The Interview:
1. What is your job title? Commercial Transport Mechanic
2. What is your job description? Repairs buses and disassembles engines and rebuilds them to factory specifications
3. What are the duties and/or tasks you perform at your job? Building and rebuilding engines
4. What qualifications do you have for this job in the following areas:
a) training? Post secondary school, 4 year trades program
b) education? 4 year apprenticeship program
c) experience? 31 years working in mechanics and equipment repair
d) skills and attributes (personal qualities)? Highly qualified, gets along with co-workers, hands on experience, and mechanical aptitude
5. What are some of the things you like about this job? Seeing the end result of what he builds and the personal accomplishment when finishing things
6. What are some of the things you dislike about this job? The health and safety risks like the chemicals and machinery and the physical wear and tear on your body from years of lifting and moving stuff
7. How do you anticipate this job changing in the next 5 years or so? Less jobs for mechanics because there will be more and more just replacing parts of engines etc. instead of repairing the old engines
Student Reflection:
1. Give three reasons why you would like this job (be specific):
a) The personal achievement in finishing what you started
b) Getting to work with or meet so many different people
c) The hands on work and working with all kinds of different tools and machines
2. Give three reasons why you would not like this job (be specific):
a) The dangerous chemicals and health and safety risks
b) The physical demands and physical wear and tear over time
c) The jobs are very time consuming and it takes a long time to finish them
3. Is this job for you? Why or why not?
No this job is not for me. I don’t think this job is for me because if you get hurt doing it and you can’t work there again you didn’t get the education for a different kind of job, you’d have to get a job that doesn’t require that much education and you wouldn’t be paid very well or you’d have to go back to school then get a better job but that would take a while. I would also rather spend the time to get a great post secondary education and get a job that would pay better and have little to no health and safety risks.
4. Explain the value of the TOKTW experience in relation to your ideas about your post secondary (after high school) plans (education?, training?, travel?, work?).
I think it is useful to know or have an idea of what you want to be when you grow up and the TOKTW helps show you one area of what they could be and all the different jobs in that one area. So if you didn’t want to be what your parent is you could be someone with a job connected to theirs if you still wanted a job in that area. It also shows you different work environments and the kind of education you would need if you wanted that kind of job. It is also helpful to know if you would or wouldn’t like that job. Like if you have no idea what you want to be when you grow up you now know that that job is or isn’t for you. Then you now know that you found what you want to be, or that now you consider that job an option, or you now know what you don’t want to do, so you can cross that one off the list and consider something else.
