Why Are Young People Not Learning Trades/Skills?

[Ffermer Bach]

Our youngest daughter is training to be a midwife she loves it and just started her third year, she is totally unpaid labour, NHS is not worth working for she has to pay all her university fees and board fees and work for nawt she gets mileage money for fuel for driving in her car to placement hospitals but only with an argument about the mileage fees ,And then has to pay to park when she gets there . she is an absolute credit to the younger generation and us.

In Wales my eldest is training to be a nurse, full bursary (including extra because she chooses to a third I think in Welsh), plus free parking in the hospitals in Wales. What I can't work out, is, if we as a country need nurses, doctors, midwives etc, why nationally there aren't bursaries towards their training?

 

[Ffermer Bach]

My Granddaughter has applied to 19 establishments for an apprenticeship. None were able to help. Some because of her (young) age some because she is female But most because they didn't want all the extra admin and losing time by training etc.

My point being it is not the lack of will to work but all the outside interference; health and safety etc

I remember reading an article in the business pages years ago (when I worked in FE training apprentices). It said, for an individual company it made business sense not to train, but to poach trained staff, but from a country wide perspective, it made sense to train, so the government should incentivise training, but our successive governments have actually chosen to poach trained staff from Poland, Europe or the rest of the world, all to the detriment of our young people.

 

[Ffermer Bach]

Schools just steer them all to university direction , manual jobs are taught to be beneath them , truck driving pays alot better than many jobs now but you wouldnt get a careers officer encouraging yoof into haulage and if they did it would have to be a degree in management or something …. My lad took an apprenticeship route into accountancy works hard got no debts and new car his mate went to uni do same thing , lazy loads of debt no car and will find work really hard after years of dossing about …. Hmmm my other lad is apprentice agg engineer great jobs but schools are not even telling the kids about this sort of thing and they discourage ordinary jobs which truth told vast majority of us only any good for anyway.

My partner has just retired from working in a business school in a Uni, and she said that an accountancy apprenticeship is a great scheme, and if her children wanted to be an accountant, that is the route she would advise.

 

[ford 7810]

Our secondary school had “ rural studies “ an old chap called mr Duckworth held the class captive, we did engineering science in a class overlooking the rural studies groups, he was castrating piglets in front of them , they grew veg in gardens , all sorts mostly and not being rude , for the less academic kids
It’s all gone now though

We called ours Plantpot but not to his face .i must admit I haven’t got much time or respect for school teachers absolutely full of no common sense,and just held me back from working and making a career for myself.by the time I’d got to 13or14 I’d lost all intrest in school . and the day I turned 16 I never went back.having said all that I was a bearer for my primary school teacher this summer.

 

[Wood field]

We called ours Plantpot but not to his face .i must admit I haven’t got much time or respect for school teachers absolutely full of no common sense,and just held me back from working and making a career for myself.by the time I’d got to 13or14 I’d lost all intrest in school . and the day I turned 16 I never went back.having said all that I was a bearer for my primary school teacher this summer.

I hated secondary school , went to Ulverston Vic, there was a cross over of old Grammar school teachers and young hip types
After primary school of 52 kids it was a culture shock

 

[PSQ]

Blair..
Said everyone should goto uni.
No grading of students at comp to put in appropriate class.

So the 'bright ' kids goto uni, get a sh!t€ degree on sociology.

The kids who not so academic minded, but practically minded used to be guided down the trades route with different classes. now they struggle in lessons, get detentions and drop out school soon as possible with no grades or skills.

Youngest son is working for a 'motorsport engineering' company and having then time of his life.
His boss is great, and offered him the chance to do an apprenticeship - national apprenticeship wage £5.28/hr (£6.40 from April fools day onwards)
But the minimum wage for a 19 yo is £7.49, going up to £8.80 in April, and an apprenticeship is a £2.40/hr pay cut for doing exactly the same as he's doing now, or £96 less per week, and £96 more turns teenagers heads away from an apprenticeship. You and I know training is more important in the long term, but most kids won't listen.

[Full disclosure: he didn't take up the apprenticeship because he starts a 'motorsport engineering' degree in September]

 

[bluebell]

Everyone on here, first i thankyou for the replys, but all are "excuses", isnt this just one reason why this country is in such a mess, we seemed to have gone in just a couple of generations from being able to supply,train, produce, grow our own needs, of what industry needs/requires, to now, happy to import the jobs, skills, this across the whole spectrum of work, from doctors, to builders, etc etc, whilst our own homegrown young are in many cases, "wasted" doing a couple of years of a jolly? wasted course that no worthwhile job is the outcome? but only benifits the many new unis and their over paid lazy lecturers, people in industry should be given a force of what thiscountry needs from its young people?

 

[delilah]

It's always someone else's fault isn't it. There is nothing stopping folks on here running a session for a couple of hours every week for a handful of kids to come and give farming a go. I don't buy all the stuff about insurance,risk assessments etc, it's all surmountable.

