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Q: Do they have trade schools and apprenticeships in China?
A couple of classes I did recently were based on jobs / occupations. When you ask the kids what do they want to be they always say Doctor, Nurse, Nuclear Physicist (not really, they can't pronounce that and I doubt they ever will) and Policeman. Nobody ever says "Electrician" or "Plumber" or "Mechanic" but the country is littered with people doing these things.
Having experienced locals coming around to do this type of work I doubt very much that any of them have served an apprenticeship or studied a trade because, quite frankly (and sadly) they are bloody hopeless! It seems to me from my observations that nearly everyone goes to university, gets a degree, works for crap salary, opens a restaurant or...well whatever. Dropouts and those that didn't get into university gravitate to doing electrical work, painting, carpentry cutting hair. I wonder how they learn? Just from doing it?
Does anybody know whether there is a formal trade education system here? If not I'm afraid that the standard of trade work done will always be the same - BAD!
10 years 24 weeks ago in Business & Jobs - China
Third-tier colleges are technically trade schools. In order to "qualify" for their college diploma, these colleges require an internship. The internships, however, do not have to have anything to do with the major that they're studying - which is how you get hotel management students working on the factory floors.
Good question, I have thought of this myself before. What i noticed was that i never seen any young men working in the trades, just men over 30 or 40. And yes, I agree, a tradesperson without any training will not make a great tradesman most the time.
There is an actual trade school here in town. Sino is right that it is called something like "Technical College"
All the people carrying out plumbing, electrical work, masonry seems to be completely without education. They are inefficient and the result if difficult not to laugh at. The so-called newly renovated apartments I've seen have all been in poor condition.
Interning just means to one day show up and start doing it the way you think it is to be done. I am sure they get pointers from each other, but I am pretty sure that you don't consider calling a structural engineer before you start knocking down a load-bearing wall.
The result is that there is permanent occupation for tradesmen as their work is so shoddy that it needs redoing once ever couple of years.
this is a strange screwed up system, to save face the school call itself a technical college so the kids parents can say he went to college, never mind its automotive technology, or brick laying, masonry, parents leave that part out when they brag about the little emporor or empress.
with so many people, you can get some lousy trade labor cheap anywhere, and lousy is being nice.
the thing that makes this really bad is the universities have borrowed money and governments have built so many higher education venues that they have to get the body count up at universities, so the kid with a 300 gaokao should be in a trade school or technical college but he is paying 3 times the regular tuition rate as a penalty for being dumb and in return he will get an international business degree and not understand the word binding arbitration,
so the least common denominators in society are going to universities rather than trades and the demographics is going to cause the blue collar guys to get rich and charge a fortune in the future,
nobody here even knows its happening
welding is a skill you cant screw up, so a trained welder here now pays more then a university teacher, this is just beginning.
when i see the electrical work here (i m engineer) than i mostly wanna cry in a corner.
i highly doubt that anyone ever taught them, so probably learned it by themselves and getting a few electrical shocks.
Electric is a field that sort out bad one because they die anyways 
Scandinavian:
we actually had some electrical work done by a friend of the family who teaches at a technical college. the dude showed up with decent tools, a ladder and ...... 3 students. the wires actually looked pretty good, they did spend a lot of time making sure things were properly connected, everything worked. the part of concealing the installation was not done to top marks, but we had a crappy painter come make sure that all the walls looked equally crappy. .... and then repainted
Yeah, child labor.
dom87:
there might be some decent electricians around here probably working for an international company or whatever but if you look at the normal compounds around here you definitely see that that wasnt made by a professional electrician
in the companies i work for the wiring looks decent as i would expect it but i m not 100% sure if that was build by chinese workers. But this is a new factory and after 1 year now it all looks full of rubbish and dust so actually no one ever cares about these things
