In the area I work in (encompasses 4 counties - a fairly substantial territory, considering one of the counties is the first county north of NYC), I have seen what I consider a steady decline in the quality of work. The number of people who are performing this work who understand what they are doing is also steadily declining as well...maybe at just a little slower rate.
With that said, forget about KO seals and the like, but there are many times we are repeating our inspection for items such as location of devices/equipment and other code issues that are not even understood. This leads to the same statement that a lot of inspectors hear " when did they change that code?". Etc, etc, etc.
Basically what some of the ECs are doing is using the inspectors as job foremen, saving a buck. I was on a job yesterday where the two men were in their very early 20s. They were not well trained and could not even understand what I was asking for in the changes. I see more and more of this as the ECs try to compete for work.
There are other jobs I am on where the electricians -if that is what we are trying to decipher in this thread, are IMO, not really electricians. They are installers...who can mechanically pull wire, bang boxes and very little more. Then there are the guys who follow those installers, a little higher on the scale. Again trained only in the portion they are installing. If the job strays from the original plan, they are lost.
So, in answer to Brian's OP, I think the industry has a long, long, long way to climb to get out of the hole we have dug for ourselves. Until more people who can do something about it see this and try to help, it is only going to get worse.
On the brighter side, there are still men out there who are excellent in what they do and show tremendous amounts of pride in their work...thank the lord for those jobs, otherwise I would leave my position tomorrow.
