qualified tilers

I have no level of qualification at all but I appreciate those that do have it.
i guess it depends on whether you perceive a qualification makes a difference as to whether you get work for having this badge or not.
this is actually a very interesting question.
 
Tiling for what seems ever and not got Zilch quals.. but does that mean i know nottting aboot tiling :lol:
 
An argument could be made for a tiler with qualifications, that they have nothing to prove, so no matter what standard of work they do, it must be good as they are qualified. If i was hiring a tiler and given the choice to see there qualifications or there last job, i know what i would pick!
 
This could turn out to be the best thread ever posted .
i have always thought that you are are as good as you are, regardless of qualififications in our trade.
i need to be careful here before I post further .
 
I have L2 L3 nvq wall and floor tiling ,I also have a certificate of experience from the British chamber of commerce which was needed to apply to register to work as a tradesmen in Germany in the early 1990s this entailed showing you were a bonafide tradesmen by providing evidence of where you trained and who by ,listing all the companies I had worked for and showing invoices and payslips from tiling companies, I also had to provide proof of advertising, best thing for me is the fact 2 of my children are both in their twenties and on their birth certificates it states fathers occupation as floor and wall tiler
I look at some of the lads that have worked for me over the years and have gone on to be tilers in their own right ,
most after a year can tile to a reasonable standard on ceramic work and start making money on price ,when this happens they start gaining in confidence and believe they are worth as much as the lads that have been tiling 5 years and sometimes do produce more work ,the biggest problem is they still make lots of costly errors where the more experienced guys dont, I know this is a generalisation and there are gifted individuals who are mustard after a year but and its a big but after a year they still need bottle feeding to a certain extent whereas after 3-5years they dont and can cover anything you give them
 
I get that there is no real need for them other than for CSCS purposes and I know that having them dose not mean you are any better at tiling than someone without them. In fact some of the tilers that have no qualifications are the ones that have so much knowledge and so much skill and have developed this skill over decades of hard work. But when someone that has no concept of what that actually means asks are you qualified it is nice to be able to say actually I am.

This may go down another path but we are always saying this industry needs to be licensed to protect us and Joe public from the shady characters in the industry but who would the licences be given out to would it be the ones that can prove that they are qualified with there silly bits of paper or would it be the ones without the silly bits of paper??
 
As my thread inspired this thread I would like to say I was by no means "polishing my buttons" just stating that these quals don't exist anymore and that in itself is a crying shame. I for one am proud of my background in this industry.

Without proof of my qualifications I would not have been awarded the CSCS Gold supervisors card or my CSCS Gold Heritage card, and I would not have been considered for the Master craftsman accreditation. In short I have got the bits of paper, but far more relevant, I can do the bl00dy job.

So no, a piece of paper is not the mark of a tiler, but I can tell a good fixer just by talking to them, we all know who we are, and what we are, and where we fit in on the scale. Let us hope this trade of ours is some day respected as it used to be.:thumbsup:
 
andy allen said:
iv'e got nowt .....lol

however ive been tiling since i left school at 16 and im 47 on sunday.....

so dose 31 years of tiling count for anything, or is a piece of paper all you need to be a qualified tiler..?
Click to expand...
pretty much the same as me Andy, I do have a HNC in Building Studies though, not that it's relevant to tiling:lol:
 
deanotile said:
why is that m8 ??
Click to expand...
At the time of the on site assessment I had only had my NVQ2 less than a year and was only doing Social Housing work(3 x 150mm x 150mm courses in the Kitchens and Bathrooms,up to the ceilings around the bath if it had a shower)...not exactly very taxing to say the least. The paperwork involved while being very wordy and lengthy had very little relevance to producing quality work.
 
wrighty said:
At the time of the on site assessment I had only had my NVQ2 less than a year and was only doing Social Housing work(3 x 150mm x 150mm courses in the Kitchens and Bathrooms,up to the ceilings around the bath if it had a shower)...not exactly very taxing to say the least. The paperwork involved while being very wordy and lengthy had very little relevance to producing quality work.
Click to expand...
Did you produce evidence that you had in the past hit all the criteria required ?? An assessor can make judgements on prier learning and infer knowledge but if there is no evidence then that is not cool .

