Careers · Trades
Paid from your first year, no fees, qualified in four. Then you can work for anyone or nobody.
Electricians install, maintain and repair electrical systems. Houses, sites, factories, and increasingly solar panels, heat pumps and car chargers. There is a formal qualification at the end of it and exams that people fail, so treat anyone describing it as unskilled labour as telling you more about them than about the job.
Once you are qualified you can work for a company, work for yourself, or end up running the site rather than being on it.
There is more than one. None of these is the "proper" one.
Find an employer, they register you, and you alternate between working for them and blocks of training. You are on the payroll throughout.
A year of electrical training makes an employer far likelier to take you. Common route for anyone who came out of sixth year with nothing lined up.
People start this at twenty-eight after five years of something they disliked. It is allowed.
A Leaving Certificate at a basic grade level, or an approved equivalent, or an employer who wants you anyway. Maths and a practical subject help. High points are not the currency here. Check the current entry requirements rather than taking this paragraph as gospel.
A percentage of the qualified rate from year one, rising each year. You finish owing nothing, having been paid for four years. Compare that with the alternative honestly and not sentimentally.
“It's what you do if you're not academic.”
The exams fail people. Different difficulty, not a lesser one.
“You need to know someone.”
It helps, which is why this site exists. Ringing round local firms also works, and hardly anyone bothers.
“There's no progression.”
Supervision, contracting, inspection, teaching, your own company. Some of them earn more than the people who looked down on it.
These pages tell you how it works. A person can tell you what it was actually like. Mentor profiles are open to registered schools.
How schools registerInformation checked September 2026. Requirements, fees and deadlines change — always confirm with the official sources linked above before making a decision.