Search the forum,

Company or Self employed sub contractor?

Discuss Company or Self employed sub contractor? in the Plumbing Jobs | The Job-board area at PlumbersForums.net

Status
Not open for further replies.
M

marcwhittaker

I'm looking into doing a intensive plumbing course and was wondering wether its better at the end of it to go self employed or sub contracting or into a company. I've heard that sites, e.g. new builds don't really take people without experience, so i was thinking of going into a company to get experience.
 
good luck - loads of people in same boat and companies are wising up the the fast tracker
 
No-one will take you on unless you have served your time mate. Unless you are extremely lucky even at that you'll struggle to get paid anything decent.
 
The only intensive plumbing course that i know of that will make you decent plumber is a four year apprenticeship followed by a further six years experience. Even after this you will be learning for life.
 
Id work for your self youl earn £50k in your first year easy.
 
We'll if it's anything to go by, we only consider engineers with a lot of experience and top qualifications. Our engineers are the face of our company, so they've got to be of a high standard!

Best of luck with whatever route you decide on. :)
 
good luck but lower your expectations so youll be less disapointed
 
If you're after honest advice here it is.

I spent a considerable amount of money 'retraining' as a plumber. Had I done a bit more research before, all of the information on the course was freely available on the internet.

I did a course with OLCI. They passed everyone and anyone who came through the door, so in effect the end qualification was worthless.

I would have liked to secure work with a plumbing company afterwards, but nobody would take me on as I was 'just another person doing a fast-track course'. Please realise, you come away from this course with nothing apart from some limited knowledge. What you learn on this course is such a far cry from plumbing in real houses.

This said, you certainly can be a success doing these courses and working on your own. It takes a LOT of hard work and I don't mind saying some stressful experiences. My first year was very stressful but now I am a confident plumber and I do all my own tiling/carpentry etc as well. Over the last 6 months I have stopped advertising and all my work is from my website or word of mouth.

As long as you recognise that the course you will be doing isn't worth the paper it's written on and that your first year will be very, very hard then it's worth considering.

I don't believe you need to do a 4-year apprenticeship to become a good plumber but the point is valid that you do need experience. 1 year should do the job in my opinion. That said, you never stop learning - the learnings just become less frequent.

Good luck!
 
good luck,
in the current climate,you wont get a job,think how many apprentice trained unemployed plumbers out there.
you will be lucky to get work un paid plumbing work.
its tough out there and will be for at least 2 years.
as an employer,i have 1 apprentices who we pay £93 a week,young and keen.
if you go self employed make sure you have plenty of reserve money,and good pli
 
cr0ft said:
If you're after honest advice here it is.

I spent a considerable amount of money 'retraining' as a plumber. Had I done a bit more research before, all of the information on the course was freely available on the internet.

I did a course with OLCI. They passed everyone and anyone who came through the door, so in effect the end qualification was worthless.

I would have liked to secure work with a plumbing company afterwards, but nobody would take me on as I was 'just another person doing a fast-track course'. Please realise, you come away from this course with nothing apart from some limited knowledge. What you learn on this course is such a far cry from plumbing in real houses.

This said, you certainly can be a success doing these courses and working on your own. It takes a LOT of hard work and I don't mind saying some stressful experiences. My first year was very stressful but now I am a confident plumber and I do all my own tiling/carpentry etc as well. Over the last 6 months I have stopped advertising and all my work is from my website or word of mouth.

As long as you recognise that the course you will be doing isn't worth the paper it's written on and that your first year will be very, very hard then it's worth considering.

I don't believe you need to do a 4-year apprenticeship to become a good plumber but the point is valid that you do need experience. 1 year should do the job in my opinion. That said, you never stop learning - the learnings just become less frequent.

Good luck!
Click to expand...

Thats the same as me dont learn anything at college except the very very basics. I have been self employed for a year and I don't see what the big deal about 4 year apprenticeships are. people seem to spend 3 years hanging rads lol. the rest you pick up as you go along in your first year. TURN DOWN JOBS YOU CANT DO. lol that includes full bathroom suites 4 weeks after you finish college.
 
Hmm!

The idea of fast tracking really came about because an apprentice spent so much of their apprentice time working and only a small amount doing college work.

The government looked at this small amount of college time and lumped it all together which came to about 3 months over an apprenticeship. They then decided to make fast track courses of 3 months intensive college work.

The problem is they could not easily make up for the three or four years work experience. Basically the colleges still seem to be offering the 3 months intensive college work but not the work experience.

Having been a course tutor I can tell you one of the hardest jobs is not doing the course theory work, but finding work placements for trainees.

The companies obviously only want experienced people there is usually not enough fat left on the prices to allow for none productive training time especially in a possible recession.

Its why they tell you to go self employed. Thing is your on your own then.

Incidentally as somebody said you have got to be flexible, it may take a long time to build up a Plumbing only business, so learn to do other things. But also be aware that people probably still regard you as a real Plumber only if you do Plumbing.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
sorry to say that i'm also in the same boat.
i have my quals c&g and nvq, niceic certification for unvented and water regs.

i have had no apprenticeship and am unable to find a job in the current climate.

i have now decided to go down the self employed route also, while i understand the sentiments of the previous poster who said don't take on jobs you can't do... i think a better approach is to refer the work to an experienced local plumber and let him take the money for the job while allowing you/me to work alongside him to gain some valuable experience. this way both confidence and competence can grow much quicker.


