Toolbox Talk Is Becoming an Electrician a Good Idea for the future?

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[00:00:00] Ben Poulter:

So many jobs are becoming irrelevant over time. The jobs they've been replaced by Mon Technology. A hundred K machine can tell you a fault on a vehicle 10 times quicker than any mechanic can these days. And of course, yeah, I know they still need someone to push that test button on that machine. But employing someone to be able to push a button on a test machine is a lot cheaper than employing a qualified.

So is the job of an electrician going the same way in this podcast? That is what we're about to find out. Toolbox talks for electricians, loading electricians with the tools and the skills they need to reduce stress, gain back time, and earn more money. Welcome back. My name's Ben Poulter, your host. Now, can electricians be replaced by an automated computer or will electricians be replaced by an automated computer and maybe a robot one day in the future?

Because there is technology out there for everything these days. There's technology where I can go and get a automated AI to create a podcast for me. Not that I do that I like talking too much, but you might have heard the software called Chat gtp, and it's recently come online and it basically answers questions for you in a human.

and it's a bit like Google, I suppose, but it's got me thinking of the future of maybe an employed electrician or maybe self-employed, maybe electrician that run his own business and we could actually have a job in the future, or, well, there'd be no need for us one day, just like some of the jobs that used to be around, but will obviously, well, there were plates by te.

like a lift operator. You don't get people in lift anymore. Them os lifts they have, uh, someone that talks to you saying, yes, floor one, floor two, stuff like that. You don't need someone in lift operator anymore, you just press a button. It does what it needs. Maybe a switchboard operator for the phones where you see videos of these ladies that used to plug them in and.

Like change it. I think it was a wartime videos I used to watch that maybe they plugged the lines in to connect each phone line to people. You don't need that anymore. That ain't a job no more. There used to be a job for a lamp lighter. Some guy used to go around at night, obviously with a ladder and a stick maybe, and light the lamps.

Well, that's irrelevant now cause we've got electricity. , that job's out the. or maybe a typist. I'm not sure whether they use it in court anymore because, well, I haven't been to court for a few years, I must admit. But, they've got people that sit in a court and they type, but I'm assuming you don't need that anymore cuz you've got AI that'll just do it.

Automatically for you and even Film Projectionists used to have these guys that did these films and had this fantastic amount of kit and millions of bounds worth of kit, but have all been condensed now to maybe just do on a computer. Let's be honest, maybe a 10 grand computer can do a thousand films, but it just saves money in the film industry, I suppose.

There's them jobs have been replaced. . I know what I thought some of you youngsters out there that actually think there weren't a guy that went around. Light lamps are stupid cuz you do struggle to think that there're actually jobs in the past that technology replaced. Cuz before supermarkets had fridges, they used to be a guy that went round in a milk car and electric milk car and cause it was silent.

You probably didn't hear it. And when was the last time you saw a milk car and a milkman delivered your. It doesn't happen anymore cause everyone's got a fridge in their house. They go to the supermarket and they put it in the fridge. And you don't need, there's no need for a milk float. And a couple of years ago, I helped install six new office blocks.

They all came pre-wired. All you needed to do was basically join 'em together. You joined the lighting and the sockets, and there was one boarding one that fed the whole lot. There were sort of prefabbed buildings. And I found out, uh, later date that that's exactly how McDonald's go up. Cuz there's around where I live, I think there's five McDonald's and over the past two years there's been three new ones.

But they have shot up. They didn't take, they, I dunno if they put a foundation pad in down, but within a couple of months they were up running and that was it, serving McDonald's food. It was crazy how quick , they go up. So I did a bit of research and found out that they're prefabbed as well. , they're pre-built, ready to ship out.

In a, um, in a factory. So when they turn up, they just put 'em together, BI bash, Bosch, that's it. They're ready to roll. It's crazy. So if you think about it, whatever you say, that future is evolving right in front of us. And I don't think it's gonna be long before houses are built the same way. But with all the new technology evolving, there needs to be someone to maintain that equipment.

Sure. Even if every house or business or structure becomes pre-wired, there'd always be a fault that's gonna occur one way or another. And that's where us as electricians come in a machine. Yeah, it can tell you that, yep, there's a fault. Do not use this equipment. A rats chewed through the cable and it's says, sprung up a fault, but they're not gonna be able to get a machine to go in there to repair that fault efficiently.

You're gonna need a human being and not just any human being, you're gonna need electric. but it still doesn't say that , electrician's job is not changing cuz it is. It's evolving over the years as well. It's gotta changed a lot over the past, uh, I don't know, 10, 12 years. Cause if you are one of these electricians that are in your forties, like myself, it has changed a lot already.

I remember the days when I first started out. I used to put in thousands of these G 10 down lights. Everyone loved them. Everyone wants down lights, chrome, white, brass. Even sometimes they'd want these G 10 down lights because they looked the part, but then we had to upgrade them. We upgraded the lamps.

