The mill grinds on...

It's been a while...and a while is a hell of a long time in education.

I am questioning my position and my existence. The question is, do I want the hassle? If the answer were so simple I'd sell it and retire. So what hassle is that then? Well, lets go back a little...

Now it seems that the Department Manager has left, leaving a bit of a gap. He got another job apparently. So I step up for a position that temporarily shares the job. The only downside is that I am still teaching full time (in fact I have just finished a stint covering for someone as well). How, when teaching full time, I can run a department I am not sure. Certainly my counterpart does not teach therefore has a huge advantage.

Also, we have a new head of centre. This in some respects is very good as the person is very affable and obviously intelligent. The downside is still that we hear the same old management patter all the time.

It's all rather disheartening and to be honest although I should be celebrating the faith put in me by the college, I can't help but feel very very down at the moment.

Ages away

Well, this is turning out to be an interesting year teaching.

The thing is with teaching, is that it is an extremely enjoyable career. That is, when everything is in place and running smoothly. When it isn't, I just want to get back on the tools and work hourly again with a fraction of the hassle. I suspect if the teaching game doesn't improve, then I may well go back on the tools or maybe even back in the office, who know's?

There must be an easier way to make a living...

Why teach?

Why teach?

Yeah, thats what they say in the ad. The wonderful government sponsored ads persuading us to impart our knowledge on those in need. Well to be honest, there really aren't too many superlatives thrown at the game from those actually involved in it. Currently I am trying to be the programme area coordinator while contact teaching 31.5 hours. By the time you have stripped the breaks and the dinner out, that means Mon-Fri the only time I am not in front of a class is between 1.00 and 4.30 on a Thursday. That also means it's 10pm on Wednesday night and for the 3rd night running I am sitting on this computer preparing the class for tomorrow.

Another comment levelled today, semi-tongue in cheek possibly, by a mature student mentioned the wonderful holidays we get. Well, we do get 35 days of course, not to be sniffed at, especially since I came to the teaching game after being self employed. Having said all that, I think I actually took 25 last year, and 10 of them I actually spent working at home. On top of that, we get paid for 37 hours a week and yet, I think the least amount of hours I have committed since the first week of September (actually, more like half way through August) is somewhere in the region of 60 hours a week. That puts my hourly rate at somewhere about £7.24 an hour by my calculations. Excuse the language, but that is piss poor for the stress involved in the job, especially when I get offers quite often to go back on the tools for £14-15 an hour with no stress.

Kind of brings me back to one of the other points I have made before; is it any wonder we can't recruit?

Anyway, at the very least please visit my website at http://www.electricalqualifications.co.uk and buy something through it, a book from Amazon maybe? A jumble of accessories via Ebay? Some new tools from Screwfix possibly? I think I may well need the commission to help me pay the mortgage...

Recruitment time again, can we get a management decision?

So the arduous task of trying to recruit an electrical installation lecturer begins again. For one reason or another, we lost a reasonable member of the team last week giving us exactly zero days to replace him. A management decision somewhere I am sure, it would have been nice of them to put some thought into the decision but instead, it leaves us having to cover lessons again once more at the expense of the NVQ(remember we have now been covering for staff for 11 months) . Bear in mind that recruiting an experienced electrical installation tutor is akin to discovering Atlantis and if we did discover the lost city, it has to give us 3 months notice before it can start.

It does seem that education struggles from the top down. Management in these institutions struggle so very much to make a decision with most decisions having to be taken back to the top to actually occur. This being the case, why do we have the Principal, Vice Principals, Assistant Principals, Directors, Assistant Directors, Heads of Schools, Department Managers, Programme Area Co-ordinators and finally Course Managers if every decision has to be made back at the top of the chain? We may as well have the Course Managers reporting directly back to the principal. We could still employ a few token people to attend meetings while we are teaching to come up with other ideas as to what other demands they can place on a tutor (perhaps someone could make the decision that a teacher teaches? Sorry, flippant mode).

