Impossible to get a good apprentice

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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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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

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.