Hi Samtiler
Qualifications ie NVQ is only usefull if you want site work, they are pretty worthless in a domestic market as nobdy will ask you to show it, all the domestic customer is bothered about is if you can show them you have the confidence by using your knowledge of the job to do and getting on with them.
I can only speak for my training centre and i actually do the tiling training, i have trained thousands of people now over the last 7 years and 2 weeks good training will get you a good start into the industry where you will gain experience as you go through your career, whether a long college course or a short course it can only show you simulated projects that you are likley to come across.
Once you have the basics ie Setting out properly, applicaion of tiles, understanding of backgrounds and products, shaping and cutting of tiles etc, you should be able to adapt those skills onto some live jobs in the real world.
What we do that a college probably wont is tell you how to run a full business in tiling from keeping accounts, paying yourself a wage, taxation, pricing, trade accounts and how to market your services and add link sales onto your business so you can make as much money from the job as possible by adding design work, supplying of extras etc
We run a one week and two week course that you will get everything you need to know to make a start, the course comes accredited with a Level 2 qualification which will go towards an NVQ which you can only get once you are working on site or in a domestic market place.
There are a lot of people against short courses on here that will tell you otherwise however they are in no position to comment on something that they might not have every been to, I know from a fact that we have had hundreds of people start and maintain tiling businesses from our course many who are still on this forum today.
It easy to say just go out with another tiler for free, that just aint going to happen as you will just be their competion once you get going so why would they want that, a lot of people are not in a position either to train for years, so a good short course is all thats left
We have 15 pages of possitive course feedback on here to back up the quality of our courses
Check out our website for a breakdown of what we cover on the tiling course
Regards
Darren
UK Trades Training (NETT)
Website click
UK Trades Training