Things like training centres that falsify evidence and assessors that just pass anyone do the industry and the credibility of the qualification no favours.:mad2:
 
for a period of 15 years until say 2009 , I had a steady stream of tilers working for me along side my core of employees.
most of these were australians and some stayed 3 months, others came/ went and came back and others stayed for a longer period .
the reason I tended to employ aussies was twofold.
Firstly i had worked and travelled in their country and they always had good attitude to work.
they worked hard,played hard and never let you down and then went off traveling for a bit and i would always have work for them to come back to if given decent notice. they only needed hand tools as i had all the other kit that they would not want to pay out for when travelling.
it worked perfectly for both parties.
the other reason though was that i knew that they had all done the aussie tiling apprenticeship which was a lot of hours .
that ticket was the gold ticket and i didnt consider anyone else without one.
this did not make them good tilers necessarily but they had the basics and i found that i could get any tiler with that qualification and the right attitude to adapt to limestone fixing .
with a couple of exceptions , the rest found the work really interesting as different to home and in fact i am still in contact with many and they find that they are years ahead of the game in aussie when limestone started to come in aussie from china.
so their certificate was important to me as it sorted a lot of the crud out on gum tree in those days .
I did not entertain an eastern european tiler .
You may ask why i did not go for english tilers .
Well the answer is partly because i put one of my employees through the citb course in vauxhall school of building and i think it was the last one they ran and i was appalled by the course.
My employee could not even do a mix when asked by one of my aussies because labourers at the college did it for them!!
In fairness this might have been a time when adhesives were taking over from sand/cement bedding and i am sure that the old school boys had a far better tiling education and THAT QUALIFICATION REALLY MEANT SOMETHING
I would take a safe bet that the aussies set their tiling courses around those in the uk before and they really work.
as an example a qualified aussie tiler ten years ago could lay a screed to falls in a bathroom which was the norm in aussie that he could then tile on to successfully .
the aussies for the most part dont even bother coming here to earn their money for travelling as there is so much competition from eastern europe.
they do their saving in oz now.
i now find myself not employing many extra tilers over and above my employees because of the climate but i will say that i have had some exceptional stone fixers from eastern europe.
I put ads out on gumtree again and had to sift through countless applicants and this was much more difficult as there was a language problem and no recognised qualification.
this did mean trying out more people but i have found some quite extraordinary natural talent that has required longer to train and adapt but the results and long term are the same and these people become employees and stay rather going home much quicker.
in short i think that if qualifications are very important but i am afraid to say that i personally think that they may too easy to achive today just like our school exams and it is hard as an employer to sort out out the good from the norm pass.
 
I think the value of the paper work has changed so much, you can't compare a piece of paper awarded for a 4/5 day course or a 2/3/4 week course, to a piece of paper that took 5/6 sometimes 7 years to achieve + in my case one day per week day release to a real building college for five years, as well as the five years serving my time with real master tilers.

I am not putting the short course guys down, I have said many times, it is always down to the individual. But if I had to choose between a time served guy or a course guy to be a part of my gang, knowing that my reputation/business was on the line, I would have to choose the time served tiler every time. If for no other reason other than that the time served experienced guy has probably forgotten more about tiling than some of these tutors will ever learn.

