Essential qualifications ? - Advice on basic qualifications req'd.

[scoffsred]

Hi to everyone,

Im Dave, newbie to the forum and a bit of a novice to the old landscaping business, ive been in the biz for a couple of years now, at least as a career, and i wondered are there any qualifications you more expirienced fellas feel are essential to your company, im a one man band at the minute, the courses listed with the hltg are very interesting, but i would find the travelling a bit much due to family commitments, workload etc, would you reccomend distance learning or would i be better doing it hands on? Any comments etc are very welcome.

Great site by the way, i couldnt have laid me brothers patio without your brilliant technical help

Regards Dave

[Dave_L]

You can't beat experience! :rock:

[scoffsred]

your right on that count for sure, i just wondered if there was maybe 1 course everybody should consider attending, i dont even know what hse course or cards i should have/do.

I want to do it the right way, so any hints tips whatever you want to call them will be greatly appreciated,

Cheers Dave

[Tony McC]

The 'qualifications' situation at the moment is a complete obllocks. The 'construction' side of the industry as one NVQ set-up while the 'landscaping' side has a completely separate and different NVQ, even though they are both teaching pretty much the same thing!

And even if we had a consistent NVQ for the WHOLE industry, what are the chances of a 40+ year old bloke who's looking for a career change agreeing to sit in a class with a bunch of 16-17 year olds?

As LLL says, experience really is the most important qualification, and I recommend all newcomers to the trade spend a couple of years working with an existing company so they can earn while they learn.

However, if you want a short, sharp intro or improver course in block or flag laying, then those I run for the Hard Landscape Training Group are ideal (I would say that, though, wouldn't I?). There's also a Measuring-Up and Setting-Out 1 day course coming up at the end of this month.

I've just submitted the summer schedule to the group, and, assuming it gets the nod, I'll publish that later next week. Keep yer eye on this page

[scoffsred]

Cheers for the info tony.

[seanandruby]

I have been in the game for thirtysummink years. ive done every aspect of ground-works... paving, concrete, tarmac, drainage etc; i have an N V Q which i passed with flying colours. but now the N V Q process is a total "bollocks". i have had men with me taking their grades off my work. their history, i e photos, of work completed witness statements etc are, in some cases, complete fabrication. i had an Italian store man, who could hardly speak English, get an N V Q2. it makes me so angry to see this go on. i have no faith in the current system. it is of course a big earner for the employer as they can make hundreds of thousands of pounds, millions in some cases. to see the shoddy work that these newly trained so called experienced, or, semi experienced men turn out is unbelievable. i don't mind teaching people the way to do a job proper as long as they are willing to learn. i mean how do you get through to a man who puts a manhole base in to high, then, cuts into the side of the channel so that the pipe going in is lower than the invert of the channel? Nuf said. :angry.

[Tony McC]

The problem you seem to have, Sean, is with the so-called assessor, rather than the NVQ/SVQ. In general, both flavours of the NVQ are pretty good, but I get annoyed that the terminology and requirements are so loosely defined that it's open to abuse, especially by bone-idle coundn't-care-less assessors who just want paying for minimum effort.

Not enough time is spent checking actual skills, and, as you say, providing photos of work by others, and getting a mate to swear the trainee has done this that and the other is a massive problem, but what's the alternative?

hopefully, as we keep working at these NVQs, and at the assessing bodies, we'll get back to a properly structured, assessed and tested apprenticeship. But for now, we have to accept that, as sorry as they are, NVQs and SVQs are better than nowt ... most of the time.

[lutonlagerlout]

my 18 yr old apprentice tells me now he has level2 nvq in brickwork he is a bricklayer and wants £150 a day hahaha
so i say to him when you can lay what i lay then you can call yourself a brickie (at the minute he does about 30% of a fully fledged guys work)
i reckon 5 years to learn a hard trade
LLL

[seanandruby]

The asessor is put under pressure by the internal verifier to deliver so many awards. on large sites like mine that is achievable. But when the assessor is on the long road, ie Bham' London, Liverpool etc then its harder to reach their targets. so they get men through as quickly as possible. I am in favour of your courses tony, i wish the money spent on NVQs, was pushed more in that direction. also lll the lad is getting the benefit of one on one education, so he will have more of a chance than lads with me, who are with a different gang almost daily. the trend now is to make anybody up to supervisor. men who know what they are doing are hardly picked because it means taking a good man out of the field. So you end up having a lad who's been in the game 5 minutes telling 30 year men what to do. you can imagine the rare ups, i have loads of them. its shoddy, bad practice and fecking dangerous.

