On 17 November 2011 00:36, <[email protected]> wrote: > but does this mean that you aren't allowed to work on your own car? or > only that if you are going to certify that a car will pass the test you > must be certified? >
No, it means that the testers must be certified. No mechanic in the country will certify that the car will pass the test (you could hit a pothole between garage and testing center, blow a taillight and fail the test, and Ireland is second only to the US in terms of how litigious its population can be). > what about farmers working on their own tractors? > Same story - they're fine, the testers must be certified. In both cases, if you tried something stupid - say, you chipped the car in a stupid way - and the results caused an accident on a busy motorway and it got people injured or killed, there'd be a legal liability that would probably be leveraged in court afterwards. There could be major financial penalties even if you escaped a custodial sentence, and of course, there's no possibility of insurance against that kind of thing. In other words, it's legal so long as nothing goes wrong and nobody goes to court. Same thing with uncertified mechanics doing work for pay - if they're gifted geniuses who never slip up, no one would ever complain. And maybe there are some like that still out there. But we never hear of them. Instead, all we ever hear of is cowboys who do slipshod work and occasionally nearly kill someone by forgetting cotter pins so that wheels come off cars in traffic and the like. End result, everyone's warned to only use certified mechanics by the media, and uncertified mechanics lose business, because it's a damn sight easier for Joe Public to look at a fancy looking cert on a wall than objectively evaluate a person's described skillset in an area that if Joe Public understood, they wouldn't be paying someone else to do the work in in the first place... > I would be _really_ surprised if there were no entry-level jobs for > mechanics that did not require certification, a 4-year training before you > can start work is rather extreme, even in law you can work before you pass > the bar, and you can prepare your own legal documents with no certification > at all. > It's a four-year apprenticeship. Not a four year college course where you never work on a real customer's car. Apprentices work under supervision during apprenticeships (there are also academic courses within the apprenticeship). However, the mechanic you're apprenticed to has to be approved - which makes sense, otherwise, you could get some 18-year-old kid who couldn't assemble an IKEA table rebuilding your brake calipers without sufficient supervision and guidance, with the expected level of results. I suspect we've gone off-topic here though, by the way :D -- Mark Dennehy
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