If you follow your friends, your path out of high school might look something like this: graduate, go to college, study for four years, work up a huge debt, graduate from college, look for a job in your field, end up working a menial job in Toronto CD replication or at a department store to meet your student loan payments. It's a depressing prospect, but if you're planning for your future you should know that it's not the only prospect open to you. If you like to work with your hands, you might consider taking a skilled trade, which is generally learned through apprenticeship rather than academic study.

The concept of apprenticeships dates all the way back to the Middle Ages and for a long time it was the only way that lower and middle class people had access to careers. Today much more emphasis is placed on university, to the point where there are plenty of job opportunities in an Edmonton auto body shop or a building company because not as many people choose to apprentice in a trade. Therefore if you're worried about your job prospects, it's well worth looking into studying a trade.

In the early days of apprenticeships, the apprentice period began when the apprentice was still a child. The child's parents would send him (trades, except for sewing and baking, were only for males in those times) to live with a master craftsman. The apprentice would live with the master's family, learning the art of sludge removal or carpentry from the master and performing whatever jobs the master required in exchange for the training. Once the apprentice came of age, he would become a journeyman and work for a certain period of time for the master before setting off on his own.

Today's apprenticeships are a little different. Not everyone who wants to be a carpenter has to have family who knows a master carpenter, and apprenticeships don't begin until the apprentice is at least sixteen. This can make drive pulley apprenticeships hard to arrange on one's own, which is where vocational schools come in. The apprentice applies to vocational school, does some practical or classroom training, after which the school arranges a placement with a master that lasts a few years depending on the trade.

If you think you might want to study a trade, such as plumbing, auto mechanics, heatshrink sleeving, or even baking, you should start down the appropriate path as soon as you can. That means enrolling in a vocational high school with the appropriate program rather than an academic one. If you've already graduated from an academic high school, look through the calendars for nearby community colleges. Find one that has the program you want and apply.