In my area, we all come from the construction industry and more so, the 'real world'. None of us are academics and certainly, whereas we may not have that edumacation degree, we all completed the 4-5 years of an apprenticeship it took to become tradesmen and most more too with the advanced craft qualifications. We then all go and and do another 3 years of assessors qualifications, teaching qualifications, internal verifier qualifications and the obligatory "Celebrating diversity" staff development event that is so useful to us all. Perhaps it is because of the construction background that we struggle so much with the internal wrangling of an educational establishment. On site, if a decision has to be made, it has to be made soon. If it is a big decision, then the decision must be made that day. Large sums of money rest on a decision and the time it takes to make it. Contrast this to an educational establishment. A small almost inconsequential decision takes anything up to a month to be settled, an urgent decision is usually settled by the end of the week (or second week) and a large decision starts getting measured in years. The crazy thing is, this seems to be perfectly acceptable to the academics in charge. One thing a college doesn't have is money yet seems to employ far too many expensive layers of management. These layers of management then slow down the decision processes again costing money to an already strapped college. We all then know what happens when colleges get into financial trouble, they start laying off the lecturers, it has happened all over the country in the last 10 years.

Perhaps it is because we are tradesmen before lecturers that we can see these obvious issues within education. Perhaps if we had left Generic University and become teachers we may see the need to deliberate over a decision for a minimum period of time before choosing (invariably) the wrong one. Perhaps we are just too practical for an environment that is run by academics, I really don't know. Certainly, with the amount of private training providers about all it takes is for some of them to start running the proper courses rather than the get rich quick types and colleges can really kiss goodbye to the vocational areas they struggle with. Of course, the problem then is that the government will move the academic courses back into the schools 6th forms and all these academics with their buried heads may have to go back into the real world and get a job. Imagine that?

http://www.electricalqualifications.co.uk

Expectations by Neil Sambrook

What are our expectations as consumers? This is the question I have been mulling around in my skull for the past two weeks now. As a college or a training provider we sell our products to the general public, but in what way do we actually sell them? We don’t appear to sell a physical product like say perhaps Robert Dyas on the high street do; we sell an experience, the combination of the whole, a package if you will. So how do we compare this package to something else we know? A package holiday may be the obvious comparison. In one convenient cost, we purchase a flight, accommodation and tour rep to cater to our whims and expect a certain level of quality when doing so. If we pay £200 for a fortnight in Majorca, we expect the hotel to be average at best, the rep to turn up once in that two weeks and a crowded flight with no leg room, in fact, anything better than this is an unexpected and most welcome bonus. If we spend £2000 for a luxury week in the Maldives, we expect to be treated like royalty; we expect spacious aircraft legroom, the best food and top class accommodation with a rep that cannot do enough for you. It stands to reason that the more you pay, the greater the expectation of the end product. Our expectations as consumers when paying what we consider to be large sums of money are extremely high, indeed my own are no different.

Then I asked myself, what if I was to buy an LCD television. I have the choice several models but I narrow it down to two different models, one costing £400 and one costing £4000. What do I expect the difference in product to be for the actual difference in price? Well, I expect both of them to work in so much as I can watch Eastenders equally well on either television (perish the thought). I would also expect the more expensive one to have a much better quality picture, better sound, better build quality and more functions and features to justify spending the additional premium.

