Samantha Vartiamaki

Training Employees to Train Apprentices
February 27, 2008

A couple of years ago, most advertisements for contracting employees had a small line stating; “Only experienced workers need apply,” or some variation of it. However, with the baby boomer era coming to an end, there is no longer a large supply of experienced workers. It used to be, that you needed to know someone in the industry in order to get the experience to find work on your own. This is no longer the case.

An aging population has forced businesses today to begin to hire apprentices. However, many businesses are unprepared to train new apprentices. Experienced workers have never had to explain the basics of the trade before.

An electrical company I know of recently experienced the difficulties of having apprentices, here is what happened.

With two new apprentices on the site, and work running behind supervisors were telling an apprentice to run “DC”s from one spot to another. They were also asking the same apprentice to run a certain gauge of wire through various DC’s and AC’s on the site. The apprentice had no idea what a DC or AC was and didn’t know how to tell the gauges of the wire were. The apprentice spent 20 minutes trying to figure out what he was supposed to do, then he spent another 10 minutes looking for the supervisor to explain. 

On a busy jobsite, supervisors often forget to explain simple basics of the trade to new apprentices. Although this apprentice overcame this difficulty quickly by asking a million questions, not everyone is confident enough to ask so many questions. Supervisors must be trained on how different it is to train an apprentice coming into the trade with no background knowledge.

Terminology is one of the most important parts of trades. If an apprentice does not know the terminology your employees use, they will not understand what they are being told to do.

Here are some tips and tricks to training apprentices:

• Have the apprentice spend some time in your company’s storage/warehouse. – You can either get them to organize and pick out what you need for your next job, or just go through the warehouse with the apprentice and give them a run-down on what everything is called.
• Have the apprentice shadow an experienced worker for a day or two. This will help them pick-up on the terminology used in your trade.
• Give the apprentice at least a two-day crash course in your trades terminology and operations.

Communication on the jobsite is also important for training apprentices.

• Make sure apprentices have a partner to work with for the first two weeks to a month so they can see how the job works.
• Only have one person giving the apprentice instructions in order to prevent confusion.
• If the apprentice has to work alone, give them a walkie-talkie so they can contact their partner easily.

Apprentices can be an amazing investment for any construction company. Training apprentices properly will ensure a stable, growing employee base; that can make you business money.

Posted by Samantha Vartiamaki on February 27, 2008 | Comments (0)