Where Are All The Plumbers?

If your looking for a plumber it may have come to your attention that they are becoming increasingly difficult to find. This article focuses on the reasons for the shortage of good local plumbers and the problems that our young plumbing apprentices face on the road to becoming qualified and highly skilled plumbers.

First of all, if your looking for a plumber to fit a bathroom suite or even carry out small plumbing repairs in and around your home, you might think it’s just a case of picking up the telephone directory and choosing a company from the list. Not so! Given the recent property development trends and because there is so much demand for local plumbers in general, it is much harder to contract a local plumber than you may think.

More realistically due to the small numbers of quality plumbing companies that are currently servicing the your area.

So why is this the case? Why are there so few plumbing companies in the that there are not enough local plumbers to meet local customer needs? In our opinion, the root cause is that very few young people are training to become plumbers. Even fewer of these plumbing students are entering the plumbing trade once they have received there formal qualifications. Plumbing is, and has always been a difficult trade to master. A plumber must master multiple disciplines in order to be able to meet the needs of their customer and must also have the business sense to turn a decent profit. A multi-skilled plumber may have skills which border on such trades as building, electrical, plastering and tiling.

We have talked to a number of local plumbing apprentices and, while we knew the route to becoming a qualified plumber was not easy, we were astounded by some of the things that we heard from the people that we believe to be the future of the industry. First of all in order to get essential plumbing qualifications from a reputable college a work placement was needed first so that apprentices could provide photographic evidence of plumbing techniques that they have learned ‘on the job’. We think this is a very good way to teach young plumbers, i.e. by combining classroom theory with on the job practical skills.

The problems are evident however, when you stop to consider the fact that there are very few local plumbing companies out there and even fewer that are willing to take on an apprentice who once trained would be able to compete with them for local business. Consider also the fact that these young people are expected to work for very little money. In many cases plumbing apprentices are expected to work for free! When you understand the dedication and effort that goes into training to be a plumber you can see what a thankless task it is for our young people to complete their training. This especially true when you consider the increasing number of lesser skilled job opportunites that are present in our area at the moment that offer decent wages for young people but which offer little in the way of career development or opportunities to develop other skills.