Hi All,

Just a quick one please, how does everyone handle apprentices on site, what i mean is if an electrical company sent in 2 apprentices to a chemical manufacturing site to carry out work would you be happy to let them at it or should there be a qualified electrician with them at all times? 

Thanks,

Torres

What did your contract say? i.e. did you specify a level of competence

As with everything we all need to learn although personally I would expect a "qualified" electrician to be monitoring and responsible for any works they conduct after all if they were my direct apprentices then they would be supervised.

When you issue them with their Clearance to Work don’t you check their competence to work on your site?

Check the invoice carefully and if, as is likely, someone chooses to fraudulently submit charges at qualified rates I would be seeking significant discount.

Is the concern because they are apprentic esnor they were being asked to do more than they are competent. Have they been on site supervised several times, near then end of their apprentice time, and being asked to change a plug or something quite different. 

Steve - I don't think that Torres or any respondent to his thread has indicated that they are "happy with 'unqualified' electricians working on a chemical plant unsupervised".

That it is a "chemical plant" is largely immaterial unless the work was what might be described as "safety critical" and that aspect was addressed by AK.

So, the questions are (A) whether these apprentices were given sufficient supervision so far as reasonably practicable to do whatever they were doing and (B) if what they handed back to the client was safe to operate, SFARP.

If the answer to (B) is yes, then simply deciding to redo the work and then charging the contractor for rework is a recipe for a lengthy and potentially expensive legal battle, unless the client's contract makes provision for such event. 

Over the years the rabbit hole of what consititutes qualification or competence in the field of electrical matters has long been discussed - some example posts:

http://forum.iosh.co.uk/posts/t116525-Contractor-Electrical-Engineer-competence

http://forum.iosh.co.uk/posts/t123773-Proof-Of-Electrical-Competence

http://forum.iosh.co.uk/posts/t106210-Electrical-Qualification

So personally whilst I do not endorse "unqualified" works it is hard to state a base level of qualification or competence when nothing is set in regulation or statute unlike schemes such as GasSafe.

The way I am looking at this...If I was the plant manager (I have been in the past) and I discovered that an apprentice had been sent instead of a fully qualified electrician...despite what is says in any contract - which incidentally will most likely not specify the level of supervison but will most likely specifiy the level of qualification - I would as I said before look at it that this fundamentally puts my production at risk...now before we get into a long debate about competence...answer this question - if a company sent an upqualified apprentice to your house to work on it unsupervised would you be happy?

The fact that this is a chemical plant IS material to the answer and all the individuals need to be qualified or thier work signed off by a qualified person...end of there is no get out here ...if you have a weak contract then maybe you can get away with it but when asking a queation like this I would hope you are looking for the right answer and not just how to get away with saving money on a contract...that is how people get dead...