So thinking of the two parallels, I have tried to compare them to the expectations placed on us as tutors and assessors in an increasingly demanding industry. The thought process almost immediately got me thinking about my experience at college during my own apprenticeship…

My experiences and expectations at college

We had many different tutors during my stint at college each with their own eccentricities, strengths and weaknesses. I was there for three years in total, the City and Guilds 236 Part 1, Part 2 and finally the C Certificate, all done via block release. Over the three year span, we had eleven different tutors:

1. Mr A (Sergeant in the TA, not a great lecturer but extremely respected, strong disciplinarian!)
2. Mr B (young tutor, my inspiration to want to teach, very good, lots of personal respect for him despite being a Villa fan)
3. Mr G (sitting at the front reading the Regs is not conducive to learning I am sorry to say! People literally fell asleep and snored during the class. Four hours of being read the Regs by a guy with the worst monotonous Yorkshire drone you can imagine should have seen the guy fired out of a large gun into the nearest dole queue)
4. Mr R (great motivator and a really nice guy is unfortunately as much as I can say about him)
5. Mr Bob M (king of eccentrics, good solid tutor in later years though, despite having an old school approach, we did learn from him)
6. Mr H (absolutely no class discipline whatsoever, learnt nothing, lovely friendly guy though, I felt guilty that no one ever listened to him as I suspect we all did)
7. Mr B (not much to say, was alright I suppose, no lasting impact or memory)
8. Mr F (excellent sketch artist, very poor tutor unfortunately)
9. Mr H (mad professor, always way above our level and impatient too)
10. Mr M (sorry, learned nothing from you I am afraid)
11. Another tutor, forget his name, one lad tried to lift his wallet if I recall, wound him up something chronic all the time they did.

So out of the three years I attended college, there were two tutors out of eleven that were actually worth paying in my honest opinion. As a head of an electrical department and recently being involved in recruitment, I could happily say I would not employ the remaining nine tutors today were they to come to interview. In all honesty, they would never get past the microteach (a short ten minute presentation before the interview). They imparted next to no knowledge and only three of them actually maintained discipline in the classroom. In hindsight, I have no idea how I passed the majority of the course. I suspect that at least eight of the tutors are long retired by now which may or may not be an excuse for the overall poorness of my general tutoring at college.

My experience at college part two

At this point, and through the comments above, you must be thinking that I hated college. You’d be very wrong in that assumption, I absolutely loved college. I am not overly sure why I enjoyed the experience so much but suspect that it was for two reasons, the social aspect and the fact that despite the tutors, I succeeded and did quite well out of it dispelling my previous schooling mediocrity. Out of all the tutors, one really inspired me, a young tutor of approximately 27 years of age who was into modern music, football, girls and everything else a rampant teenager could associate with. He was the reason I entered teaching myself at a relatively young age, I believed I could teach and communicate with the students as well as him and do a much better job than nine out of eleven tutors I had during my apprenticeship.

So what’s the relevance?

Good point, I am getting there, please bear with me. My point is I had no expectation from college or my tutors. I cannot really tell you why not, I just didn’t. School for me didn’t hit anything like the proverbial nail on the head. I came away from school with nothing to speak of in terms of qualifications and maybe this is why my expectations were so low or to be honest, non-existent. The only thing I expected out of college was a certificate at the end, and even then, only if I could be bothered to do the revision and put the work in myself for it.

Ok, ok, so what’s your point?

I suppose what I am getting at is that 18 years later, the people we teach seem to have immense expectations. They don’t expect to have good lecturers teaching them, they expect to have brilliant lecturers teaching them. They expect to be entertained as if we were all as engaging as the latest music/television/film/consoles are to their individual social lives. They expect everything to be delivered to them on a plate in a format that keeps them interested for seven hours a day. They whinge when they have to write anything down, failing at all times to understand the importance of being able to write to complete their apprenticeships and even exist in post adolescent life. They moan about covering Health and Safety despite the fact that most of it is now delivered in innovative and consuming ways; there are an abundance of interactive games and teaching methods being produced. Some even complain when we do practical work, despite the fact that the quality of the practical exercises and the equipment used today is almost infinitely better than twenty years ago. Twenty years ago our consumer unit in the workshop consisted of a connector block to give you a comparison as to how far we have moved on. All this could be compared to teaching styles years ago when a tutor would simply dictate what you needed to know with the expectation on you to remember what you were writing. We were never going to learn from dictation, but it certainly kept the class quiet and occupied. Dreadful practise indeed by anybody’s standards today. But did we complain? Did we go back to our gaffer and say that the (and I quote from a recent comment) “teaching was shit”? We certainly did not, in fact, despite the bad teaching, our end of block tests were sent back to the gaffer and if we underperformed, we were actually called in from site to explain exactly why. One such phase test saw me get about 45%, which was only 2% lower than the next highest in the class (I wasn’t top of the class you know!) and saw me in front of the company director trying to explain that, although it was only 45%, it was actually a very high score compared to the rest in the class. That took an incredible amount of persuading and a promise that the next test would be much better before I could leave his office. In stark contrast, today’s students’ getting such a result would result in the company director ringing the college demanding why his student had such a low score and what we are going to do to improve it. If we don’t improve it, they will send the student to a rival educational provider, ergo taking his business and money elsewhere. That’s the difference between 2007 now and 1989 and my first point about expectation; it has reversed entirely.

