The main requirement for an electrician is experience, the collage course is designed to work as just part of the training, you need placing with a firm at some point to get hands on experience, this is the important bit of any course, some are designed for employers to send their apprentice to them, and don't have any system in place to allow students to work with outside firms.
Things have changed over the years, my dad did 7 years, I did 5 years, even the colours have changed, it was red to red, yellow to yellow, and blue to bits, does not work with new colours.
However an electrician covers a wide range of jobs, maintenance and installation are very different, and also there are varying safety considerations which are nothing to do with electrics, where I work today it is how to work safely with trains, another job it may be when you can drill a hole in a beam, and where I have worked in the past needed to know how the read what the computer was telling me when plugged into the programmable logic controller.
I all my life as an electrician the only time I have made off a mineral insulated cable was in collage, never had a job where I needed to do it, steel wire armoured yes, including flame proof, but the electrician who maintains a production line has a very different job to one who refits shops, which is also different to wiring new build houses, and that is very different to modifying existing houses. Or even the guy who repairs the washing machine, all electricians, but very different jobs. As to the guy who repairs the power lines, working on high voltage, and I don't mean high off the ground, his job is nothing like the guy working in the factory.
All require a basic training to start with, but then it splits up depending on the branch. I once had a job at point of aye knocking in earth rods and testing them, hardest thing was lifting the paddies motorcycle onto the 1.2 meter rod to knock it in. Six months doing that, and I watched apprentices on large jobs and felt sorry for them, working on power stations I saw the apprentice who for 2 years never ever worked on a live wire. He could cut tray, and bend conduit like the best of them, but his firm passed on the work to the firm I worked for before the panels were made live.
