Colin McRae Quotes

We need to tell better stories of men and women who master a trade. We have to stop telling kids to blindly follow their passion and show them the opportunities that exist. That was the big, overarching message of 'Dirty Jobs.'

If your route is that you are practically minded, and that is what presses your button, and you do an apprenticeship and you get a job that way, that is fantastic.

I always say my first job is my building trade. The rest comes and goes.

I think technical education and vocational skills and having a trade mean something.

Apprentice is the beginner - the first years you work in a craft in the European sense you are an apprentice. That takes 3 or 4 years. Then you are a journeyman. You can go from one master to another and learn other tricks and other secrets.

When I was young I had an apprenticeship as an engineer.

I come from a family with a long tradition in shoemaking, and I still live in a region famous for its shoemakers. It is getting harder and harder to find skilled workers. There are no professional training institutes, so we have to train our own employees. And an apprenticeship takes three years.

My parents, and especially my mother, encouraged by the director of the local school which I was attending, wanted in spite of everything to send me to a National School of Arts and Crafts so that I could later become an engineer.

I wanted to be able to talk with people who have trade jobs and make records with them. I want to do more records with carpenters, electricians, people who specialize in even more bizarre trades that are off the beaten path.

The system in Germany is different, as you sign up with a company for two or three years, and you work exclusively with them; you can't do any film work on the side.

I am an earnest advocate of manual training and trade teaching for black boys, and for white boys, too.

People of Baltimore, if you want to simply learn a new trade, if you want to join the Foundry, it's a membership. It's like joining a gym, and you can go and meet other entrepreneurs like you. You can talk about how to get financing. You can take a class on how to sew. You can take a class and say, 'I want to be an electrician.'

I told my mom for years that I wanted to be a manicurist, and she'd always be like, 'But what if you went to college and you got a degree?' She'd try to explain how I could actually do a thing that would make me a ton of money, or that I didn't have to just pick the business that was closest to our house.

I was walking home from school when I was about 17 with two friends, and they took a left into an electrical shop. While we were chatting away, they grabbed a couple of forms and I was handed one. My mum found it and made me fill it in. I got called for an interview, and that's how I ended up being an electrician for 11 years.

Apprenticeship is a proven model for developing a skilled workforce.

You don't need a college degree to be a good carpenter, welder, plumber, auto mechanic, member of the armed forces, or firefighter.

Behold the little State of Massachusetts, with more Institutions for industrial education than the entire South; let them see her textile schools, her schools of design, school of art, school of technology, manual-training institutes, trade schools, polytechnic institutes, schools of applied science and institutes of technology; let them see industrial departments in all her city high schools

If you are willing to be a lifelong learner, you can be a lifelong employee.

My job was to build, and that's still my job - and I like that better than interviews.

I was told by my father nine times a day that you were going to get a job the minute you finish your studies.

When I left school at 16, I became an apprentice television and radio technician, and was paid £17 a week, which was decent money in 1976. But the job turned sour when I gave myself an electric shock while repairing a television set.

I was in the U.K. and Germany and went to Volkswagen and learned about their apprenticeship model - young people become paid apprentices in trades. It's not a coincidence that youth unemployment is far lower in Germany than the United States because there are paid opportunities for young people to get experience.

I don't love being an actor, but I'm not qualified to be anything else. I was an auto mechanic and drove a tow truck and tried to go to school to be a paramedic.

The closest thing I have to a manager is my parents, for all their words of wisdom and business experience.

The idea of having proper qualifications had been very much ingrained in me. My father had a steady job for the Potato Marketing Board, and the family emphasis was on getting to university.