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Trades. Learn a trade. Electrician?
My kid fell for this. They promise you’ll get paid while you learn. What they don’t tell you is that IF you manage to pass the entrance exam (he did) you get put on a list for open apprenticeship positions, waiting to be called in at any moment. While you’re on that list you don’t get paid. If you do get a spot, contracts only last a couple of months. Then you go back on the list. Rinse and repeat. And the longer you’ve been in the union the higher up you get placed on the list. So the older members get placed before the newer ones no matter what number they were in line. This “join a trade” push is similar to the charter school scam, siphoning up state and federal training funds without delivering results.
That sounds like a specific problem to whatever country you live in, not trades in general.
That’s US trades in a nutshell due to unions.
That has not been the experience of any of my friends in the trades and that's not a small number
That’s the plumbers, electrical, boilers, elevator, carpentry, lathing, scaffolding, HVAC, refrigeration trades/unions at least.
Schooling is done and provided by the union and not secondary institutes, so they control everyone who goes through their system. In the vast majority of them, you won’t even get in unless you know someone.
You must not actually know anyone in a trade, or you know just the few people in trades that aren’t heavily unionized that aren’t like this.
It’s an extremely well known and common issue.
That's not how it happens in Canada. Private institutions run schooling and the government oversees the apprenticeship program. Unions don't have much say in it at all.
Went through the system in Canada, it’s great that they have also started harmonizing stuff across provinces too. Before if you were a third year in BC, you would have to start as a first year in AB as the schooling was too different.
Unfortunately there is some trades that you still need to know someone to get in, since you need a company to sponsor your apprenticeship before being accepted by the government program.
My partner is in an apprenticeship program for electrical and plumbing. We're in a city so large, with so many tradespeople, that a given field has multiple unions within the same metro area. What you're describing is not at all anyone's experience in this area of the U.S.