They come out with these G 10 L LEDs. So all we'd do is just change 'em, saying, yep, we can make it more efficient. They were better. They didn't cause the heat because the amount of times when these G 10 lamps were plastic, maybe from being Q that weren't brittle, You replaced them with LEDs that, eh, that didn't matter if they got hot anymore cause it didn't get so hot.

But now it's evolved to the next step where you get rid of them two U 10 fittings completely. You put a whole new fitting in, which is l e d, color changing Smart light that you can operate from your phone or your voice activated Alexa or Google, whatever. And it's not just the lighting that's changed, it's the sockets that are changing as.

Where it's a good idea these days to fit a 35 mill BackBox where you used to fit 20 fives cuz you'll fit your wire and your socket in there perfectly lovely and neat. But because of these USB sockets, they've got a a bit of a bigger profile. So you wanna put a bigger BackBox in for it would be nice and neat and it's not gonna cause any fault.

And we know as electricians that any socket can be changed. To a USB port socket. But I know that some customers they ask me, or if I put one of them in, do I have to put um, extra wire into that socket? No, it's just a USB port, like in the socket. So this could be a good idea for maybe a promotion to your customers to explain to them that I can just change any socket to usb.

Cause a lot of people don't actually understand that you can just do that. But there is something else happening in the world right now with electric cars. , we are all desperately trying to reduce our carbon footprint. I don't know. Well, I do obviously know why, because he owns own layers completely wrecked, and it's obviously down to us, but we're retired to reduce it with electric cars.

And I don't think the vans are quite there yet, cuz obviously we need the mileage. You can't sit off for 45 minutes to an hour charging up every day. Time is money at the end of the day, so you might as well get a petrol car for Vans at the moment. But it, it's not far around the corner cuz the cars have taken off in a huge way.

So much that there's not enough of these car charges installed around the world. There's not enough for the country that the people have got the cars, but there's not enough charges to be able to handle 'em. And I see it every day. I get text messages, emails, people crying out for EV installers to install these car charges, and they'll work around the clock to get these new charges put in.

But there's also a small problem with that as well. I think if these online courses that say, yeah, we'll train someone to. A car charger, you'll become a qualified electrician and will chuck in EV car charging as well. It's sort of a sweetener to some guys like yeah, you get an EV car charger cuz his EV car chargers, they're mass produced all around the world from different companies and different brands and I don't believe that maybe Volkswagen or Ciran or whoever, or Tesco's, Audi, whoever, they don't.

Bother about looking into the technology and how long the warranty lasts. They haven't been around for five minutes, so you won't know how long they last, and they don't look into that about how actually good them components are. It's the sales pitch. If someone comes along with a graph, fantastic sales pitch, it's right to get a 500 for a knockdown price.

It's all about money these days, so they don't last. . So along with the installers that have sort of just got qualified because they wanna make a shed load of money outta installers, these car charges, it's may be not their problem. To be honest. They might be doing a good job. I don't install these car charges, , myself, so I wouldn't know.

But these new people that are come along, new qualified, they're installing these car chargers that don't have a massive amount of a electrical knowledge, and the charges don't last long. It's just a concoction. Like you see these Tesla ones. , I'm not picking on Tesla in a way, but there's the Tesla ones that blow up.

Why does that blow up? The modern technology, the cars blow up as well, to be honest. But all these faults that happen, I just feel that these problems are gonna get worse. But with the government that are throwing money at it, and the car manufacturers throwing their electric cars at it, It's just gonna pick up, it's gonna go crazy even more than it is now.

They're gonna keep paying electricians to install these charging points and then they're gonna need periodic testing as well to keep them maintained cuz they're in public premises and public areas. So , if you've gotta need EV installers license, you're gonna get more and more in demand.

And I would maybe put your prices up now because if you're good, you could have a shed load of. . But there's also another thing that's came out well over the past, well, I think it's just booming over the past two or three years that's gonna get rid of some of the older electricians cuz they're not familiar with the technology of smart lighting and maybe not too interested.

Because if a light is supplied to be able to be used with maybe Alexa or Google, you can be damn sure that that customer wants you to set it up for 'em. And the old school electricians, some of them guys that still get out there, knock your 33 30 s or their, their little flip phone, they won't be able to set it up.

They won't be able to figure this software route. They won't be able to connect it to the app and get it all. You think about when you do it yourself, you register the product and you are syncing it up with the property's wifi. It can be tricky. Sometimes it can be a bit of a nightmare, and I know plenty of electricians that have spent a good hour getting it all set up to work.

But these are the things that customer wants and what the customer wants as electricians, as a workman, as a tradesman, as someone that runs your own business. Yeah, the customer gets what they want all the time, because if anything that I've learned over time that if someone designs it, it's gonna be someone that'll want it.

Like Siemens. Siemens have produced a coffee machine. You can control from an. now, personally, I don't even see the point because you've still gotta go to the machine and actually grab the coffee to be able to drink it. You can't drink that coffee virtually. But if someone has one, I've been around their house where they say, Hey, come check out my coffee machine.

