World Youth Skills Day: 'There are so many options with apprenticeships'

On World Youth Skills Day Jonathan deBurca Butler chats to some people who decided to forgo college life and instead start their career with an apprenticeship.

First Year Heavy Vehicle Mechanic, Natasha Rowan at work in the ESB depot in Portlaoise. Photo: Alf Harvey.

Plumbing the course

When the school bell rang, bringing the curtain down on his academic life, Roy Jones was hit by a sense of relief. Though he had no idea what he wanted to do in life, he was certain he didn’t want to continue sitting at a desk studying.

“I was kind of in limbo after school,” says the 25-year-old plumber. “I didn’t want to go to college because it sounded too much like school and I didn’t want to do that again. I looked at a bit of everything. I put CVs in left, right and centre. I got an interview with a well-known food store but they never got back to me.”

Luckily, for both Roy and the waterworks of North Dublin, Alpha Mechanical in Coolock had more faith and offered him a plumbing apprenticeship.

“I didn’t know a thing,” Roy recalls. “I didn’t even know what a length of copper was. I remember my first day. I walked onto the site and they were still stripping out pipes on the roof. For most of the first year, I was carrying pipes and copper and whatever else down off the roofs of sites.”

Roy Jones, a qualified plumber. Photograph Moya Nolan

After one year of “doing the dirty work”, the Dubliner began to learn the basics of plumbing before going on to phase two of his apprenticeship where he spent six months in college honing the skills he had been shown on site. This back and forth between on-site practical application, in-college theory and practice continued for four and a half years.

“As they see you progressing on site, they will give you more responsibility and then it’s back to college before you’re back on site,” says Roy. “Every year you’re getting better and as you progress you’re put more in at the deep end.”

Roy has been fully qualified for almost three years and his only regret is that he didn’t start sooner.

“If I was to go back to school, I’d force myself to do it earlier,” Roy says. “I’d have left at 16. I love it. Nearly every day is different. You have different tasks. If I was working in an office, I’d be sitting at a laptop doing the same things every day, whereas in this work, there are different challenges to work around. It’s very rarely repetitive.”

Getting the hands dirty

Natasha Rowan from Portarlington, Laois, swapped her clean white outfit as a beauty therapist in a swanky hotel for the slightly less glamorous overalls as a heavy goods vehicle mechanic with ESB Networks.

“I think some people in my family were a little shocked that I went from being all clean and done up to getting all dirty, but everyone can see how much I love it,” says the 20-year-old.

Her family and friends might well have been shocked but given her history, they weren’t really surprised. Indeed, it was Natasha’s mother who alerted her to the call out for apprentices.

“I had always tinkered around fixing lawnmowers and bikes and cars at home,” says Natasha. “I did a lot of work with my dad on that kind of thing during the summer. We weren’t professional but people brought us stuff to fix. One year, we built a motorcycle from scratch. So the opportunity came up at the ESB and I went for it, passed the aptitude tests and the interviews and here I am, a year and a half into it.”

First Year Heavy Vehicle Mechanic, Natasha Rowan at work in the ESB depot in Portlaoise. Photo: Alf Harvey.

Natasha is the only woman in her cohort of six and admits that at first, she found that somewhat daunting.

“I had in my head, ‘oh it’s a man’s job’,” she says. “But I feel it’s good for women to be getting into these kinds of jobs to show that it’s not just men that can do it. It was nerve-wracking at the start but once you get to know everybody you just feel at home.”

Natasha is now waiting for her call for phase two where she will either go to Cork or Tallaght in Dublin for college and learn more about her trade. There will be seven phases in her apprenticeship and she expects the whole thing to take up to four years.

Last year almost 9,000 school leavers joined apprenticeship schemes. After a drop off due to the economic crash and an understandable lag during Covid, the numbers registering have rebounded, according to the National Apprenticeship Office. There are now 27,470 registered apprentices, and of that total 2,272 are women.

Sparking a new career

Unlike Natasha, Amy Delaney was lucky to have some female company when she started her electrical apprenticeship with Intel almost two years ago. While she says that was a comfort in the first few days, she now looks back and wonders why she worried.

“Once I got into it, I realised that men don’t really care,” says the 20-year-old. “I might have been lucky but I found we always got along. They haven’t given me any special treatment because I was a woman. They were there to give me a hand if I needed to learn something but they left me alone to get on with my work too. They treat me like any other apprentice. Once you had a sense of humour you were grand.”

Amy credits her electrician father for having that bit of banter in her back pocket but most importantly he was there for her when she was struggling to decide what to do after school.

“I was going to go to Psychology in college but somebody came into the school to talk about it and turned me off,” she recalls. “I didn’t know what to do until I spoke to my dad. He was a little surprised but I was never really pushed to do college. That was my idea. Both my parents were glad that I was going out to get a bit of experience in the real world, get my hands dirty and learn something my own way. He was very encouraging, showing me the ropes at the start. I think he is proud more than anything.”

Amy Delaney, electrical apprentice

Though the numbers joining apprenticeship schemes is up, Ireland still lags well behind other countries like Germany where learning a trade is respected and encouraged as much as having a degree from college.

“When I was leaving school, I had a counsellor advise me against it,” says Amy, “They said it wasn’t a job to go into and that I needed to go to college. So I still think it is looked down on. But in saying that, I have friends who are in college stuck on the same subject while I’m off earning money and doing so many different things and travelling to different places with the work. They’re starting to realise that it’s a really good profession to be in. I wouldn’t do anything else. There are so many options, I would one hundred percent recommend it.”