Apprenticeship Corner

By

Shawn Lenczowski

I hope everyone had a great holiday season and Santa brought you everything that wanted.  Wow, this year just blew by!  Where did the time go?  Looking back on the last year we averaged about 23 apprentices in all our trades.  This is a good sign and I hope we can continue that trend.

Classes continued to go well with each trade having three week-long class sessions.  Mark Roddy is the instructor for CPC class, Bart Jensen & John Mayer teach the Tile Apprentices, and Dan Bonife and I teach the brick classes.  This is a very knowledgeable group of guys and our apprentices continue to get very good instruction from them.  In July, Mark went to the IMI facility in Maryland to get training in EPA renovation and Dan went in August to get MSHA certification for teaching mine safety to our Refractory Workers.  I want to continue our instructors staying up-to-date with the latest instruction and passing this knowledge on to our current and future apprentices and journeyman. 

Last May, we sent apprentices Caz Helmstetter, Shane Salchenberg, and John Lambert, to the Western States Apprenticeship Contest held in Sacramento, California.  Once the dust settled, Caz placed 2^nd in Tile, John placed 4^th in CPC, and Shane placed 7^th in Brick.  Congratulations and great job!  This year the contest will be held in Las Vegas, Nevada and hosted by Local #13.  We will be holding our local qualifying contest in the upcoming months.   If you are interested in being a judge and seeing these apprentice skills first-hand, please contact me and we will get you plugged in.  Remember, we can’t do this without people stepping up and volunteering.

In 2011, our brick apprentices learned the proper way to install different types of building envelope products, thanks to Nathan Weible of the Henry Company.  Our CPC apprentices got real-world training by doing donation work on the new AFL-CIO building and on the Wall and Ceiling building, who has in turn generously donated to our Apprenticeship Program.   Michaels precast, Mutual Materials, Basalite, Dal Tile, and our own contractors have also donated and given us a great price breaks on materials for our apprentices to practice with.  A very big Thank You!

One of things that I am doing within the program is outreach with schools, Job Corps, Veteran, and pre-apprenticeship groups to make them aware of the opportunities in our apprenticeship.  I’ve also been working with BOLI and the JATC Committee to change language and our work processes for clearer standards.  I was hoping to have these done by now, but there have been hang-ups with the state.  Hopefully these will be wrapped up in the coming months. 

We are on a continuing effort to strengthen our Ranked Pool of Eligibles.  If you know someone that wants to get into the trade, please have them contact me for apprenticeship opening dates. 

Well, in closing, I hope 2012 is brighter than the past couple of years and I look forward to working and talking with each and everyone one of you.