[Tony McC]

Some of the large firms who hand over big wads of money to the CITB each year seem to think that the N/SVQs are theirs by right, and that because they fund the organisation, the qualifications should be handed over to their chosen trainees regardless of performance.

The attitude of management to training in this country is the worst I've ever encountered. In every other country where I've worked, training is seen as an investment and is regarded as essential. In this country, it's often viewed as a necessary evil, and those holding that view are very often the people who do not have any craft skills of their own, but have chickenshit diplomas and degrees in ephemeral, vacuous "management" skills.

If you're stuck on a desert island, who do you want with you: a brickie/joiner/groundworker or a resource consultant? A nurse or a bed manager? A cook or a restaurateur?

Craft skills are the oldest human skills and they are just as important today as they were a thousand years ago and 10,000 years ago. Pretending that we can all be IT developers, stockbrokers and call centre droids is a failed relic of the Thatcherite socila engineering mission and incredibly shortsighted. Yes, we need some of these people in the 21st century, but we also need many more craftsmen and women.

Time to climb down from my hobby horse, methinks!

[IanMelb]

Time to climb down from my hobby horse, methinks!

... nah, I'll join you and enjoy the view...

You should see the quality of students we get these days, most of them cannot think for themselves - give them a set of instructions and they still need hand-holding, if someone else can't do it for them then it obviously isn't worth doing.

I blame the 'Coursework Culture' that is rife within the schools. Because so much of the 'A' levels and GCSE's are now coursework based, then Teachers can have a direct feed in to the results obtained. i.e. in the old days, it was mainly exam based, if the pupil didn't know their stuff then they flunked; these days, if they're flunking their coursework then the Teacher comes along and tells them how to do it right time and again until they get something resembling a decent piece of work which is then submitted. The trouble with this method is that the Teachers are spending too long fixing things like this and not enough time actually 'teaching'. The end result is a pupil who knows they don't have to get it right first time because someone will always pick up the slack for them ...

This isn't a dig at the Teachers - they have to do this kind of thing to meet their performance targets - it's the people who set the targets (and require them) that have forced this situation

[bobhughes]

Coursework is a joke.

From yesterdays daily Telegraph:

“Hundreds of schools are coaching students through GCSE coursework by turning essays into "join-the-dots" exercises, researchers claim.
At least half the secondary schools in England use "writing frames", in which pupils are given instructions in how to present assignments. Examiners say the practice is tantamount to "mass plagiarism".�

If you want to see what these “frames� do then go to http://www.ashcombe.surrey.sch.uk/Curricu....mes.htm

To me it makes a total nonsense of the whole idea of testing a student to see if they have understood what they were reading

[Stuarty]

Your taught to the exam and thats pretty much it. So when something comes up that the exam didnt cover nobody really knows what to do. There is very little practical work done in schools, before i left almost 4 years ago, im sure i got approx 4 or 5 hours wood / metalwork a week, but by the time you set things up etc etc lucky if that is 40 mins per hour of useful stuff. All ive learned is from being on site and watching and listening to those who are skilled in what they do. A book cant teach you experience, and how to fix problems or issues that arrise halfway through a job.

[seanandruby]

I think half the battle is doing what you enjoy. we've all had our favourite subjects in school, so excelled in them. half the lads in our game don't really want to be out in all weathers in what they assume is a dead end job. I, like you lads and lasses actually enjoy doing what i do, if its benching a connection to a stinking manhole, or, laying a patio i get a sense of achievement. therefore the knowledge gained will stay with me instead of going over my head. in my younger days we didn't have an nvq we had the N F G. That is you were watched on your first day to See how you shaped up. if you was ok you stayed , if not the ganger would sack you cos you were N F G. ???

[IanMelb]

Another problem is the fact that the current 'Education System' seems geared up into the fact that they reckon 80% of schoolkids should be going on to University.

Now, don't get me wrong, Universities are great places (Poly's were better, but that's another gripe) but they are *not* for 80% of the population. Pretty much all a University Degree does is show that you can study enough to get a degree, it doesn't really equip you for a proper job in the real world. By 'proper job' I mean one with practical work rather than theoretical 'management' stuff. I studied Electrical Engineering when I was a student (back in the day) and we used to take the p out of the sociologists for their 'Mickey Mouse Degrees' (mind you, they took the mick out of us for our lack of social skills, girlfriends and general geekiness) but these days, we'd be spoiled for targets with those taking 'Media Studies', 'Cat Psychology', Elephant dentistry' and the like (OK, I may have made a couple of those up, but you see what I mean).

At least with the NVQ system there is a reasonable hope of the student getting some grounding in the basic practicalities of what they're actually doing ...