Where do I begin?

- Apprenticeship programs, to me, are important, because it gives opportunity other than a four-year college option. For those individuals that want to start a career and maybe provide a family at a young age, apprenticeship programs provide great wages and benefits as well as free education for a trade that is sustainable, that can be used throughout your life. - If you're looking for a trade where you don't have to sign up for a whole bunch of college debt this would be the place for you. You can go through a five-year apprenticeship program with little to no cost to you for your schooling. You can earn money, benefits, a living wage, maybe even a pension or retirement, while you're learning, and then at the end of it, you are a journey-level worker and you're making an incredible living, up to six figures, without any debt. - Our program itself consists of a college-accredited associate's degree at the end of the program. We are accredited through Mt. Hood Community College in our program, and at the end of their five-year apprenticeship program, they're entitled to take 15 more credits to achieve associate's degree. We call it an earn while you learn program, with no college debt or debt at the end of the program. - And the apprenticeship is a perfect time for people to really come to a program and talk about the hows, talk about the whys, and then also network with each other. - One solid week of school five times a year. Students start out in their first week of school as we bring their math skills up to a level to where they can succeed in learning pattern development and layout and fabrication, and it excels over the years to understanding the engineering aspects all the way through to foreman and foreman training, so that individuals will be successful and leaders. We teach leaders in our apprenticeship at the end of the program. - They come here five times a year in one-week segments. At the end of that, at the end of those five years, you will have gotten a few certificates, so some fire life safety, which is the inspection and maintenance and installation of fire smoke dampers, which help keep people safe in the event of a fire in a building. You might get some welding certificates. - The education you receive in the apprenticeship program will amount to something as basic as basic algebra all the way through engineering aspects of understanding properties of air, the laws of thermodynamics, how heat and cooling work, and the principles behind all of those methods in order to understand and make heating and cooling systems efficient. - In this program, what we do is we show you how it's applicable. You know, geometry or trigonometry, which are two words that really tend to scare people a lot, we show how you're actually going to apply it in the field. So we say, okay, this is the math that you need to know, and this is why you need to know it. Now let's go out into the shop and let's play with it. Let's go apply it and make something of it. - In our sheet metal apprenticeship, you'll learn all basic aspects of basic electronics, understanding the electrical components that make heating and ventilation systems work, as well as fundamentals of welding. Fabricating metal, how to fasten it together from pop riveting to welding, which is a variety of different kinds of welding methods. The apprenticeship program that we offer here is 8,000 on-the-job training hours by the completion of your apprentice, and over 800 hours of school training. So the process of getting into the apprenticeship program starts by downloading or coming to our facility and getting an application. There are minimum requirements that have to be met, as we're a state-registered apprenticeship program. - You would get your transcripts from high school showing that you might have had some math in the past that would get you some points on your application. It's a points-ranked basis, so all of your previous experience, whether you've built a fence or you built a deck in your back yard, right, those things would go on your resume or your application saying that this is the experience you've had with actual tools in your hand. And then you would be scheduled for an interview. You would come in and take an interview, which might be a completely nerve-wracking process, because you're sitting in front of five to 10 people and they're all peppering you with questions. - And through that interview process, you'll be ranked accordingly on ranked pool of eligible list into the apprenticeship program. - We call it the pool of eligibles. So those are people who are eligible for the apprenticeship program. When the apprenticeship opens and we decide to take in a new class of apprentices, we'll take the top 12 or so people off of that list, and they'll come in as a cohort. That cohort or that group of people stays together for five years. - And as work demands, we will bring in apprentices according to our joint apprenticeship training committee. A typical day for an apprentice on the job site would be to show up, typically there are safety meetings in the morning, a little bit of stretch and flex before they get on the floor of the building that they're working on, and they'll stage material. They will help install it, working with journeymen. Once they have completed the apprenticeship program, they are officially turned out once they've met the requirements of the state as far as work hours and on-the-job training. They will receive a journeyman sheetmetal card that allows them to work anywhere in the nation under that card for any other logo. They're at the top of their wages and benefits that they can receive for that craft. Currently, the mean age of our apprenticeship program is around 27 to 28 years of age. We're working hard to change that number, to bring down the age, to give and to educate individuals or youth out of high school that there is an opportunity here other than a four-year degree. - The people who would really love to be in this program are people who love working with their hands. The people who, at the end of the day, feel a sense of pride, of driving around town and being like, I built that, I worked in that building. The neat thing about this job is our experience on a daily basis is so varied. Throughout this trade, we're a relatively small trade. It's a community of people, and so what we're doing is we're riding on the reputation that we're building for ourselves. In order to network with other people, you're sharing your knowledge, you're sharing your experience, what worked, what didn't, what are your best practices, how did you deal with this, and so coming to school and having that group dynamic where you learn together throughout a five-year period five weeks at a time, you're able to earn money on the job site doing the whats, and then the schooling is where you learn the hows and the whys. - We're teaching careers in our industry, not part-time jobs. Our investment is huge, and we want our payback in our industry is success and longevity in the craft.