Contractor's Continuing Education -- What a Crock

First, let me apologize for my bad language above. I can usually restrain myself here; I’m trying to run a moderately toned and family friendly site. Besides, my Mom reads this stuff. But there are limits to my forbearance …

As I write this, I’m taking the second of my mandatory 7-hour continuing education courses for my Florida General Contractor’s license. I’m required to complete 14 hours every two years, the deadline is 49 hours and 53 minutes away, but I’m going to be too busy tomorrow and I’ll be traveling the day after, so I have to finish it tonight.

It used to be we had to go to some hotel conference room somewhere and pay about $200 to get the credits. Invariably, the course consisted of some drone (Whoops! Sorry about that.) standing in front of the room reading the text of his little handbook word for word for word for word for word….zzzzzzz. There was no escape. I’d sit there, butt numb, and after an hour or two I’d have read the booklet all the way through. Drawing beards, horns, mustaches, and pointy ears on any people in the booklet might consume another 20 minutes if I was lucky. After that there was nothing to do but clock watch and time the cycling of the air-conditioning, which was never set low enough to satisfy me or my flannel-wearing brethren. It was torture.

Some time before the last deadline in ’02, the Florida Construction Industry Licensing Board had two brilliant ideas. The first was a name change. No longer would they be known as “the Florida Construction Industry Licensing Board!” Henceforth they would be known as the Construction Industry Licensing Board. Wow, talk about a bold initiative. But their other idea was really remarkable – they began allowing contractors to take their continuing education on-line.

It was still tedious as all get-out (that means “very” or “a lot” to y’all Yankees) but at least it was tedious in the comfort of my own room. The course material was still as repetitive and dull as it had always been, thanks to the CILB’s approval requirements for certified courses. Every 7 hour course has to include an hour for workplace safety and workers compensation insurance and something else so boring I forget what it is even though I’m taking a course on it right now. And besides the obvious comfort and convenience of taking it on-line, I could also take it at my own speed, so I got through my 14 hours in about 5 because I am, relative to my construction peers any way, a fast reader.

Of course it was too good to last.

This time around, the CILB has come up with some new regulations. No way are those brainiacs going to let sharp operators such as myself get away with scamming the poor defenseless public with 14 hours of credit for 5 hours of work. Uh-uh. No way, Jose. Not gonna happen. This time, the rules are:

1.) You must spend at least 5 hours and 50 minutes of actual time on-line to get 7 hours of credit. Furthermore,
2.) You must be active on the site. If you’re inactive for more than 10 or 15 minutes (honestly, who can remember this kind of stuff?) you’re timed out. And,
3.) If you’re timed out, then the time you put in up to that point is erased and you have to start over!

No doubt some of you geeks could program your way around that no problemo, but for The Happy Carpenter it means (be right back….) clicking back to the class’ website every few minutes and hitting the advance arrow. I have about 4 hours and 50 minutes to burn up with about 75 slides to go, so every 4 minutes it’s back to The Contractor’s Institute class in Construction Math and Plan Reading to click my mouse button.

I’ve been doing this all day. I lost some time this morning when I had to help get the boat ready and was away too long. Amazingly, I did NOT lose my time when the power went out and my computer rebooted. But the big joke is the tests.

Each 7 hour course is broken into several modules. The first was broken into about a dozen, the second into half that. At the end of each module, I take a test. They’re toughies, these tests. Some are up to four questions long, others up to one question. That’s right – click and read for a friggin’ hour about OSHA regulations and get one multiple choice question. And if you don’t get at least 70% correct, guess what? They give you the correct answers and you have to take the test again.

So I finally figured out the system:

• Click through the pages as fast as your browser will refresh.
• Take the test, going from memory or random answers; it doesn’t matter.
• If you fail, write down the correct answers
• Take the test again, giving the correct answers.
• Go on to the next module.
• Wash, rinse, repeat.

When you’re done with this, you’ll still have about 5 hours of mandatory (oops, BRB. Click.) on-line time to spend. That should give you plenty of time to learn everything you wanted to know about anything that can be found on-line… in four minute bites.

What a bunch of crap.

The next “Progressive” that tells me how necessary and important it is to have the government protecting the public from the vicious side of capitalism will be surprised to find a 22 ounce waffle-headed framing hammer sticking out of his ear. I have 20 years of experience in the construction industry, and I can tell you for a fact that the whole rigmarole of licensing doesn’t protect the public from squat.

The testing and continuing education is a joke. It doesn’t protect you, Gentle Reader, from anything. Plenty of dishonest, lazy, incompetent, know-nothings can pass the initial licensing test. That initial test is a two day ordeal, given twice a year at I think four locations in the state. Since it’s important to people’s livelihood, the test has to be absolutely cut & dried -- any ambiguity or subjectivity would be the subject of lawsuits and claims of discrimination, so naturally they make the exam thusly:

It’s in basically two parts. The first is plan reading, the second is an open-book test of reference materials. The cost of the reference materials was about $600 when I last upgraded my license from Class B to Class A. The secret to passing the reference portion of the test is simple:

Forget everything you’ve learned in the mandatory two years (with college degree) or four years (in the trades) structural experience you needed to qualify just to sit for the exam. For this you need only have the Dewey Decimal System smarts to select the appropriate book from your stack, open the book to the index (usually found at the back of the book) and find the right topic. Go to the indicated page and find the exact sentence from the exam on the pages of your book. Find the missing word. Color in the bubble. But first, watch out for true-false inversion trick questions, and the other hackneyed test tripwires, such as “always” and “never.” But usually, just find the missing word. On to the next question.

Does that make you feel safer about the expensive licensed contractor you just hired to build your church or school? It shouldn’t. But surely the plan reading portion of the test is real-world, and will separate the sheep from the goats, right?

