I can give you real-life examples.
The joint apprenticeship committee that I used to sit on—in a former life I was a business manager for the Hamilton local for electricians—we had approximately 280 apprentices, and we had that problem with getting apprentices to go to school, because of their economic problems and whatnot, so we went with Mohawk College and with our representatives from the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities and asked if we could set this up somehow for night school for, say, two nights a week. That way the apprentices could still work during the day, could go to night school, and could then come back. Could we could break it up so that, exactly as you said, we could have a week on, a week off, a week on, a week off?
So they tried a couple of those programs. It was a miserable failure to get young people to focus on this, especially if they're working.
They work all day. They might work outside. You're in the apartment building business, so I'm sure you know they get built outside. As a result, you're outside all day and you're cold, especially in the wintertime. Now you've got to go home, grab a bite to eat real quick before you head off down to your local community college, and then sit there for three or four hours to learn something else. What's your retention level? Generally speaking, our experience was it wasn't very good.
Some people were good at it. Some people can work quite well under that environment, but the majority of people in the trades are not scholars. They're not like the kids who go to university and cram and cram and cram. They're used to that lifestyle. Most apprentices don't think along those lines. In the end we had to end the program because the success rate was terrible, and we ended up forcing them to go into block situations.
Just to be clear, it's not just eight weeks. They go eight weeks one time, and then they go two periods of 10 weeks on top of that, so there's a total of 28 weeks of training.
As I said, my experience with it in our particular group was not very good.