I see the same with parents, if a full time student is underperforming then it has to be the lecturer’s fault. Parents’ will look for reasons why their child is underperforming and believe the child without question when they say that the ‘lecturer is crap’ and actually pursue the college to have this ‘malpractising fiend’ replaced by someone who knows what they are doing. The very last thing they will do is question the performance, commitment or desire of the child. Of the two years I have been managing a full time class I have been astounded at some of the parents’ responses, in fact, absolutely speechless as the parent of the most disruptive and badly behaved student on the course last year got his Mother to ring in and complain that we weren’t teaching him correctly after a bad report. It was our fault that the student was behaving badly (and apparently the two schools that he had previously attended and been removed from had extremely poor teachers too) and that we should do something about it or they would be complaining to the Principal. I had call from another parent saying that the student wasn’t learning anything in the class as it was such a disruptive environment to try to learn in. When I investigated, it turned out that the son she was ringing in about was the main cause of the disruption and had been chastised by the lecturer on several occasions.

The truth

In all honesty, I am probably venting some pent up half term frustration as I get another load of student surveys plonked on my desk as part of the tri-annual course review. I see comments on there that are utter rubbish, perhaps the fault of us giving some of these students a voice when some of them fail to understand basic English (and I am not talking immigrants and EU workers here). I get, as electrical co-ordinator, moans and groans about tutors under my leadership. I get questions about their competence, their commitment, their experience, their interest in the subject and everything else you can imagine. These lecturers they are complaining about are the same as all of us; they are electricians trying to put something back into the system and earn a wage. They may not know everything about electrical installation and science or be Superteacher™, but they are really trying hard to adopt new and interesting teaching methods to keep the students attention and increase the amount learning at the same time. They are trying exceptionally hard, with many working 60 to 70 hour weeks just to keep on top of information they themselves haven’t studied in 20 or 30 years. Most of all though, I get angry that no thought goes into the seemingly mindless ranting from many of today’s students. There is no thought about the fact they are destroying the morale of people that are trying so very hard to educate them. Their expectation level, despite the majority of them getting absolutely free training courtesy of the government and the remainder paying about one thirtieth of the average electrician’s salary a year, is extremely high. Too high in fact.

The conclusion

Well, I was going somewhere with this after all. Our expectations in life when talking about buying an LCD television simply cannot be linked to an educational experience. It is the sum of much more than the whole. A mature student expects that his £500 a year to gain a trade qualification is a lot of money and demands premium experiences because of the outlay. It seems that £500 a year to many people wanting to train is apparently extremely expensive. When compared to everyday life, I suspect that the same individual that thinks £500 is a lot of money for a course that will change their life forever, doesn’t think that paying £900 for a plasma television is a lot of money. They may think that the holiday to Majorca costing £500 is excellent value for money but they won’t think to compare this to an educational experience, an experience that really will have an impact on them and their families’ future.

