Triumph rider you speak a lot of truth.

Recently we had a engineer start with us who was 21, just finished an apprenticeship with Toyota/bt rolatruc and I s@@t you not, he didn't know how to change a tube of grease in a grease gun - and he was on good money! He couldn't solve a single problem without someone holding his hand.
Adventually he admitted they had only trained him to work on rolatruc PPT's. How the **** can you claim you've put a lad through an apprenticeship with this little overall background knowledge?
In the UK the young lads trained by the independants are better because they have to be, working on anything and everything without the magic laptop.

Myself I started with my father who was a one man band and have had a lot of good mentors who were grizzly 'ol buggers who taught me the value of hard work and how to solve my own problems. They seemed hard at the time but God, I thank them to myself everyday, they made me the engineer/man I am now.