 

[Sausage]

It’s not just in the trades. I work in an office as a systems engineer. You get some good young people coming in, but you also get people with no drive, no mental flexibility or problem solving skills and those who want to get promoted into a position where they think the work is easier as quickly as possible (I seriously doubt it is easier, just different). We have people with degrees in mechanical engineering who have never picked up a spanner, it’s not their fault as such, uni just isn’t geared up for it.

 

[bluebell]

This is all in my opinion to do with education, after all, we all were children once and went to school to were end? in work and employment, simple isnt it?

 

[bluebell]

So its comming to crunch time here in the UK, we as a nation cant have over 1 million plus , young people not working, with no excuses anymore that there is no jobs? whilst then either turning out people with the wrong qualifications or just importing those people with the skills required whist accepting, writing off call it what ever our own young people its got to end?

 

[serf]

Nearly everyone ive asked to do a "job" is at or over retirement age, busy as hell? Examples, metal worker/welder, blacksmith, motorcycle dent, classic bike painter, thatcher, motorcycle seat recoverer, maker, etc etc etc? Just named a few, i bet others can name many other skills/ trades, that are crying out for young people, who dont want an "academic" education, but a skill, money is often secondary to you just cant get them? Its like that currant TV programme, restorers the professionals, rehopostry, wood working, using a "english wheel" to create metal panels, panel beating, all these trades/skills are still in demand so why are not young people taking them up as a way to earn a living, rather than as a hobby for retired professionals?

Tony Blair , Education Education Education ....

 

[Wood field]

Tony Blair , Education Education Education ....

To be fair , Thatcher … we don’t need dirty smelly industries,
Blair same as but blame the tories
Tories same as but blame labour
Meanwhile you get paid more in an office than you do as a time served engineer..,
Why get your hands dirty and fek your joints up

 

[serf]

To be fair , Thatcher … we don’t need dirty smelly industries,
Blair same as but blame the tories
Tories same as but blame labour
Meanwhile you get paid more in an office than you do as a time served engineer..,
Why get your hands dirty and fek your joints up

No one promoted University as the "only way" ( regardless wether you were academic minded or not ) like the Blair...

 

[Wood field]

No one promoted University as the "only way" ( regardless wether you were academic minded or not ) like the Blair...

I’m not saying he’s right, I am saying they all played a part blue red green or yellow

 

[Lowland1]

If you do something just to earn money then it’s going to be a miserable life. Surely you’ve got to enjoy your career. This belief that kids go straight from University to the dole is a load of nonsense. Truth is people don’t want to be plumbers if they can get a job that doesn’t involve unblocking toilets then they’ve done well.

 

[S.Jamieson]

Everyone on here, first i thankyou for the replys, but all are "excuses", isnt this just one reason why this country is in such a mess, we seemed to have gone in just a couple of generations from being able to supply,train, produce, grow our own needs, of what industry needs/requires, to now, happy to import the jobs, skills, this across the whole spectrum of work, from doctors, to builders, etc etc, whilst our own homegrown young are in many cases, "wasted" doing a couple of years of a jolly? wasted course that no worthwhile job is the outcome? but only benifits the many new unis and their over paid lazy lecturers, people in industry should be given a force of what thiscountry needs from its young people?

Are you offering apprenticeships to young people?

 

[Pistonbroke]

Youngest son is working for a 'motorsport engineering' company and having then time of his life.
His boss is great, and offered him the chance to do an apprenticeship - national apprenticeship wage £5.28/hr (£6.40 from April fools day onwards)
But the minimum wage for a 19 yo is £7.49, going up to £8.80 in April, and an apprenticeship is a £2.40/hr pay cut for doing exactly the same as he's doing now, or £96 less per week, and £96 more turns teenagers heads away from an apprenticeship. You and I know training is more important in the long term, but most kids won't listen.

[Full disclosure: he didn't take up the apprenticeship because he starts a 'motorsport engineering' degree in September]

My lad's doing a masters in civil engineering. He got a summer job on the A465 heads of the valleys road with the surveyors and they were paying him£400 a week. They want him back this summer as well, he'll have done the equivalent of the " year in industry " and finish a year earlier than the others. Says he can't believe how much he learned last summer compared to everyone else.

 

[bluebell]

S. Jamieson, im not offering apprenticeships to young people? Im raising, discussing, i think a very important question, and whats to be done? After all we as a nation seem to care alot and spend fortunes on other countries people and their problems? But what about our own? It worries and sadens me that when your young as we all are once, just to be forgotton, left behind, have no "fight" to get on, what a waste? Its a waste for those young individuals?

 

[Lincsman]

It's always someone else's fault isn't it. There is nothing stopping folks on here running a session for a couple of hours every week for a handful of kids to come and give farming a go. I don't buy all the stuff about insurance,risk assessments etc, it's all surmountable.

If i did that I would have to show fallow fields and plans for legume mix SFI stuff... not actually producing any food here now.