Apprenticeship Blues

About a year ago, Mister Fixit gave up his lowly-paid job as a motorbike mechanic to become an Adult Apprentice Aircraft Mechanical Engineer. You can read what we thought about it here.



Fast forward to a year later.The reality of Fixit's exciting new job has been as follows:

The Workplace.

1. No long-term planning to accommodate proper learning for the adult apprentice intake. Random quantities of proper instruction. If he is rostered with a good leading hand then things will be good. But it's not unusual for him to be given tasks with incomplete instruction and help. Many days spent either lubing or removing/replacing panels. And of course, apprentices should expect a degree of hack work but they also need to acquire a variety of skills in order to qualify. Fixit is not convinced that anyone within the management remembers this.
2. Roster system completely crap. Fixit receives his roster 2 days ahead of it commencing which makes planning ANYTHING completely impossible. Said roster could include night or weekend work which is highly problematic for us given that I work 3 nights a week and Saturday mornings. Bear in mind that there is NO financial reward for overtime, evening or weekend work. Two weeks ago Fixit submitted a letter saying that for the duration of the apprenticeship he would only be able to work day shift, as had been agreed when he signed up. The response from the people he talked to was that it would take at least a month to verify this.
3. Nine and ten hour days standard for most of the year.
4. Random stand-downs when no planes in service making Fixit anxious about fulfilling his annual quota of hours.
5. Lack of any proper chain of command making it difficult to know who to speak to when problems arise.

The TAFE (schooling)

I don't think I can dot-point the TAFE so easily. Last year they received enormous amounts of material to work through in very short periods of time. For example, an A-Z of Year 11 Physics in a bit over a week. These very concentrated bursts of learning are followed by an exam. If a student fails the exam they are expected to pay $140 to re-sit. Handbooks are not given out in advance so you can't swot up before class time, and the handouts often arrive 2 days into the learning process. They have access to some online worksheets from the aviation industry but they don't necessarily conform with the course-work and are available only for the month when the subject is being taught. The TAFE itself is badly organised and the communication lines between the industry authority and the TAFE are laughably bad.

This year, being second year, Fixit and the others were hoping that they would be studying harder stuff but not in such a rushed and pell-mell manner. The preferred method of teaching appears to be an information dump, without practical examples or thorough backup to make sure they understand. What actually happened this year was that the material was indeed harder and more complex but it was taught dumped in exactly the same way. Making it even harder to take all this knowledge in is the presence of the young apprentii who muck around, whinge, or sleep through class and then panic at the end and take up all the tutor's time. Not that that is the TAFE's fault, but it doesn't help the serious learners like Fixit.



So this has been Fixit's existence for some time now. The rostering problems really only started towards the end of last year, but the TAFE stuff has been getting progressively worse since the start. It has been a really hard year for us. We're still on a terrible wage, but Fixit's hours got longer and more unpredictable. Not surprisingly he became more and more stressed and grumpy and frustrated and dispirited. We've been unable to really plan very much involving him. He's had no physical outlet to offset the ongoing stress; finding time to fit in regular exercise what with child-minding on my work nights, early starts and random work hours has been all but impossible.



Anyway, it all came to a head last weekend. I think it is one thing to sort of know you are stressed and another thing to work out you actually ARE STRESSED and that it has started to affect the way you function. In Fixit's case he went to try and have a bit of study prior to week of schooling and found himself staring at the worksheets unable to take in a single thing and in a state of absolute panic and hopelessness. He was convinced that his brain didn't work in the right way. And sometimes it takes someone else to say to you: this is not because you are too stupid to do this, it is because you are too stressed. So I guess it was lucky that I was around, and that I'd just read an excellent article by Stephanie Dowrick on stress. Because when we checked off the physical symptoms she listed as stress-related, Fixit suffered a whole lot of them: Flu-like symptoms, digestive problems, sleeping problems, breathlessness. All on top of emotional and mental symptoms, such as feelings of hopelessness. Not fun.



The upshot is that we saw our G.P. who immediately gave him a medical certificate to absent himself from TAFE for the week and prescribed some blood tests and some walking to begin with. And then we applied for some annual leave to give him a proper break. And whilst all this is starting to make him feel better, it only took the sms from his work informing him of his roster for the following week (night shift, despite his letter) to give him the jitters again.



Then Fixit's grandfather, aged 92, without any preceding illness to speak of, died peacefully on Monday morning. So we've had the funeral to contend with too. And the guilt about not having seen enough of Pop recently to contend with too. It hasn't been the happiest of weeks.



I'm not sure which way forward. We hope that the request for Monday to Friday day shifts will be granted, and that maybe we can devise ways to help him cope with the study load (it would be naive to think the TAFE will change the way it operates). I'm considering spending some of the fiscal stimulus money on a laptop and some wireless internet so he can study in the comfort of the loungeroom while I'm at work. The more he can get ahead of the TAFE workload the better he'll be. I think some regular exercise is vital, as is as much TLC as the boys and I can throw at him. And eventually we have to decide if it is worth hanging in there. We always knew the first few years would be tough, but it's been worse than we predicted. We need to find the balance of how much short-term pain for long-term gain we can bear. It's hard to know.