My Way or the Highway

Hamilton builder Mike Pryor, of Estate Builders Limited, reckons he is one of the fussiest guys around and that is one reason why he prefers to work with apprentices. He is willing to put the time into training them properly so he gets the benefit of a work crew that he has moulded to his standards. He has picked a diverse group too, including a long-established builder who is working towards a formal trade qualification, and female Modern Apprentice, Nikki Kettle. 

 

Apprenticeships give Mike some control of the way his crew works, he says. "I prefer to train people up my way," Mike says. With apprentices, he has a better gauge of their abilities. "You know what you have to work on and what you don't have to work on." He used the same philosophy employing Nikki as he would with any apprentice. "Give them a shot. It doesn't matter whether they're a boy or a girl. It's about the way you work with me, and if you listen and do it, then I'm happy." 

          

 With Nikki, it's so far so good, he says. "She can swing a hammer, mate. I don't care if she's black, white, green or orange, female or male, it doesn't bother me." Nikki brings an element of order to the site too. "What I've noticed so far is the cleanliness, the punctuality, pretty impeccable."

 

 Mike says that generally apprentices respond to criticism better than qualified builders. "You'll tell qualfied builders, "That's not good enough, do it again," and they'll spend the rest of the day sulking. Whereas an apprentice knows the standard from day one, so they just get annoyed with themselves and not with me."

 

 Mike likes things done to a certain level, and prefers having a crew that expects the same level. "Like, I grizzle about a millimetre, when most people grizzle about 15 millimetres." He tries to prepare his apprentices as well as possible for what they will be doing. "I want to know that any problem they're going to solve, they're going to have a couple of ways of looking at it, because I've shown them a couple of ways. I want to know what their capabilities are before I put them on a job. Otherwise I could leave them to it and have it turn to custard because they don't know what they're doing. That gets very expensive."

 

Because Mike takes training seriously, he puts a big time commitment into marking his apprentices' books and making sure they're filling out their diaries. With three apprentices, that could work out to over $500 of his time during the year. But that is easily offset by the savings he makes on wages. "You can be paying an apprentice $13 an hour to do the same job a $25 an hour man can be doing." 

 

Mike says some people don't seem to get the variety of learning experiences they need during their apprenticeship, either because they don't pursue it or because their employers don't offer it. He disapproves of workplaces that employ apprentices without teaching them anything. "Most people I know are good tradesmen but there are some rogue guys out there who are just using Modern Apprentices. I've had guys come to me in the last year of their apprenticeship that I would have thought were in their first year. You could spend four years just doing skirting, and someone would sign you off as a tradesman. Whereas I really like to get people to do everything and not just make money off them." 

 

Having Nikki on site hasn't changed things much, 'though Mike admits to having the question of political correctness at the back of his head sometimes. "I'd say I think about it a bit more than I would normally. It's a bit of a learning curve for both of us."