In truth, that £500 a year is merely chicken feed, a token payment, it barely covers the wage demands of the people delivering, administering, registering and running the course they have enrolled on yet alone the amount of material used every year. One course alone, popular amongst private training providers’, costs £200 just to simply register the student with the awarding body. When you actually break down what you get for your money, you realise it is extremely good value for money.

So what do you expect for your money and how much does a quality education actually really cost? Well, when paying the sort of fees that colleges are charging for a course you should put your expectations somewhere amongst the cheap package holiday to Majorca level. You’ll ultimately get your qualification from the course but you need to put in a lot yourself to meet the required level of competence. If you get an excellent tutor, then you can compare this to getting additional legroom on a cheap flight, or an upgraded hotel room for free on arrival in Majorca. When paying some of the rather more exorbitant fees of private training providers, then you can start to expect the level of service that comes from a premium package, akin to that of the two weeks in the Maldives. You have a much greater right to expect a better service when spending £4500 on a course at a private provider compared to £500 at a college.

The real conclusion

Next time you complain that your lecturer didn’t quite get a particular point across, has a strict and disciplinarian approach to class management, wasn’t quite on the ball during today’s lesson or got something wrong in class, remember your expectations and manage them accordingly. The next time you get a survey to complete about your experience on a course, think before filling it out, don’t whinge and complain like so many of us in today’s society seem to want to do today. There are many students who do act and respond in an intelligent way, they may well have important concerns and as long as they approach it in the right way, we as tutors, course managers and department managers will listen and try to act accordingly. We only have the interests of the students at the end of the day.

An electrician willing to enter the teaching game is very hard to find, an experienced electrical lecturer is extremely difficult to persuade to work for you and an experienced and excellent electrical lecturer with a good reputation comes about as often as Halley’s Comet. If out of three lecturers over three years you have one average one, one good one and one excellent one, you are doing extremely well in the scheme of things. If you continue to complain about the trivialities then remember one thing, we may be teaching at the moment, but we are all really just humble electricians under that shirt, tie and name badge, we’ll simply get fed up and go back on the tools, leaving the chancers, the retirees and the downright crap lecturers behind to train the next generation of electricians. Then believe me, you will really have something to complain about.

Been away for a bit

October is a real nightmare for teaching. I do believe statistically it is the worst month for bugs, viruses, coughs, colds, infections and the like to occur. Whether that belief is true or not, it has definitely hit us. Already short of staff, I managed to fight off a nasty headachy type bug with just an afternoon off. My colleagues have not been so strong in the fight and I have ended up taking on even more.

This of course is the tip of the iceberg, we have now been covering staff shortages for 10 months for one reason or another and I think it is possibly starting to show now. Usually we are shagged by Christmas, this year we are shagged 3 weeks into the course. Says something in itself I suppose.

http://www.electricalqualifications.co.uk

Still crazy here. No difference there then.

Anyways, I am finally managing to get some leeway on Google. I am not doing as well as I am in Yahoo but a lot more clicks are finally coming the way of the popular search engine. Search for electrical qualifications and you will now find me on the first page. I am also featuring for a lot more search terms now which is nice, I can finally start seeing what keywords are returning results from my logs.

As a nice aside, I have again received a couple of complimentary emails regarding the site. A personal thanks goes out to you for taking the time to write, as long as a couple of you found the site interesting and useful, it makes all the effort worthwhile.

www.electricalqualifications.co.uk

Still here?

Things are busy with a capital F here. We seem to be coping and be on top of the teaching, now it's the NVQ we need to lick. Personally, I have never known anything as convoluted and difficult to follow as the electrical NVQ, whoever wrote it obviously done so behind a desk without any real thought. Combine that with unreasonable pressure from the funding people for targets and you get a rather stressed assessor trying to bridge an impossible gap for the sake of a student.

