Robster_1981 said:
When i said learn, i meant pick up hands on experience.
This may take many years it depends on your abilities
Robster_1981 said:
I'm just making a valid point that if a labourer can get £6.50/hr, and i will be doing the same (ok, at first i'll be a bit slow).
No you won't be any where near as good a s a labourer at labouring. They do that job their whole life you would be worth about a 5th of a labourorer if that. When we have some heavy labour work to do we get a proper labourer in for the day he does in a day what we could do in a day with a jcb.
Robster_1981 said:
just for the record, i've been to uni and done 3 years working as an Assistant Accountant, but got more and more sick of it. Plumbing is not a get out clause. it's something i've wanted to do for years, but because i wasn't bad academically, i was persuaded that was the better route.
I part qualified as an accountant many years ago that drove me to be a despatch rider in London for many years before I near killed myself and trained as a nurse, the stress of that job and perhaps the dirty sea water I windsurfed in gave me M.E. but the main symptoms were pshychological I couldn't handle the stress of nursing any longer. So I do know where you are coming from, but I have gone where you want to go, from this side of things it lkooks a heck of a lot different to how it looks to you right now.
Robster_1981 said:
If i could afford to work for nothing to get the trade, i gladly would, but unfortunately, i cant
Oh but you must, there is no free lunch, have you had insuficient life experience to realise that yet? I worked for free to gain the required experience and paid £3,500 for my extra ACS training which at that time was called category III training. I was one of the last able to do that. Don't forget loss of earnings for about 6 months aswell as having to find that money, and after two years off long term sick with M.E. it costs us a house. No pain, no gain.
But the biggest defecit you face is skill with your hands. When I came out qualified I was hopeless, my first combi swap (which my boss and I did in about 6 hrs at that time) took me and a labourer 3 days. Now with the additional difficulties imposed upon us by the government it's hard to find a boiler job that takes a day, most are two day jobs many are three days, but the rates haven't gone up over what my boss got for 6 hrs work back when I was looking at this trade through rose coloured spectacles.
Trust me you are not worth £6 per hour, actually you are going to cost money, but if you do get someone to give you the free experience you need, whatever you do don't ask "what are we doing now" every time you get in the van. Actually say nothing is best policy, especially have no voice when customers are around, they will happily talk to you while your boss unloads his heavy tools from the van. Your job is not to entertain customers, your job is to carry heavy tools. Don't smoke.
You can pick up skill with your hands on your own doing some work for yourself, like fitting laminated floors or tiling or doing cheap bathrooms.
It is a very tough life ours, you have to be imensely skilled and adept with your hands and have to have an amaising mind to think through all the variables of the job today and dovetailing it into the way the previous job you are altering was done yester year. The job you think you want to do is nothing like you think it is, after you've been struggling to earn a take home pay less than minimum wage for a couple of years you will see my point. Don't dismiss my post as negative and trying to put you off. This is probably the worst trade and the worst time to enter it. Not the least because of the totally wrong public perception of us.
I think the greates perceptual floor someone like you has is that anyone can do it. The job requires a huge amount of skill and special kind of strength and tenacity which very few people posess. That is why they fail, so have to call us. We make it look easy. Never underestimate the skill any tradesman posesses, but he has gathered it over many years. He is probably not worth minimum wage as a labourer to anyone for the first 5 years.
