Installing ... parrot fashion!

It has long been one of my complaints about the industry that a new breed of installers is coming along that just don't understand what they are doing. They install the systems 'parrot fashion' and when the first problems occur they can do little more than just scratch their heads and grope about in the dark. I'll give you an example.

For some time now I have been inspecting the work of a young man running his own one-man business. The quality of his work has always been top class, his service to the customers has been excellent, his relationship with his customers has always been very good bordering on brilliant – AND – he is the proud holder of a City and Guilds 1852 alarm installer's qualification.

In other words the classic example of a young man making a go of it – until the visit before last ... Halfway through the day his mobile phone rang, it was a call from a local business complaining that their alarm was going off repeatedly during the day and was driving them mad.

The twangs the thang!

"It's a tamper fault" he stated, and turned to me. "Do you mind if we make our next call an emergency repair call out?" I agreed so we concluded the present inspection as fast as we could and attended the fault. His method of sorting the fault amazed me; he removed all the lids of the PIRs one at a time and twanged the tamper springs around a bit. He then replaced all the lids and told the customer that he would not have any more problems.

Later I asked if he thought that he had done enough to locate the problem. He was quite happy with his action because he claimed he had come across the problem before and that was how he fixed it last time.

I asked why he didn't read the log or use his meter and his reply was "Do I need to?" We then had a long discussion on the use of a meter in troubleshooting and I felt I was getting nowhere. He just didn't understand.

I then asked what they had taught him at the college where he gained his City and Guilds qualification and he said they had been very thorough and had trained him in all aspects of meter reading. "I can read anything with that meter," he claimed. I decided to let the matter drop and trust the college; after all, they are the training experts.

On my next inspection visit I took a lot more notice, this time he was carrying out a service on a system. He opened the panel, took the battery out and was about to administer a discharge test with the old ACT Meters battery tester. I stepped in smartly and asked if he had forgotten something ... like a charge voltage and a charge current reading.

Once again he looked totally baffled so once again we had a good long chat when we got out of the building. My conclusions were astonishing: He knew to take voltage readings, but didn't know why.

It was the same with current and resistance readings. He also knew not to fix his low voltage wires in the same cable-trunking or through the same entry holes as the mains wire but hadn't a clue as to why. He knew that the remote keypad should not be on view from outside but didn't know why. Here was a young man installing top class systems because he had listened very carefully to his tutor and was doing everything he had been taught to do right down to the finest detail. The crime was that he just did not have a clue why he was doing it.

Are questions properly phrased?

I now have to ask the following questions: How did he get his qualification, or more to the point WHY did he get his qualification. Do the colleges realise that this is happening?

Have the examination questions been phrased the right way? Are they quite content to push a young man like this out into the big wide world (with his little piece of parchment stating that he has attained the required standard) knowing full well that his understanding is virtually zero but he has a phenomenal memory and can soak up and repeat "parrot fashion" all that he has read or been told? And finally do they consider that they have done a good job in getting yet another candidate through the C & G mill, even though there are huge flaws in his trade education?

I really do wonder, and I am amazed that this is going on.

Once again, training (or the lack of it) has come to my notice from another corner … private training companies.

I have just crossed paths with a pupil from a short training course on installation. He says they spent about five minutes showing the class how to read a meter and not one word about why we need to take readings and what use can we make of those readings. He still had to ring me to ask how to do it.

He says he was told not to mark the cables and not to twist them in pairs ... in other words to leave the inside of a control panel looking like a bag of entrails so that any other engineer visiting the site would not be able to sort out how they had wired the panel. Bunkum!

Any engineer worth his salt would still have the wiring sussed out in about five minutes flat. Another half an hour would see the wires neat and tidy and twisted in pairs and labelled with the skilled engineer pointing out to the customer how it should have been done in the first place, in other words he is making our first engineer look a complete Bozo.

Too much in too little time

I can see what has happened and it's all to do with getting bums on seats.

