The Problems With Apprentices Nowadays

 In the construction trades and related fields, people have been complaining about the quality and capabilities of apprentices since the very beginning. 

Every generation of people at journeyman and equivalent or higher experience levels complains about the lack of willingness, attention, and capabilities of new apprentices.

In fact, being an apprentice isn't easy.  It takes a special young person to find the drive, endurance,  and aptitude to stick with it.  Definitely not for everyone. 

On the other other hand, not every journeyman is meant to be a trainer.  More than half completely suck at it because they don't want to do it.  Many lack the confidence and natural ability to teach and work at the same time.  Many are resentful at being forced to train an apprentice, and take it out on the apprentice the entire time.  A recipe for failure if there ever was one.

More importantly,  being a high quality and successful trainer requires specific training in itself.  There are very few people who are just naturals at training and teaching others. 

Far too many companies whether big or small, do not appropriately train the journeyman to train an apprentice correctly.   They set the journeyman up to fail, consequently setting the apprentice up to fail.  And if the apprentice isn't really the best type to be an apprentice to begin with, well....  we now see why there is such a lack of quality apprentices starting and seeing it through.

When journeyman say that too many apprentices don't have what it takes in terms of mental fortitude to be in the business,  they aren't necessarily wrong.  There's a lot of solitude in the work.  There's a lot of brevity and not a lot of room to make mistakes on an active jobsite.  One has to expect to be corrected and called out and still keep pushing on.  Not a mentality many young people grow up with.

To be fair, much of the problem isn't that they just get called out.  A LOT of the problem is that they get hollered at and talked to in the most disrespectful ways, completely unacceptable but because the individual trainer in question had little to no training to be a trainer and probably the only experience they got in being a trainer is that they got treated like shit as an apprentice,  they are not qualified as a trainer.  They may be fantastic at the work, maybe.   But that doesn't automatically equivalate to being a good trainer.

Just using foul language and rough humor on a jobsite doesn't make it a bad environment.   That's just common.  But being degraded, treated personally disrespectfully,  or abusively is something else entirely.   Both sides need to understand the differences.

An apprentice beginning training in a classroom and shop environment with a trained instructor is probably the best way to introduce the apprentice to not just the tasks and skills but the general environment on a job site.

A person slated to take on an apprentice in the field needs to be trained to be a trainer first.  Give them the skills in how not to demean, degrade, and disrespect an apprentice while still keeping focused on the business of getting the job done while training.  It's not about holding the apprentices emotional hand.  It's about meeting expectations and getting things done professionally while working in a team or doing one's part in an expanded project.

On site behavior skills are just as important as the skills and experience of doing the tasks. A good trainer is able to teach both.