Anyone here a working mechanic? career advice!

[Chazchuzzlewitt]

once again my current job as a broadcast sound engineer looks to be unstable, and thoughts of moving out of the city and getting a 'real' job come to mind.

I come from a family background of engineering, and I have self-taught myself how to fix and maintain my cars... and I really enjoy it. So while not intending to entirely give up the broadcast industry I was wandering if anyone had advice what the best path into wrenching for a living might be?
Do garages look for qualifications or experience or both?

 

[television]

Hi Chaz, whilst I have worked for broadcast stations and done work for the BBC I can understand your predicament. the BBC had the most objectionable people working for pea nuts as their mummies darlings " Oh yes,our claud works for the BBC", and I used to love winding those guys up, any way your problem. I think that the most important atribute is wanting to do something, that's 60% of the battle.. Main dealers do have first class training programs with the back up that every job and how to do it is on the computer from start to finnish.

I am going to MechanEx a trade show for motor car engineers, this one mainly deals with diagnostic and repairing in genral, this one is at Sandown Park, surrey on the 21st and 22nd Nov.

There are trade shows all around the country at various times, its a good insight and you never know who you meet at these places. Do bear in mind that everyone has to start somewhere, the electronic world is dying so fast, On one forum this time last year there were 150 members,its down to 5 now.
Many of these first class electronic eng; have moved over to car elctronics.

malcolm

 

[Ultymate]

I've just reached retirement having worked as a mechanic all my working life, the last twenty as an AA patrol personally I would'nt reccomend it to my worst enemy much as I enjoy working on cars. In my estimation most garages not all hope to take on monkeys as staff to pay them peanuts theres usually little or no sick pay and pensions are abysmal, the pension scheme at the AA was ok so i can survive. Also apprentiships are hard to find and in my opinion not usually that good these, most mechanics not all these days if their computer don't tell them what's wrong have no basic mechanical skills to fall back on, don't get me wrong I know you need computers to carry out diagnostic checks on modern cars but how often have you heard a garage say the cars ok the computer can't find any faults, so in short if I had my time over I would'nt go there JMHO.