I have a relative, a young man in his late 20s, who wants to become an electrician. He's looking at tech scools as well as apprenticeship opportunities. I'm hoping to find him some books or online resources that will help him. He has no tradeskill experience. He is a hard worker.
I'm less interested in reference books on ohm's law and more interested in "the path to become a good electrician" kind of resources.
I'm hoping one of our master tradesmen would like to provide some resources, recommendations, and tips. Anything productive is appreciated!
IBEW is a good place to start, if you can get in. You can try applying at a JATC (it's like $20 to take the test?) and hope you get called back for an interview, and then hired.
It's going to mostly be new-work though, especially as an apprentice. Which was something I always hated personally. And you can get pigeon-holed doing that stuff, if you aren't careful. But the apprenticeship programs are good overall. I've known some people who traveled a ton doing IBEW work and made good money, but they all complained that it was hard to have a life doing that. I've also known folks who refused to travel, stayed local, and had to sign the books a lot.
If you do the 5, you can turn out and then things could change. Personally I'd knuckle down and finish the apprenticeship, and then take stock. If you don't like doing new work, you can start looking at maintenance and service gigs. The bad thing there is, it can be a big adjustment going from more construction, to more maintenance.
You don't have to start out union. But I'd be careful about trying to avoid the fly-by-night shadetree non-union shops. There's decent non-union places that will do bigger jobs and might be willing to hire, but I'd generally avoid any employer with less than 30-40 people unless you know someone.
Tech schools can be good, depending. But I don't think people should look at it from an "Apprenticeship vs Trade School" viewpoint either. An apprenticeship is going to give you a far different experience from a tech school, and vice versa. At least with an apprenticeship...that comes with steady work as well. A program at a school is fine...but most people can't just afford to do full-time trade/tech school for two years w/o working, so they do 2 classes a semester while working full time elsewhere.
I'd say try for an IBEW apprenticeship first. If that doesn't happen, try to find a job that might hire as maintenance or has different maintenance departments, and do the tech school at night. Even if it is working production or as an operator in a plant. Once you get courses under your belt, you might be able to get over to maintenance and end up doing electrical for work while taking those courses.
With no experience, I honestly don't know what resources would help. Being new is rough, and there's a lot to learn like how not to kink conduit, don't loan out your tools, which parts of the NEC you're actually going to need, wtf linesman's pliers are, how scissor lifts are not ATVs and no you can not make it over that 3" drop. You'll mount boxes until you want to cry...and then you'll mount more boxes. There's the 'ghetto' way to do most anything, and then there's the right way. You'll learn from Bob that you can cut hairs/strands to 'make' cables fit into lugs, and then you'll learn that there's a lot of fucking idiots out there and to never listen to Bob. There will be an enormous amount of scutwork before being ready to take on learning anything additional, and you only learn that stuff by doing it.
I will say that I wish I could have been able to use my phone and Google any questions I had, when I was starting out. The Mike Holt forums are a decent resource, and his textbooks aren't bad. His code-change stuff is excellent, but that's probably not beginner friendly. Mostly if I'm stumped and I'm too lazy to open a book, I'll google and read any results from his forums, if they pop up.
I don't think there's really any resources I could point out that would be worth anything to someone who hasn't started yet. But that changes if/when he starts somewhere and starts running into stuff and getting experience.