With the way the world is at the moment, 'all doom and gloom', it seems redundancies are everywhere, businesses closing, unemployment up to record levels and everyone going around with long faces. What is wrong with us?

Nobody is moving - that is good, as it would appear more and more people are staying put in their homes and are simply either revamping their kitchens or bathrooms or putting on extensions. What all this means is more and more tiling.

I have been in the tiling industry some 37 years and some might say that things are bad out there. To be quite honest we have never been busier.

Our continual influx of 'would be tilers' at our training school has again never been as popular as what we are experiencing now. I think possibly why we succeed over our competitors is the very essence of the way we train people. Firstly in small groups, maximum of 6 students at any one time and importantly our unrivalled training curriculum is 90% practical tuition. From day one the student really likes this way of learning, as he/she does not get bored by being kept in a classroom just talking about tiling. He or she has been allowed to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty and simply get on with the job in question. By this method if you make a mistake, you learn by it and hopefully don't make the same mistake again.

Our aim at Alpine is to produce some outstanding tilers, that become self employed and are not beholden to an employer ever again. They are quite simply a 'maker of their own destiny'.

For more information on how Alpine Tiling can prepare you for a career in tiling e-mail us today.

More people than ever, are deciding to extend their homes, rather than move. This ultimately means more domestic tiling projects.As more and more independent tiling training schools diversify into other trade skills, can we blame it on the 'credit crunch'? I can remember, not that long ago, where I sat around a very large table at Construction Skills Head Office with other like-minded owners of other tiling training centres in the belief that by forming an association, namely the Association of Tiling Training Providers (ATTP), we would be setting up a body that would regulate the provision of training in the tiling field alone. This body would be respected within our industry and offer potential students throughout the UK a standardised curriculum of tiling skills set by Construction Skills together with hopefully the approval of The Tile Association (TTA). This meeting was followed by subsequent meetings at Weber head office.

I now see that the majority of those like-minded colleagues have since joined the realms of the multi-skill schools. Please don't misunderstand me here. The owners of the multi-skill centres that already existed, who attended that very first meeting, appear to have and are continuing to do a very good job on the whole. My frustration is with those companies that sat around those tables and categorically expressed that tiling and tiling alone was what they believed in and was the only trade they wished to teach, which brings me back to my first point;