apprenticeships are day release 8 hours for 36 weeks a year and for 4 years, now you do the maths. Poor advice leads to incorrect decisions, your post is not only incorrect but dangerous for people wnating to train as they need the correct facts
It is not dangerous, these are facts, when you work out the amount of time it is pretty much the same and when you learn all together, you in-bed it in your brain, when you go 1 day a week, you can forget things from one week to the next. It is my opinion and i thought this forum was to express your opinions.
"why do you think people must take you on??"
because if they do not, the industry will go down hill due to plumbers like me having to go out and learn on the job with no previous experience.
I was on about the tech cert level 2 is 10 weeks, level 3 is 10 weeks, NVQs are 6 days each so in total it is 106 days plus gas training.
over 4 years at 36 weeks you will spend 144 days a year at college, minus the days that the college mess you around, the days that you spend not learning anything and the days where the kids mess around. so roughly the same.
When i went to college the first term was spent waiting for a tutor to turn up as the first one quit within 1 week of the start of term. so of your 36 weeks, we only actually got 28 weeks, then we taught ourselves as the tutor joined in with the younger kids messing around and then 2 weeks before the end of term, he got sacked, I would never go back to college after my experience. The facts. The fast track is exactly the same as the college for training (not including the stupidly fast track courses). 2 weeks to become a plumber is absolutely rubbish, nobody offers this, they only say that and when you sign up they tell you its actually a lot longer then that.
Now where I agree with everybody is, college / training centres can only teach you so much. The only place you will really learn is in the workplace. If somebody has done 5 years working as a plumber then he will be hundreds better then somebody who went to college for 5 years with no work experience. And the person who worked and went to college 1 day a week will be millions better. You do not learn how to empty water from the pipes before you start work or to empty a toilet before you work on it.