as punishments.

Nowadays I have so many knee and back problems, that even if I wanted to crawl under a house and install pipes I'd have a hard time doing it! :P If you want to find good apprentices though I'd search through your network of friends and see if one of them has any kids that are bright-but-struggling in school and approach that way. Plumbing ought to be pitched as a rewarding career that rivals that of the white collar jobs, because that's the mindset you're against. And, box the phones up

mikemac2

Jackdaw89 wrote: »

Apprentices nowadays are soft, weak and cheeky little shîts.

Dtp1979 wrote: »

All of this is true. Young lads these days are soft little molly coddled babies.

Every generation says this and guess what, when you were young ‘uns it was said about you

Mrcaramelchoc

Vote4Napoleon wrote: »

My apprenticeship was rough got a bollicking most days regardless of whether I did something wrong or not. "Why haven't yee that f--kin house finished yet" I was a 3rd year at the time wiring a house with a 4th year and a qualified lad, luckily I grew up on a farm without an explosive father so i generally just brushed it off but looking back I should have barked back and on a few occasions I believe I was entitled to give him a belt but hindsight and all that.

this is why im not an electrician now.i lasted a year into the apprenticeship because of it.i hated it and the c u nt i worked for.and the sad part of it is i would have made a good one i know i would. i never understood the amount of s h ite i got when all i was trying to do was learn and get good at it.



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Overheal

Yeah, I'll also add the culture of beratement does nothing for entry-level retention.

Dtp1979

mikemac2 wrote: »

Every generation says this and guess what, when you were young ‘uns it was said about you

You’re right, but so Am i

.G.

Mrcaramelchoc wrote:

this is why im not an electrician now.i lasted a year into the apprenticeship because of it.i hated it and the c u nt i worked for.and the sad part of it is i would have made a good one i know i would. i never understood the amount of s h ite i got when all i was trying to do was learn and get good at it.

I've seen both sides of the spectrum. I'm an electrician myself and when I was an apprentice I had the good fortune to be with a sparks who was more like a mate than boss, he taught me loads, not least how to interact with people for their benefit and his. I follow his way of things now with my own apprentices.

My mate in the same company was stuck with an absolute arsehole who treated him like ****. Working on site when subbed out to other companies I see that side of it now too, sparkys who treat their apprentices like ****e and I feel so sorry for the lads. The sparks were obviously treated that way themselves but it serves nobody well, he's stressed all the time and his two young lads look like they hate life. Sad state of affairs.

That all said we've had a few lads in our place who really have no idea what the trade involves or even what a decent day's work involves and are a complete waste of time but I'll still treat them like people until they naturally fall by the wayside.

.G.

Mrcaramelchoc wrote:

this is why im not an electrician now.i lasted a year into the apprenticeship because of it.i hated it and the c u nt i worked for.and the sad part of it is i would have made a good one i know i would. i never understood the amount of s h ite i got when all i was trying to do was learn and get good at it.

I've seen both sides of the spectrum. I'm an electrician myself and when I was an apprentice I had the good fortune to be with a sparks who was more like a mate than boss, he taught me loads, not least how to interact with people for their benefit and his. I follow his way of things now with my own apprentices.

My mate in the same company was stuck with an absolute arsehole who treated him like ****. Working on site when subbed out to other companies I see that side of it now too, sparkys who treat their apprentices like ****e and I feel so sorry for the lads. The sparks were obviously treated that way themselves but it serves nobody well, he's stressed all the time and his two young lads look like they hate life. Sad state of affairs.

That all said we've had a few lads in our place who really have no idea what the trade involves or even what a decent day's work involves and are a complete waste of time but I'll still treat them like people until they naturally fall by the wayside.

idnkph

so apprentices are bullied on a large scale?

Roen

I spent three years as a plumbers labourer approx twenty years ago now, which you might struggle to believe with some of the questions I've asked here, but in my defence I can't recall what I was at this morning, not to mind two decades past.

The work was very physically demanding as it was all bullet hard council house concrete floors to be kangoed out for oil/solid to gas conversions. It was more good craic than not though, with only one or two bell end plumbers out of the gang I worked with.
I did witness less than savoury treatment of some people by guys from all trades. I myself was blamed for some mistakes a couple of the plumbers made which was the worst part, including cutting a mains pipe with a skil saw and destroying someone's ceiling.

So with rat bastards like that in the industry I can understand why people leave soon after joining. What I don't understand is people shying away from hard work.

I also worked on some large sites at that time and the work went from very to extremely physically demanding. The developer wouldn't shell for hoists or lifts so everything was handed up, and by the time we reached the third floor carrying above your own body weight in concrete lintels up to the top was a hell of a way to start a back breaking day.


On the flip side I learned a huge amount of general DIY stuff though as reinstating people's carpets, presses, skirting, doors, kitchens, bedrooms etc was tremendously educational. I acquired tools about that time that I still use today and I gained the confidence to tackle the majority of projects about the house and garden.
As I said it was generally good craic and there was always room for a bit of messing.
I was fit as a flea from the work and as one brickie put it "you'll have muscles on your piss by the time you're finished here".