To expect apprentices to look smart?

[sproodlemummy]

Currently interviewing for apprentices at our company, have so far seen 6 boys ranging from the age of 16-19. All except 1 of them has turned up in Jeans & T-Shirt!! WFT????

AIBU to expect them to look smarter?? Their parents drop them off so they are very aware of how they are dressed. My parents wouldn't have left me leave the house without a suit on for an interview.

The environment in which they could be working is not a suit based workplace, but still i'd like to see them make a bit of effort.

Is it a sign of the times and I'm just becoming am already and old fart???

My boyfriend interviewed for an engineering roll, narrowed down to two applicants. The other lad was wearing a MATCHING tracksuit and said he couldn’t afford anything smarter. My partner being kind said to let the interviewers know and hope they didn’t mind.
My partner didn’t get the job, so the other lad must have

I struggled to sort clothing out when I was a teen looking for work, closest clothing shops an hour away by bus so that's bus fare plus clothing cost if I could find something, having a weird body type made it hard to find anything especially cheap. Most of my school uniform was second hand when I got it, and I wore it to holes, anything not past use handed down. It all adds up, clothing, shoes, no money for a haircut so wet it and tied back but then it looks greasy.

On the other hand I certainly got no interview guidance or information at school, I've never come across that. I was asked for a CV at an interview when I was 16, had never heard of it til then, so I went to the library and used a word template and made one. You have no way of knowing what to wear or how to speak until you get the experience. They may have slung on whatever or it may have been a careful choice that makes perfect sense to them at the time.

What to wear to interviews has always been a nightmare for me though, as a nanny I still get it wrong. Parents expect a smart professional taking this incredibly trusting position very seriously while also expecting someone who appears happy to roll around playing with kids and happily change nappies. Even after almost 20 years experience I'll see the parents at interviews thinking I'm under or over dressed! With no interview experience at all I can see it being tough for teens.

If the clothes are clean and match the environment you are entering I don't see the issue, I always felt silly thinking of wearing a formal outfit to go interview for stacking supermarket shelves, so changed it to more like something you'd wear to a nice restaurant. but when it came to interviewing with large companies for my career choice I made the effort to get a smart interview outfit because I was tailoring it to the type of job.

In saying that you should always look neat in clean pressed clothes whatever they are IMO.

For a 17 yr old I would expect a shirt & trousers - i’d even accept smart jeans as long (as they weren’t faded, got rips, hanging so low you can see their underwear)
YABU to expect a suit, but jeans & Tshirt isn’t appropriate for an interview
Perhaps, given that 5 have shown up dressed like this, you could add a note to your invitation to interview
“What should I wear/bring?
You should dress smartly (eg shirt & trousers - Tshirt & jeans are not appropriate) and bring a copy of your GCSE results and your id”

I don't think you're being unreasonable at al.

My first interview after I left school was at Tesco(10 years ago) I wore my school shirt (which was a fitted one), school trousers and a cardigan.

It's not hard to wear your school shirt and trousers especially if you've just left school.

I was asked for a CV at an interview when I was 16, had never heard of it til then

I had the same experience in my second year at university. I was asked to provide a CV for an extramural placement but I'd never heard the expression CV before and had to ask lots of questions before I worked out what was being asked for. I think most kids now will have had a session on CVs & job applications at school, but it will probably have been in year 9/10, they won't have understood why they were doing it and they'll have forgotten it by the time they're applying for jobs/courses. The school my kids went to does mock interviews in year 10, which is great as an introduction but neither the school nor the sixth-form college that most of its students progress to follow it up with more rigorous interviews when the students have some idea of the kind of career path they want to follow. I think most of the kids are baffled by the year-10 experience and then forget about it because it's never followed up. And of course they never get any kind of careers guidance.

I attended a careers fair at a local school a few weeks ago. It was a bit of a whirlwind spin for year 8, 9 & 10 pupils around a fairly random selection of employers and HE/FE institutions. Quite a good cross-section but clearly leaving many areas untouched. As is nearly always the case at these events, the most striking thing about the pupils was how little awareness most of them have of the range of jobs that people do. It's quite easy to understand that the options they are most aware of are (a) what their parents/siblings/friends' parents do and (b) teaching, but I do wonder how they fail to notice people working in other roles when they see them in shops, in garages/machine repair workshops, on farms, on building sites, in GP surgeries/hospitals, on public transport, etc. But then there's always one who will amaze you by having detailed knowledge of a career path that neither you, their parents nor their teachers know anything about.

I watched a documentary on television a few weeks ago about a ferry refit: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01llr67. I was amazed not only by how efficient the process is but also by how many highly skilled workers there are whose jobs I was completely unaware of, even in this tiny field. It must be so hard for teenagers to work out where they should be going. I commend the OP's firm for offering high-tech apprenticeships, and apologize for being excessively aggressive in my comments on dress codes. I just wish there were some way to make access to these programmes more even, and I get frustrated that lack of understanding of social conventions they haven't really had opportunities to learn prevents some young people from benefiting from them.

My son went in a (cheap) suit and his old school shoes. He borrowed a tie from his Dad.

I'd have expected him to wear school trousers and shirt plus borrowed tie had he not gone and bought the suit. (I thought that was a bit if a waste of his money earned in an minimum wage job tbh.)

I like the idea of giving some guidance with the invitation.

In an early job of mine I wore black and white non fashionable clothes. It was very dull and "office" as it was the cheapest way to dress appropriately tbh. A French guy who couldn't place my working class accent said I was either posh or poor! My worst nightmare would have been the named jeans / casual wear type workplace .. it's relatively expensive to fit in with that. That's where you will find middle class privilege! Not in an engineering firm ime.