I can control it from an app block and make you a coffee from my phone. I thought you're standing next to it, mate. You paid 200 pound for that function to be able to do it from your phone. If your wifi goes down, you can't use that anyway. Have you gotta get your ass outta bed to make a coffee like everybody else.

Yeah. Okay. Fantastic. It's a lovely little gimmick. And these gimmicks are what people want. They've even got these wifi washing machines. I can turn my washing machine on from work. Why? What's the point? . But if it comes with wifi and you can voice activate things, , they'll sell you. It every, every, everything in the world.

I think you can get a kettle that's voice activated, like, Alexa, boil the kettle. What's the point? I don't get it. You gotta go there and turn it on anyway to make your cup of tea an extra 30 seconds. Is your life really that tight schedule that you can't be bothered? But there is advantages to this technology that's going on for electricians, and that is renewable energy, mainly , solar panels, and wind farms.

Not just them huge farms either. There's customers that have solar panels on their roofs , on a housing estate, and even know people that have got their own wind turbines in the garden. Both of these renewable energy sources, They use inverters who installs and maintains inverters. Once again, it's us electricians and this is why there's so many options when becoming an electrician.

You don't have to be a domestic installer in working people's houses and in these council houses and smash people's stuff around. Move all their kit around cuz yeah, I understand. That can be a nightmare. A lot of guys call it house bashing. It is house bashing, but. The experience you gain working with power and electrics, it can take you on so many different career options.

This is why I believe that all those years ago when my dad told me, get a trade beyond you, you'll never be outta work son. Well, it's still true to this day. Maybe even more so for electricians cuz the modern world needs electricity to. and there's people all over the world who will pay a fortune for their supply never to go off.

They can't be without the wifi, they can't be without electric cuz they maybe run their businesses from home. And you think if someone does a stocks and shares business from home, if their computer goes down for 30 seconds, they miss a deal, then uh, yeah, it's gonna cost a fortune. So there's people out there that will pay a small fortune for you to install a backup just in case it should ever go down.

And these backups are called a UPS uninterrupted power supply. Well, there's something that I used to work on , all the time, all over the world with a telephone communications company because they couldn't have their network going down. It had cost them thousands, so they didn't want them to go down and we had to install them UPS's, and we also had to maintain them as.

But these days electricians are being asked to install backup generators into domestic premises, but they also want a UPS just in case because that five seconds it takes for the automatic changeover for the generator to come off the mains and go on and start the generator up to start creating power.

I don't want that. Five seconds. Five seconds. I will spend two grand on a UPS for the . little a bit of time that they might knock things down enough to start the computer up, I suppose. But yeah, , they'll pay a fortune for it. And these people, they have, they've got money to burn and they'll pay electrician to put the best equipment in that they'll probably never use.

And the funny thing is because they never use it, I've been there before. People ask me about, Hey, can you just test my, um, generator or my UPS supply said, yeah, okay, I'll, it's never gonna work. You change over. Switches just wrecked it. It, it's no good. It, it couldn't have been any good from the beginning, so they never, they've had it in there for maybe five or 10 years, but it wouldn't have worked.

Because I, I'm just assuming, I don't know what happened five years ago, but a bloke's come along, charged him 10 grand to put this supply in, thought he ain't never gonna use it. Took his 10 grand and done one. And it was five years later until he actually realized that it didn't work properly with someone else coming along to tell him it didn't have a power cut.

And then five years, he banged out 10 grand just in case his computer went. I, I don't know. Me personally, I don't mind if electric goes up, it's fine. The kids will talk to you for a little while rather than sitting on their iPads or sitting on their phones. But, nah, I'm not bothered about electricity going off.

Sometimes , it's a bit of a benefit. So as an electrician or even training to be an electrician, you will, or maybe you do, you've got a job for. This skill is evolving over time and I think the youngsters know that as well. Cause they're quite, they're obviously a lot better than me. iPads and registering apps and the smart lighting.

I just think they've grown up with it so they know exactly what they're doing. Cuz the work is out there. People want it, the demand, the smart lighting. They wanna walk into a room, click their fingers. And the light comes on or say, Hey, lights, turn on. That's, this is what people want. They want the voice activated.

They want the, the touch system. They don't wanna a flip a switch. That's sort of old hat Now, the modern technology, the modern day millionaires, they want everything fancy. And that work is out there. You just need to get your name out into the world for people to be able to find you so you can do the work for them.

And that's the plan. What I'm helping you to do with this podcast and also inside of the toolbox source for electricians Facebook group, which I'll leave a link in the show lights below so you can jump in there if you'd like to come check it out. And I will try my best to load you with the tools and the skills you need to reduce.

Gain back time and earn more money in your business, and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, and I'll see you back here on Monday at 6:00 AM So until next time, I'll see you again.