Apprentice and labourer

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• Apprentice and labourer

$20 to $27 an hour

Full time, no experience needed, Vancouver and the Lower Mainland

A way into drywall that does not require you to already know it. You will spend the first stretch on protection, stocking and cleanup, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Then you get taught to cut and hang, and later to coat, in that order and for a reason. We are always willing to talk to someone who wants to learn the trade properly.

• 1 Protection, stocking and cleanup

  Masking and covering floors and fixtures, carrying board to the right rooms before hanging starts, mixing compound, keeping tools clean, sweeping and bagging offcuts. This is where you start and it is the least interesting part of the job. It is also the part that decides whether a customer thinks we were careful in their house.

• 2 Cutting, lifting and hanging

  Once you can be relied on for the first lot, you get put on the board. Scoring and snapping, rasping edges, holding sheets to a ceiling while someone fastens them, then hanging simple walls yourself. Most people reach this within a few months if they turn up.

• 3 Coats and finishing

  Mud last, because it is the hardest to undo. Tape coats on straightforward seams under someone's eye, then sanding, then progressively harder work. Nobody is handing you a Level 5 skim in your first year and any employer who does is not teaching you, they are gambling with a customer's wall.

• Attitude, because the skill is our job to teach.

We have no way to assess your drywall ability, because the role assumes you have none. So the conversation is about something else entirely: whether you will be there at 7:30 on the second Tuesday of a wet November when the job has moved twice and you are back on cleanup.

Being taught properly means being corrected often, and some people take that badly. A boarder telling you the sheet is a quarter inch out is not having a go at you, they are stopping you from doing it wrong for the next ten years. If you can hear that without it ruining your afternoon, you will learn this trade quickly.

The other half is care. Almost everything you do early on happens inside somebody's home or somebody's unit in a strata building, often with their furniture still in it. Carrying a sheet through a hallway without marking the paint is a real skill and it is the first one worth having.

• Work boots, a tape measure and a knife on the first day
• The ability to lift heavy awkward sheets repeatedly, all day
• Legal entitlement to work in Canada
• Enough English to take instructions safely on a live site
• A valid BC driver's licence and your own transport, which helps a great deal but is not a hard no

No experience, no certification and no course. There is no compulsory drywall trade certification in British Columbia, so nobody can require one of you and nobody should be charging you for one.

The parts we would rather you heard from us

People leave this trade in the first month for one of these two reasons, so read them properly.

Sweeping, bagging offcuts, vacuuming after a sanding day. Gypsum dust gets everywhere and it is the dirtiest job on site. You will go home grey. That is not a phase we invented to test you, it is what the bottom of this trade is, and it is the same at every drywall company that is being honest with you.

Interior work runs year-round, so rain does not cancel a day. What it does is slow compound down, because Vancouver afternoons from October to March sit near 80 percent humidity and coats simply will not dry on time.

That means being moved between sites, and the week changing after you were told what it was. We give you as much notice as we have, which is sometimes the evening before.

What pay can I expect with no drywall experience?

$20 to $27 an hour. That is the advertised range, published because BC's Pay Transparency Act requires it, and it is above the BC general minimum wage at the bottom end.

You start near the bottom of the band with no experience. What moves you up it is being useful without being asked twice, and then picking up cutting, hanging and eventually coating. Holding a valid driver's licence and having your own transport moves you up as well, since it changes which jobs you can be sent to.

Do I need any…