I hope I don't offend to many people with my comments, that is not my intention, over the years I have met/worked with thousands of tilers in the UK and all over the world. I have met the talkers, and the real deals. I find the real talented tilers don't talk a good job, they just quietly get on with it and do it. Let us hope this trade doesn't go the way of so many others like dry stone wall men/thatchers etc. Sorry for the mini rant.:thumbsup:
 
jonnyc said:
for a period of 15 years until say 2009 , I had a steady stream of tilers working for me along side my core of employees.
most of these were australians and some stayed 3 months, others came/ went and came back and others stayed for a longer period .
the reason I tended to employ aussies was twofold.
Firstly i had worked and travelled in their country and they always had good attitude to work.
they worked hard,played hard and never let you down and then went off traveling for a bit and i would always have work for them to come back to if given decent notice. they only needed hand tools as i had all the other kit that they would not want to pay out for when travelling.
it worked perfectly for both parties.
the other reason though was that i knew that they had all done the aussie tiling apprenticeship which was a lot of hours .
that ticket was the gold ticket and i didnt consider anyone else without one.
this did not make them good tilers necessarily but they had the basics and i found that i could get any tiler with that qualification and the right attitude to adapt to limestone fixing .
with a couple of exceptions , the rest found the work really interesting as different to home and in fact i am still in contact with many and they find that they are years ahead of the game in aussie when limestone started to come in aussie from china.
so their certificate was important to me as it sorted a lot of the crud out on gum tree in those days .
I did not entertain an eastern european tiler .
You may ask why i did not go for english tilers .
Well the answer is partly because i put one of my employees through the citb course in vauxhall school of building and i think it was the last one they ran and i was appalled by the course.
My employee could not even do a mix when asked by one of my aussies because labourers at the college did it for them!!
In fairness this might have been a time when adhesives were taking over from sand/cement bedding and i am sure that the old school boys had a far better tiling education and THAT QUALIFICATION REALLY MEANT SOMETHING
I would take a safe bet that the aussies set their tiling courses around those in the uk before and they really work.
as an example a qualified aussie tiler ten years ago could lay a screed to falls in a bathroom which was the norm in aussie that he could then tile on to successfully .
the aussies for the most part dont even bother coming here to earn their money for travelling as there is so much competition from eastern europe.
they do their saving in oz now.
i now find myself not employing many extra tilers over and above my employees because of the climate but i will say that i have had some exceptional stone fixers from eastern europe.
I put ads out on gumtree again and had to sift through countless applicants and this was much more difficult as there was a language problem and no recognised qualification.
this did mean trying out more people but i have found some quite extraordinary natural talent that has required longer to train and adapt but the results and long term are the same and these people become employees and stay rather going home much quicker.
in short i think that if qualifications are very important but i am afraid to say that i personally think that they may too easy to achive today just like our school exams and it is hard as an employer to sort out out the good from the norm pass.
Click to expand...

Jonny I was typing while you posted, but I think we both said the same thing. I might be wrong.
 
Phil Hobson said:
I think the value of the paper work has changed so much, you can't compare a piece of paper awarded for a 4/5 day course or a 2/3/4 week course, to a piece of paper that took 5/6 sometimes 7 years to achieve + in my case one day per week day release to a real building college for five years, as well as the five years serving my time with real master tilers.

I am not putting the short course guys down, I have said many times, it is always down to the individual. But if I had to choose between a time served guy or a course guy to be a part of my gang, knowing that my reputation/business was on the line, I would have to choose the time served tiler every time. If for no other reason other than that the time served experienced guy has probably forgotten more about tiling than some of these tutors will ever learn.

I hope I don't offend to many people with my comments, that is not my intention, over the years I have met/worked with thousands of tilers in the UK and all over the world. I have met the talkers, and the real deals. I find the real talented tilers don't talk a good job, they just quietly get on with it and do it. Let us hope this trade doesn't go the way of so many others like dry stone wall men/thatchers etc. Sorry for the mini rant.:thumbsup:
Click to expand...
I think we are saying the same thing here Phil
I used the Aussie tile apprentiship as an example as I am sure that their format was copied from ours and it really meant something to me . This was my benchmark .
of course I should say as I have always said that I am self taught so one could argue, what do I know anyway.
but i have done ok and will stick my neck out and state that I learnt more from my Aussie employee than any information coming back from Citb Course. .
i dont want to offend people who have taken the time to get the latest tiling qualifications as they have made a big effort but it would seems that a pass is almost assured by good attendance .this does not just apply to tiling .
 
