In Need of Some New Blood
I was in Manchester the other day, a place close to my heart for many reasons, not least that I lived there for a big part of my life before meeting a girl from Leeds and defecting to Yorkshire. It’s also the city where almost 40 years ago Altro opened a contracts office over Silvio’s cake shop in Fountain Street. The girls who worked behind the counter there must have thought I needed feeding up, as every time I went in to buy a sandwich they would put an extra one in the bag when the boss wasn’t watching.
Anyway while I was in Manchester I couldn’t help having a walk down memory lane, I went to Fountain Street and soon found myself standing in front of the building where our office used to be. Still there, all boarded up and looking old and sad, Silvio’s is now “the game cube” and staffed by 12 year old technophiles oblivious to the ghosts of the generous shop girls and the hungry apprentice floorlayer.
My mind wandered to my early days and my meteoric rise to Altro’s technical department which has only taken 4 decades to date. I thought about my apprenticeship and the many training courses I had to attend on my journey from sweeping the floors and going for the chips to running large contracts and everything in between.
After my initial induction course which was a week at head office under the tutorship of one of the supervisors, I was loaned out to old Albert, a sub contractor who though he looked old through my then young eyes, was just 57 which coincidentally is the age I am now, and of course it’s not old as I now know.
Albert’s much deserved nick name was the gloom peddler, due to his ability to put a wet blanket on everything, but he was also a great floorlayer, from the old school when boys served real 4-5 year apprenticeships before becoming men and being let loose with a Stanley knife.
His apprenticeship must have been hard, but mine under Albert was harder, I would sweep and scrape the floor until you could eat from it only to be told how useless I was and to start again, then “make a brew and go for the chips” It all seems a bit Dickensian now, but that’s just the way it was and I got used to it, and hard though it was, somehow I knew it was for my own good. Eventually I became adept at scribing and templating and being less of an encumbrance to the skilled fitter, even helping him to earn extra money once the “pricework” system was adopted.
Rocket forward a few millennia to more modern times and it’s hard to find flooring companies employing young lads with a view to spending 4-5 years turning them into half decent floorlayers. This is mainly due to a lack of spare cash for such a luxury, and I used to think perhaps even a lack of raw material – after all, floor laying is hard work for not a great deal of gain in the early years and many young lads choose easier more lucrative options. However scores of would-be flooring fitters visited our offices recently for a careers open day. The event was run as a way to pass on the knowledge and expertise we have as a company to those who wanted to find out if a career in flooring would suit them. Attendees ranged from school leavers looking for tips on gaining an apprenticeship through to those considering a complete career change.
Over 8,000 skilled flooring fitters are expected to retire over the next 10 years, and manufacturers and industry leaders should be doing as much as possible to encourage new people into the trade. Working in the flooring industry is an exciting and challenging profession that can take you all over the world. If you are talented and dedicated then the possibilities are very exciting. It’s not just about buildings, as a career in flooring can take you across a multitude of sectors, including transport, automotive and even maritime.
In the current economic climate, the opportunity to re-skill should not be underestimated either. Many areas of industry will have equipped people with transferrable skills well suited to the flooring industry.
Flooring companies like Altro and others are doing what we can to take up the slack in the absence of traditional apprentiships, in our own case we run countless training courses at head office which not only allow us to impart some hard won knowledge on the young and not so young who attend, but also gives us the unique opportunity to meet flooring contractors from all over the world and swap stories and ideas, an exercise from which we can all learn.
This article first appeared in the August 2009 edition of the CFJ.