Our trade (us) are already the losers, there is much talk of a skills shortage, and the problem is it is really a "skills" shortage we are having, those of us of a certain age will remember when an electrician did everything, general wiring, alarms, fire alarms, cctv etc. Now that isn't true the modern "electricians" are not trained properly, have limited experience and quite often limited knowledge, alarms, fire alarms, cctv etc is all to often seen as a "specialist" field.
Recently I came across a company who do training in making off and installing mineral insulated cable as it's not taught these days in college! Back in the day every electrician was taught how to work with this cable, nowadays it's "specialist".
I feel that there are too many people involved in the trade who's only vested interest is in making as much money as possible, be it running short courses, inventing new regs to allow the increasing amendments/changes to the regs, (these generate money in book sales) or the likes of the NI who came up with the whole "domestic installer" scheme, this allowed people to join the NI who would previously be unable, thereby generating more money!
The top tiers of the NI are run by people with little or no proper electrical experience, take LFB for example, anyone who has followed his stories cannot fail to have spotted that things don't add up.
In one article he was describing how he used to make wooden bending blocks for conduit, trouble was that following his description you end up with a conduit kinker!. In another article he writes about his time at college and how he attended college while working, yet in a later article he states that he was forced to fund his final year himself and attend night school after his employer refused to pay due to him skiving off. Reading all of his stories together, this guy has little more than 8 years on the tools, yet he's the one who seems to be calling a lot of the shots.
Speaking to a number of modern "electricians" you begin to get an understanding of their lack of knowledge, now I'm not blaming these people themselves, no I place the blame firmly at the door of the powers that be! Some years ago we had all those training centres spring up, remember the adverts in all the papers? "train as a plumber and earn 65k a year". lots of people who had lost their jobs invested their redundancy money in these courses, very soon they found to their cost that plumbing in the real world was vastly different from life in the training centres. Very few of these people actually stayed in the trade.
Now we are seeing the same in our industry, training centres springing up everywhere, adverts telling you how much you can earn as an electrician and large numbers of people paying good money for worthless courses, with an increase in people chasing a limited amount of work together with a large number of migrants who know virtually nothing about our electrical systems yet take on work that they should not be attempting.
In a nutshell there is indeed a skills shortage, however as I said earlier it's not a shortage of electricians, it's a shortage of properly trained electricians and sadly until such a time as someone decides to put training before profits there will be no change.