Ok Phil . We have posted and crossed , but this have proved that we are thinking alike.
I feel strange questioning qualifications that can be procured seemingly quite easily when I have none myself .you can quite rightly question this , I cannot.
 
what modules would you include for a worth while tiling qualification
1. setting out
2. substrate prepation including screeding , rendering and laytexing
3 .wall tiling including window reveals .soffits and cills
4.floor tiling
5.water control tiling including setting gulley channels and laying to falls
6. material estimating
7 product knowledge and manufacturing of materials including adhesives and how tiles are manufactured
8. tiling mosaic to wall and floor surfaces including paper faced work ,pre grouting and mortar bed fixing
9. setting tiles on to mortar beds on walls and floor
10 . setting out and tiling steps and risers
11. considerations of public area tiling including slip resistance and food prepartion
12. swimming pool tiling and corrosion resistance tiling
13 cleaning and restoration
14. geometric tiling ,setting out and installing
15 .health and safety
can any one add any to this list ?
 
jonnyc said:
Ok Phil . We have posted and crossed , but this have proved that we are thinking alike.
I feel strange questioning qualifications that can be procured seemingly quite easily when I have none myself .you can quite rightly question this , I cannot.
Click to expand...

I have had the pleasure of speaking to you Jonny and seeing your work, you are the real deal. I have also met and spoken to a lot of of other members and have a lot of respect for them, the fact that someone would give up their spare time to contribute to this forum shows a passion for this trade.

Last night I got a call from a guy I have never met, he contacted me through my post about Manchester college of building, it turns out he was there before me, did his C&G HNC etc. Seconds into the call I knew this guy was a pro tiler, we chatted about old times, old tilers, old jobs, old tiling legends. He was the real deal too, there are some things you can't bluff/blagg your way through.
 
I think if you are good at what you do and you set your standards as high as you can, then you will always be in demand regardless of your qualifications or background.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Phil Hobson said:
I have had the pleasure of speaking to you Jonny and seeing your work, you are the real deal. I have also met and spoken to a lot of of other members and have a lot of respect for them, the fact that someone would give up their spare time to contribute to this forum shows a passion for this trade.

Last night I got a call from a guy I have never met, he contacted me through my post about Manchester college of building, it turns out he was there before me, did his C&G HNC etc. Seconds into the call I knew this guy was a pro tiler, we chatted about old times, old tilers, old jobs, old tiling legends. He was the real deal too, there are some things you can't bluff/blagg your way through.
Click to expand...
phil I am sure that call would have lifted your spirits in these hard times for us all. I always like to be reminded about old jobs /times etcc as essentiailly they are a large part of our life.
how is it that the old jobs we did,always seem to be so much more exciting than what we do currently!
 
garythetiler said:
what modules would you include for a worth while tiling qualification
1. setting out
2. substrate prepation including screeding , rendering and laytexing
3 .wall tiling including window reveals .soffits and cills
4.floor tiling
5.water control tiling including setting gulley channels and laying to falls
6. material estimating
7 product knowledge and manufacturing of materials including adhesives and how tiles are manufactured
8. tiling mosaic to wall and floor surfaces including paper faced work ,pre grouting and mortar bed fixing
9. setting tiles on to mortar beds on walls and floor
10 . setting out and tiling steps and risers
11. considerations of public area tiling including slip resistance and food prepartion
12. swimming pool tiling and corrosion resistance tiling
13 cleaning and restoration
14. geometric tiling ,setting out and installing
15 .health and safety
can any one add any to this list ?
Click to expand...

Good post Gary, reading and understanding drawings, setting out different arches, ie working out voussoirs sizes?
 

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