What are the issues you ask? Well for a start, we take 16 year old kids straight from school and expect them to decipher the complexities of an NVQ Level 3. Thats right, level 3, no level 2, straight in at the deep end. It's the equivalent of completing a GCSE on Friday and being asked to pass an A Level on Monday. The industry is (and perhaps rightly so) refusing to recognise a level 2. This is all fine but the government then refuses to accept the complexities we face and simply drop us in with other NVQs, basically saying an NVQ in let's say for arguments sake catering is the same as an NVQ in electrical.

Now it is not going to take a genius to realise that a catering assessor can visit his trainee at the restaurant and witness safety taking place. What will he witness and record? I don't know, heat, fire, boiling liquids, hygiene, PPE et al perhaps? Now take the electrical assessor (or indeed any construction based NVQ). He visits the site and...hang on, what site? Yesterday the student was in Weston Super Mare, tomorrow he's in Bristol. The day after he is in Poole. What is the student doing? Can we observe health and safety? Well, in Bristol he is using a tower scaffold to put up a light fitting, in Weston he turns up on site and the agent isn't there to let them on and when he turns up they have to go to the wholesaler to get the materials, he gets to Poole and it is a simple Periodic test on a house so very limited and probably not worth recording. And the point is? The student can be anywhere, doing anything at any time. The assessor with his limited time slots cannot say I'll come on Monday and observe you doing a testing and inspection unit when the likelihood of the trainee doing that in the real world is virtually zero. Yet despite this, the funding people say it must happen or we will not pay you.

Bureaucratic and generic nonsense. Lets celebrate diversity and publicly state that all people are different publicly and then completely ignore it with regards to the workforce.

Is it any wonder we cannot recruit?

Well, it all starts in real earnest today. All the part time groups are back, a new group starts, a new member of staff starts, an existing member is still off on long term sickness and preparation for all courses are still well behind schedule.

Having said all that, everything is in place for the next 3 weeks so as much as anything, it is a case of keeping that lead going until at least half term when we can take a breather, gather ourselves and get the next 3 weeks or more in place.

The joys of teaching...

So again I am sitting here bemoaning Google. Now I am not the most experienced web designer, indeed, having not been paid for it am I actually a web designer? Another question for another time perhaps. No, what I am talking about it Yahoo Vs Google. I have done a couple of websites in my time, for friends and colleagues, and I have always had good success with Google. Conversely, I have never really been able to get my site listed with Yahoo, at least not to any decent sort of level. Imagine my surprise then when my site all of a sudden does really well in Yahoo, indeed, virtually all my traffic seems to come from Yahoo. Very strange indeed...

Oh well.

www.electricalqualifications.co.uk

The teaching treadmill

It's all started again. There is a certain reputation surrounding lecturers that we don't do much work and have loads and loads of time off. Well let me let you into our world a little. It is actually true. In some cases. Some people literally get away with as much as 8 weeks off during the Summer break, me, I got 3 weeks off and worked the first from home. Why you ask? Well, teaching is no different to any other job when you analyse it. There are those who can be bothered and those who merely extract the Michael. Unfortunately, those who can be bothered pick up the work of everyone else.

It comes down to morality, which I believe is a large issue surrounding todays society. I am not particularly old, mid 30s in fact, but have this ridiculous notion that teaching is important and does affect and influence the future. I do treat it more than just a job, it's not something that is 9 to 5, for 9 months of the year I probably work 50-60 hours a week and get paid for 37 of those. When Summer arrives I probably do 30 hours a week so it balances out. When you do the Math though, you realise that those doing the job 37 hours a week for 9 months and 0 hours a week for the rest should not really be teaching. Shame, it's hard getting good teachers.

www.electricalqualifications.co.uk

Trying out different things in the field of electrical installation I came across another idea for a site. I shan't promote it on here as it's not finished yet, besides that, no one read this anyway :/

Anyways, my site is doing ok, even my Adsense account is looking like it's going to make me my first hundred dollars over the next two months. Don't know if it's good or bad, got no yardstick, but it should see me break even over 12 months to cover all my costs. Not that I mind costs though, just nice to see it have some return, even if it is evens!

http://www.electricalqualifications.co.uk

It was really good to catch up with some old friends yesterday, reminded me of the good old days.

It was also really good to see that we, despite having no help or input from various sources, are on the right track as a department. My friends are at a large and established college and we as a small and very much up and coming college are reaching the standards that we should be. Sure, there is some work to be done, but it's not insurmountable.

Incidentally, they, like us, are struggling to recruit decent quality lecturers. It seems like very few people are willing to enter the teaching industry, no doubt because of a combination of the money and the thought of having to teach kids who don't want to be there and a mountain of paperwork. I don't know about a skills shortage in industry, there is a severe skills shortage in education that doesn't seem to be addressed with many tutors teetering on the edge of retirement.

Going to visit an old workplace today to show some of my colleagues the differences between what we are doing and how we can do it. Looking forward to it though although there aren't many there that I know. I am sure we can pick up some ideas though.

On a different note entirely, I received yesterday an excellent email regarding my Electrical Qualifications site. It was quite heart warming that someone had gone to the bother to put such a nice email together and send it off. Makes all the difference.

www.electricalqualifications.co.uk

A new hope and Google

I'll probably never understand the Google search thing. Within a week of electrical qualifications going live, the site fluctuated between 1st and 2nd place on a search of "electrical qualifications". Within 2 weeks it cannot even be found, although I only tried up to page 27! When you perform the search, only the first 2 results currently contain any real information and one of them is not really aimed at electricians. The rest are random forum comments and private "become an electrician in 4 weeks" companies. I suppose I am over reacting and given time the site will gain popularity. It's just odd that it did extremely well within the first week is all.

All hail the search engine eh?

http://www.electricalqualifications.co.uk

The second day of blogging. Not too much to add. There was an article placed on my desk today, a photocopy from a prominent tabloid declaring that Gordon Broon has pledged more apprenticeships. Apparently, there is less than one apprentice for every 100 skilled workers in the country. Shocking really.

EDITED TO ADD: Please visit my website ;) www.electricalqualifications.co.uk

Hello and welcome

Hmmm, hello all who could be bothered to read this. I suspect that a blog is more of a personal diary rather than a means to anything else, but at least I get to vent my spleen a bit.

This is my first foray into blogging and it's on the back of my first real web presence. I have done sites before, plenty of them in fact for various reasons. I have also been quite successful in getting the sites well known on the popular search engines, probably because a mentor of mine, good old Tony Wilmore introduced me to the wonders of CSS and web standards many years ago. It seems that CSS is all it's cracked up to be as is the open source community, who's work has saved me many many hours of learning code to get the desired effect.

Anyways, on to the site. I am an Electrical Installation lecturer and an electrician by trade. Computers and the like have always been a hobby and were I to turn back the old clock, perhaps that is where I'd have ended up had I been bothered, who knows. For good or bad though, I ended up with a trade. I am not the most experienced lecturer, but I like to think my enthusiasm makes up for that as do my computer skills when creating course material. The past couple of years I have been teaching down south where all my skills have been quite pushed to the limit as the department seemingly struggles from one crisis to the next.

I am still not at the site bit...come on!

Ok ok. We get enquiries from everyone in the department. And I really do mean everyone. A mechanic, a warehouse worker, an accountant, a cheese packer and even once a vicar have all called asking me the same question:

"How do I become an electrician?"

Now if you search, then you can actually find the information. That is if you know who, what and where to search for though, not always easy when you come from nothing. That's where my site kicks in. I have attempted to create a site that answers these questions and hopefully a little bit more besides.

The first week has been quite positive and hopefully the future more so. I'd like to think that in the future years, my little 0.00000000000000001% of the internet has helped just a few people.

Laterz, as my students often say.

http://www.electricalqualifications.co.uk