IF ANY PLUMBER IN THE BOLTON, WIGAN, ATHERTON, LEIGH, CHORLEY AREA IS NOT OVERRUN WITH WORK PLEASE PM ME AND ANY JOBS I CANNOT UBDERTAKE ALONE OR AT ALL I WILL PASS ON TO YOU>

KJ
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Mark Moss said:
The only intensive plumbing course that i know of that will make you decent plumber is a four year apprenticeship followed by a further six years experience. Even after this you will be learning for life.
Click to expand...


Really? That seems a bit excessive. 10 years of training will make you a surgeon, is plumbing really as difficult?

I agree completely with the "learning for life" bit though.
 
Mark Moss said:
The only intensive plumbing course that i know of that will make you decent plumber is a four year apprenticeship followed by a further six years experience. Even after this you will be learning for life.
Click to expand...

Hello DR M MOSS lol wise up
 
mr moss,is correct in what he says.
i would never take a fast track plumber on,
for the money we pay for a skilled plumber ,i expect a appren trained skilled plumber
who has experaince
 
I wonder how the length of an apprenticeship was originally decided upon.

Afterall it has been pointed out that there a great many more complicated and skillful occupations with similar periods of training.

Was it arrived at because they thought any less than 4 years on-the-job training in plumbing would be insufficient to prepare someone to work as a plumber or because that was the longest they could just about get away with paying a plumber pennies?
 
It used to be 5 years and was cut to 4 in the 70's. The collage work was done on day or block release, depending on the collage. This gave time to actually learn how to do the job to match the theory. Plumbing then, required a lot more skills than it does now and there was some things, no matter how often they tried, some could just never master.

It is a lot easier and less skilled now in fact most basic plumbing jobs could be done by a wean with a biscuit rse :D
 
Not all training centers that do the fast track are bad some are extremely good like ntps in Hyde greater manchester yes you can get qualified in 3-6 months by doing the 6129 tec level 2 plus the nvq level 2 this is the base qualification . This is when you can start earning money if you take the self employment route only you yourself know if you can add to what you have learnt in the training center by doing the Tiling,Plastering,Carpentry if you can you will not be without work for long good luck ..
 
Hmm!

Tamz is probably right. In the old days there was more dexterous skill required than knowledge.

Being mostly lead and copper heaving and dressing you can understand why.

It fairly easy to work out what you want do regarding say a front apron flashing to make a roof waterproof. But given a piece of lead and couple of dressers could you make one?

Would you know the grain of the lead and which way to dress it for instance?

Given a couple of coils of 1/2" 7lb and 3/4" 9 lb could you pipe a house out?

The pipework layout was simple, the hawking about and straightening the pipe as well as soldering it wasn't so easy.

In all of course Plumbing was a bit like plastering in those days. Simple enough till you came to try it yourself. Some guys seemed natural lead workers and where a pleasure to work with. I wasn't one of them by the way, I had to work at it.

To gain those hand skills took a lot of time, but who does lead work so much now days compared to what they did then?

Lets be honest a modern bathroom suite if you used flex connectors (Arrgh!) would take next to no time to learn how to install.

The modern basic apprenticeship time should be cut down to about 3 years depending on certain elements being missed such as sheet metals work.

Lets be honest a primary school child could probably fit pipes.

Plumbing is no longer a big deal.

Its usually gas fitting the modern money is made on, but then people only use registered Gasafe companies because the law says they must. And its only the Gasafe law that keeps the labour prices as high as they are.

If they stopped the registration requirements and just left the onus to fit to agreed standards as the law, the gas fitting industry would probably go bust over night.

But that is the way it was and who is to say it might not go back to that?

Lets be honest, car drivers are supposedly fully trained people but they are never inspected after initial testing. Instead they have a load of laws to follow and if caught breaking them they can be fined or go to jail.
The gas industry was run the same way.
So if prices get too high and customer pressure builds on the politicos what may happen then? The politicos will want to encourage competition to bring prices down, so out the window goes Gasafe and registration. And it will not matter who you are or what your qualifications are, so long as you fit it correctly you can do it?

Then I suppose people would be able to get gas jobs done for next to nothing. But that would only probably be if the industry overcharges.
 
never happen bernie pal....

cant really compare gas fitting and driving -

driving is like a cook using a cooker
the mot station is like the gas fitter

it will always be regulated.
 
There seems to be a growing gap between experienced plumbers and trainees. Maybe because work is tight, plumbers are becoming very defensive understandably because there livelyhoods depend on it and fast trackers seem to be the enemy but one day that will turn around. It's such a shame that all that experience is going to waste and nobody is being given the oppertunity to learn from decent plumbers. Trainee plumbers are having to go self employed because nobody will give them a chance.:cool:
 
fogarty me old pal - at the moment work is tight - i know a lot of lads who have shut up shop and gone back to working for big firms as its so quiet - people need to get it in there head its not a case of qualified plumbers and heating engineers being against the new comer its more a case of a reccession hitting hard..... and these fast track courses have come about at the wrong time - over saturating a trade with poorly qualified people. Which has ended up with every body becomming clued up to the fact that somebody who is city and guilds tech cert qualified is not actually qualified as a plumber - a fact that a couple of years ago caught a lot of employers out.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Reply to Company or Self employed sub contractor? in the Plumbing Jobs | The Job-board area at PlumbersForums.net

Creating content since 2001. Untold Media.

Newest Plumbing Threads

Back
Top
AdBlock Detected

We get it, advertisements are annoying!

Sure, ad-blocking software does a great job at blocking ads, but it also blocks useful features of our website. For the best site experience please disable your AdBlocker.

I've Disabled AdBlock