Local barber Niels Beach is lamenting the lack of apprentices in his vocation.
After 48 years, Beach wants to retire, but is having a tough time finding someone who can take over and believes the lack of a school for barbering in B.C. is the reason.
Beach received a letter from the Industry Training Authority (ITA) saying the trade has become "inactive" due to the low number of registered apprentices.
It means no new apprentices will be registered and if there is "no further interest from the industry," the trade will be "deactivated" after 18 months and removed from the ITA website. Beach said the treatment is not justified.
"How can you make things inactive when you don't have a school?" he said. "When I took up the trade, we had a barbers association and there used to be about a thousand people applying and we had two schools down in the Lower Mainland."
ITA executive director Kevin Evans said the training system is industry driven.
"We regularly go through the 147 programs we offer credentials for to see the extent to which industry is still taking advantage of those programs," Evans said.
There were just four people registered in the barber program when it was deemed inactive and was one of 15 programs put in that category since July - aggregate plant operating, asphalt paving laydown and automotive machinist among them.
Programs with typically less than 12 registrants over the past three years are made inactive.
Evans said the industries affected still have an opportunity to show whether there is still a demand by submitting a needs analysis showing a growing interest in the vocations.
"When you consider that you've got to have a training provider that is prepared to offer the technical training and not all the participants are not necessarily going to participate in the technical training that year, you need to have a certain critical mass to make it viable," Evans said.
Promoting the vocation is up to the industry as far as the ITA is concerned, Evans said, but he also said ITA does subsidize the cost of technical training in the highly utilized programs.
"We're finding that there are quite a number folks in the hairstyling and grooming business who are actually training their barbers on the job so there seems not to be quite the demand that there once was for the barber apprenticeship program,"
Evans added.
Over the 40 years he ran Spruceland Barber Shop, Beach said he's brought in three apprentices, saying he's usually been able to bring in qualified help.
A barber can make a fair living, he said, and do so without going through the extra work that hairstyling requires.
"Let's put it this way, in all those years I've never been unemployed," Beach said.
