Becoming an electrician isn’t easy. There are a great many skills required by anyone hoping to take it up as a profession, meaning it’s not always easy to know where to start. We’ve compiled a list of 5 of the most important skills required by anyone hoping to become an electrician, and have explained their significance below.
A successful electrician should possess the following 5 professional traits:
- Mathematical ability
- Patience
- Rounded, technical understanding
- Precision
- Communication and politeness
Maths
While there’s an app for pretty much anything these days, it’s essential that you have a solid mathematical grounding if you’re going to make it as an electrician. The ability to add, subtract, divide, and multiply quickly makes the job an awful lot easier. It’ll interrupt your working flow if you need to consult the calculator for everything. Furthermore, it helps if you can understand fractions and understand volume. Again, while you could rely on calculators and computers, it’ll make you a much better electrician if you’ve got a good foundation in these areas.
Patience
To become an electrician, you have to patient. Not only do the qualifications themselves take a while to obtain, but you’ll also need to stay patient on the job. Working with numerous wires and switches can, sometimes, be a little frustrating. It’s important, therefore, that you don’t blow your own fuse every time you have to fiddle with something.
Precision
As we’ve just alluded to, it is often required that you’ll have to get up close and personal with a number of small, awkward wires. Patience is one thing, but you’ll also need to be precise in these situations. Rewiring an entire home requires real attention to detail and the utmost precision. Wire the house the wrong way and you could undo all of the good work you and your colleagues have completed. Attention to detail is key.
Technical understanding
We realise this is a vague one, but some people just don’t get on with technology. We’ve all got that one friend or relative who breaks a computer every time they walk past it. If that happens to be you, becoming an electrician is going to be difficult. You need to have the ability to work with computers, do maths, do physics, and use specialist equipment. While an interest in the latest technologies isn’t completely necessary, it would certainly help.
Communication
This one really boils down to the nature of work you’re doing. If, like most electricians, your job requires you to visit people in their homes or places of work, you’re going to need to be polite. No-one wants to let a grumpy, rude person into their property, even if they do know how to fix the electrics. You’ll also struggle to succeed as an electrician if you can’t communicate with your customers effectively; you might need them to flick switches, or you might need to tell them not to plug anything in downstairs. Regardless of the situation, you need to be an excellent communicator if you’re going to become an electrician.
Who fits the bill?
Here at London Electricians, all of our workers have proven themselves on a consistent basis to possess all of the above skills (and, frankly, many more). If you’re located in London and have a problem with your electrics, get in touch with us and we’ll see what we can do.
Give us a call on 020 8728 9179, or fill out one of our online contact forms and we’ll get back to you. After all, we wouldn’t be doing our job properly if we didn’t know how to communicate!
