Career Change - Carpentry | Page 2 | The Compost Bin | Forums

You can jump right into an apprenticeship provided you can get an employer to sponsor you. No prior education aside from high school is required. Most careers you get an education then a job, with apprenticeship you get a job then you are eligible for your apprenticeship education. 90% is on the job learning, the balance is in class education.

I did some sub flooring work for my buddies brother-in-law today and he works in HVAC with a guy that used to be a finish carpenter. He's going to touch base with his coworker and see if he knows of anyone who could use a hand. I got some experience, helped out a buddy, and did some networking. Win, win, win all around. A great return for a Saturday of slinging plywood.

Nothing yet, however every little bit helps. I am finalizing my resume and CV this week, and a few of the execs at work are drafting letters of recommendation for me. Next week I have an aptitude test booked with the local plumbers union, so I am working on and in there.

Plumbing is not my first choice but there are tons of applications like solar water heaters, grey water recycling systems, geothermal heating, etc so if I cannot find something in carpentry to support myself I may look at plumbing at least in the short term.

There are a number of job postings for framers up right now so we will see if I can land anything there. We've been too busy of late as a lot of other things are on the go so I am hoping that come next week I can really start dedicating good chunks of the evenings and weekends to applying/calling organizations.

Jan 4th is my last day. I have a month of vacation banked which I will not be using, so that will be paid out, meaning I will have my standard income until roughly mid-Fed. My hope is I can hit the ground running in Jan with a job so I can take my vacation payout and put it in the land fund instead of living off it.

I can't see a lot of hiring going on in December, so I am preparing for some downtime in Jan, but I am hopeful that it will end up being little to none.

Took it on Thursday. Was a little over two hours, need 70% or greater to be considered by the apprenticeship board. I think it went fairly well. I spent a lot of time brushing up on my long form by hand math, which turned out to be not that useful since there were not that many pure math questions, although I should have gotten 100% of those ones right. A lot of the test was imagines, then multiple choice asking about where force are greatest, or mechanical process.

It was a bit frustrating as the images were not clear, so I had to ask the lady at the end about 4 or 5 questions that I could not answer due to image quality. You couldn't see important details or read measurements. Since she didn't know what they should be she just told me to put a question mark on them and they would review them later, but that doesn't really help me as the answer is either right or wrong, not to mention there is a chance that her instructions for that situation will not be passed along to however is grading. A lot of people were having trouble with the images, so may with so many it will stick out for them and they will address it.

Test was 100 questions, I had to guess on 3 or 4 as I couldn't work through them, plus those 4 or 5 I could not see clearly. Factor in a few misc errors, etc and I feel like I passed by a wide margin, it is just important that the grade is as high as possible to give me an edge.

I should know in about a month as they mail you the results.