Wrong. Oh, it looks legitimate at first glance, and if you weren’t a builder yourself you might think so even after looking it over. After all, shouldn’t a man (Yes, it’s almost always a man, dear. Come on in, we’d love more women in our trade. Seriously.) who aspires to be a General Contractor be able to figure out the exact number of linear feet of curb on a site plan?

Well, yes and no. Yes, he does need to be able to figure it out. And in the real world this is how he does it. He takes a little wheelie thing and runs it over the curbs shown on the plans. Time is money, and there’s no reason to get hung up on a couple of feet of curb in the midst of a million dollar project that he has two weeks to estimate. Sure, he could go back and forth on the plans, adding and subtracting the length of the property lines shown on the survey, the set-backs, the radii, and of course adjust it all to the centerline dimension so no corner gets doubled. He could, but that would take an hour. With his little wheelie it takes one minute and is 98% accurate. And you know what else? There is no right answer.

“What?,” you say. “Of course there’s a right answer. When the job is done there is only x amount of curb, neither more nor less, and it’s his job to make it so.” Which is true. But our Contractor Hero is not the surveyor. He does not really care how many feet of curb there are on the plan. It is his job to purchase the concrete, and concrete is sold in units of 1 cubic yard, with a 5 yard minimum order. Theoretically, you could make 37.0 feet of 6” x 18” FDOT type ‘D’ curb from one cubic yard of concrete. Sure you could, but how much will you spill? And if you need to pour 38’ of curb, you will need to buy 2 cubic yards. But that’s only if you have somewhere else to put the other 3 cubic yards of your 5 yard minimum on the site – if this is the last piece of concrete to pour, you’re going to have to buy 5 cubic yards to get that 1.02’s worth of curb. If you have a lot and you can’t pour it all at once, then you’ll have to add at least half a yard to each phase to get full cubic yards per order. To make matters interesting, the reinforcing steel comes in 20’ or 40’ lengths, with a 40 bar diameter lap.

But chances are you aren’t going to do this at all, because you’re probably going to sub it out. In that case, all you want to know is that there are approximately 450’ of curb in this job, and curb is going for about $10 per lineal foot, so you are prepared to get bids in the neighborhood of four to five thousand dollars.

Back to the test: Our poor little wannabe contractor, who knows all this stuff, is faced with doing something he’s never had to do before and will never do again – calculate the exact as-built quantity of curb from dimensions on the site plan (no scaling allowed). And he’ll probably get it wrong, because the test writers have thoughtfully provided all the obvious wrong answers, such as not correcting for centerline dimensions, or including curb in the right of way when the question only asked for curb on site, etc. Which has exactly nothing to do with his competency to build.

The whole test is like that.

I used to work with a guy named Roy, back before I went out on my own, at a small commercial firm in Clearwater, Florida named Bankston Construction Corporation. Roy was about 50 years old then, and had been in construction his whole working life. Together we built the Pinellas County Minimum Security Facility. He was the superintendent, I was the wet-behind-the-ears project manager. My boss, John Bankston, correctly concluded that it would be the perfect job to train me on; not only was he providing a top-notch superintendent, Roy, but the County and Architect would so load the job up with supernumeraries that there was little chance any mistake of mine would go by un-caught. And so it went. We built the jail on time and quite profitably with a minimum number of screw-ups. The point is this – Roy couldn’t pass the commercial contractor’s test to save his life. The big Swede knew all there was to know about light commercial construction, but he could not pass that test. He just didn’t have the kind of mind that can set aside what it knows and blithely give the answer that, though wrong, is what the test writers want. As I recall, we took the test at the same time. I got about 98% correct -- I’d just graduated from the University of Florida, and believe me I knew how to play the standardized test game. But poor Roy couldn’t get over the 70% hurdle.

And he never did. I don’t know how many times he took that stupid test, but it was quite a few. He finally gave up on it and settled for the residential exam which is a lot more real-world, and as far as I know he’s out there still, building excellent room additions. But while we were there, many lawyers and CPA’s who managed to finagle the experience qualifying requirements passed the test no sweat.

So please, don’t think this kind of licensing is protecting you or the elderly from anything. It will protect you from the Roys of the construction world, but not from dishonest test-takers. And speaking of which, while pounding this out I clicked that continuing education button 22 times. Only 3 hours to go……..

Comments

[Frank Borger]

I can certainly understand why you would want to apply a framing hammer to some of the bureaucrats who run our licensing boards, but please think again.

That would be a horrible thing to do to a framing hammer. You might damage it.

[pedro]

You know what, Frank? It's not the bureaucrats -- they tend to be decent people trying to do a good job. It's the Progressives who make the demand for a useless job, and who will NEVER understand that their basic premises are flawed. And the Socialists, too.

[Adrian]

This is one of the very few times that I'll ever say the US has something to learn from France. The French, while dogged by socialism in most areas of life, have still managed to maintain a liability-based system of ensuring building quality. (If you build it for someone else and it fails, big fat lawsuit. If you build it for yourself and it fails, well, you're an idiot.) I don't know if there's licensing or not, but there are no onerous builing permits and inspections, and the building quality is generally higher with lower costs. We should learn.

[pedro]

Sacre bleu, Adrian. Praise for France on MY blog? That will never do. The same could be said for their wine, but The Happy Carpenter has had no French wine since the French veto (except they did trick me on a bottle of "Fat Bastard" -- who would expect a bottle labeled "Fat Bastard" would be French. But they won't fool me a second time.)

But I should have mentioned Texas -- when I was there for one year in '83, Texax still wasn't licensing contractors. Didn't notice any buildings tumbling down.

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