By unleashing half trained, ill informed people on the industry you are doing untold damage

Mike Lynskey

In the early days when there were only an odd one or two training houses it was easy to attract customers so the course could be set to give plenty of time to cover each subject and to ensure that all the pupils understood what was being taught. The paying customer was given a lot of good background information and, often as not, went away having got value for money. Then we had an upsurge in the number of people offering alarm training resulting in not enough customers to fill every course.

To get more than your fair share of customers you have to offer to cover more sections of the industry for less money. The unsuspecting candidate naturally opts for the one that seems better value because it offers more for less. The problem is that we have now got to the stage that some training companies are offering so much in so little time that they have only time to gloss over the basic essentials, and I have serious doubts that the poor unsuspecting punter who attends is even getting the basic essentials.

I would therefore like to make a public plea to all private training companies ... please, please, please get your training right. By unleashing half trained and ill-informed people on to the alarms market you are doing the industry untold damage.

Whilst we are on the subject , I am also not happy with the official NVQ training program in its current state. I have recently been doing some assessments on some young students and I have come to the conclusion that somewhere the whole program has gone adrift.

For a start they are lumping fire and Intruder alarms together in the same assessment package. Fair enough, the questions may well be identical but fire and Intruder alarms are like chalk and cheese so the answers are different.

For example, if you ask the question "Is the control panel correctly sited?" The answers could not be more different. An intruder panel should not be on view from outside and it should be within the protected area. On the other hand the fire alarm panel should be on view from outside and has no need to be within the protected area.

What about the tools of our trade?

On scanning through the whole of my assessor's handbook it appears that there are far more pages about Health and Safety at work, and "contributing to a safe working environment" than there are about the actual installation. There are very few questions about the use of tools and yet plenty on clearing up afterwards. Individual items like PIRs, microwaves, bell boxes and any other specific items essential to our trade are just not mentioned.

Don't get me wrong, I think health and safety, learning to work together and clearing up afterwards are all very necessary parts of our training. But not to the point where it takes precedence over the actual installation.

I have yet to find a customer who will say, "That lad knows how to pitch a ladder safely – give him the money". No, they pay for a finished product and health and safety is our own problem. The more I read the assessor's manual the more I am convinced that our industry is hell bent on covering it's backside and being politically correct to the point of forgetting that the idea is to train the next generation to fit alarms.

There again the paperwork and processes we have to go through to gain a qualification make it such a pain in the bum that it is easier to go on a short course at one of the private training houses and ignore the NVQ. Also, looking at it logically, if health and safety takes such a high precedence, isn't it about time it was made a separate qualification all on its own and leave us free to train the next generation properly?

Driven to distraction

"Fourth ..." shouted the driver, wanting me to change gear up from third!

Well I had to – his foot was hard to the floor, the engine was racing towards the red danger line and he had his hands full.

He had been steering with his elbows and rolling a cigarette when the mobile phone rang and out of sheer habit he continued the roll-up with his right hand and grabbed the phone with his left, the hand he would normally have used to changed gear. I can recommend this guy's driving as a cure for constipation any day.

Shortly afterward he commented that I was a good passenger, presumably because I didn't scream and call him names like his last now-departed assistant. Normally the engineers that taxi me around during my working day are safe drivers but there is always the odd one ... Like the one who had an 'X' shaped gear change instead of the normal 'H' like the rest of us. He just used to thump the lever to whichever corner of the box he needed to be at.

... Or the lad who refused to slow down for the speed bumps. We hit the first one at about 40mph and it nearly rattled the teeth out of my head. After that I hung on like grim death.

I was just getting into an engineer's van one day when I noticed that the front tyres were very badly worn on the outside edges, I remarked about it to the driver thinking I was being helpful because his tracking needed adjustment.

"Oh, they always wear like that, it's the van and the load," he replied.

When we got going I realised that the real reason was that he always waited until the last minute and then braked all the way around every corner! He must get through a set of tyres every ten thousand miles.