I'm old school. I started plumbing when
I was ten, working summers with my father carrying appliances and
tools to projects his men were working on and cleaning up around the
shop. At twelve I was helping my brother. He was sixteen and already
roughing houses alone. When I was sixteen my father closed his
company and went to work for a large international construction
company.
I hired on as my brothers helper at a
commercial plumbing company when I was seventeen. We told them I was
eighteen. My brother was a lead plumber at twenty-one. He'd gotten
his journeyman license at eighteen and his State Master License at
twenty. It took me until I was twenty to have the four years
documented experience to take my journeyman test.
Back then you went to the inspection
department and sat at one of the inspector's desk to take the
journeyman test. The inspectors were hanging out, looking over your
shoulder, making sounds in their throats that said “good job” or
“you're screwing up.” Sometimes it was hard to know which. They
all knew who I was. I was Jim Moore's kid, Mike Moore's little
brother. I was there with three other guys. I knew two of them.
It was much the same when I took my
state test a few years later, just bigger. The test was held once a
year in an auditorium at the state fairgrounds. The entire State
Board of Examiners were there, sitting at a long table at the front.
I was there with a couple of hundred hopefuls from all over the state
taking the test. The board members would wander around among us,
grunting and shaking their heads.
When I took my test back in the
eighties we were allowed to bring our code book, a #2 pencil, a slide
rule, and a calculator. It was an eight hour test. Besides questions
on everything from plumbing code to payroll taxes we also had to
design and draw the plumbing for several structures including a
house, an apartment building, and piping for a boiler.
When my father took his test, before I
was born, it was a two day test. The first day was manual work. He
had to actually rough the piping for a bathroom group, pour and wipe
lead joints, cut and thread pipe, and solder copper pipe. If you
failed day one you weren't allowed to take the written test on day
two.
Things have changed over the years in
the industry. Plumbers today are only required to have eighteen
months experience before they take the journeyman test, now called
the “technician” license. The State Contractor license, what was
once called the Master License, only requires two years experience.
The tests are administered daily, state wide, on computer in testing
centers.
Over the years, working as a foreman,
superintendent, project manager, I didn't really need my contractors
license. I was in business for myself awhile, but after years of
working for a company which held a state license I let mine expire.
Recently I decided to reinstate my license. That required taking the
state test again since it had been over three years since I renewed
it.
In my time the state code contained a
set of four books; Building, Plumbing, Mechanical, and Electrical.
All a plumber needed to concern himself with was the State Plumbing
Code. For the Master license you needed to have some knowledge of
business and taxes, but it was up to the individual to figure all
that out.
Today you need four books to take the
test; the Administrative Code, the Plumbing Code, the Fuel Gas Code,
the Laws and Rules book, and the book Business and Project Management
for Contractors. All that information was on the test when I took it
the first time, we just didn't have all those books. The addition of
Business and Project Management for Contractors is especially
helpful. I had to research all that information, and we didn't have
the internet back in the eighties.
I won't say the test is easier now.
It's different. I think the experience requirement is too short. A
person would need to work and study very hard to pass the test with
only two years in the trade. I've been in the industry thirty-five
years and I didn't just breeze through the test. The questions were
hard, sometimes obscure, sometimes misleading if I didn't read them
carefully.
I do like that all the required
information is available in five books you can order from the state.
There are some questions that are from “practical knowledge” and
not in the books, but working in the trade for awhile gives you that
knowledge naturally. Those questions just assure you do have some
working experience in the field. I advise any apprentice to order the
books now and start studying.
I've known, and trained, a lot of
apprentices over the years. Most worked four years (the old
requirement) then bought a code book and started trying to cram for
the test. That's not a good strategy. It is more advantageous to gain
the book knowledge along side the practical knowledge. When you get
home at night get out your books and find out why your plumber told
you to run a pipe a certain way. What is the code behind it?
The test is open book. You can't take
your own books, with all the notes and dog-eared pages. Books are
provided at the test site. But you don't have time to look up every
answer. You'll use the books for the charts you're not expected to
memorize or to check an obscure question you're not sure about. The
important thing is to know the books and where you can find an answer
quickly. For the majority of questions you should know the answer
without looking it up.
The computer test allows you to go back
through your answers and even flag questions to return to easily with
the “goto” command. So the old advice of answering all the
questions you know first, then going back to tackle the harder ones,
works well. I paged through answering the easy ones, skipping the
hard ones, then started back at the beginning and went through again
answering everything and double checking the ones I'd already
answered.
That strategy worked well for me. You
can also page through just the unanswered questions, but I found a
couple of the easy questions where I had clicked the wrong answer and
was able to correct them. You need to time it right. Another strategy
might be to answer the easy ones, page through the unanswered ones,
then recheck everything from the beginning. Just make sure you answer
every question even if you have to make a wild guess before your time
runs out.
The test is multiple choice – four
possible answers. An unanswered question is obviously a wrong answer.
If you make a guess, you at least have a one-in-four chance of
getting it right. And many of the choices are blatantly wrong
answers, so that increases your odds to one-in-three or even
fifty-fifty. You can even tag the ones you guess at and come back to
them if you have time and look them up in the books. Just don't spend
so much time researching an answer that you run out of time with
other, possibly easy questions unanswered.
Some people know all the answers, but
they freeze up taking tests. You just have to stay chill and push
through. At least you don't have your father's golf buddy messing with
you while you're trying to concentrate. You'll be in a quiet room, in
your own cubicle, sitting at a computer with a stack of books to
reference. No one is looking over your shoulder or rushing you. Be
systematic, determined, and relaxed. Good luck.
Information on the North Carolina Contractors License testing procedure:
