Tradies are teaching young women how to use basic tools

As one of seven founders Supporting and Linking Tradeswomen - affectionately called SALT - she has transversed the continent to help deliver more than 450 workshops in schools and community facilities - including community sheds, particularly aimed at young women.

That long list now includes students from 22 Western Australian regional schools - who last year participated in SALT's first workshops in the State.

SALT is now planning a long list of workshops for the Wheatbelt in term four this year.

Last year's first WA trip was a key moment for the New South Wales-based Ms Shewring and the SALT crew - who had previously had to cancel to two trips due to COVID-19 lockdowns.

Run from two utes and two self-contained trailers - Ms Shewring and a team of SALTie tradeswomen visit schools with a full workshop and a kit containing 11 basic power and hand tools for the use of each young participant.

A third ute - with more than 500,000 kilometres on the clock - is limited only to local runs.

The students - who range from years 5 and 6 to high school - each make a wooden caddy, which they get to keep.

"But we are not teaching carpentry, we are teaching basic tools,'' Ms Shewring said of the workshop.

"These are the tools that if you want to start helping yourself at home, or if you are thinking about going into a trade, almost all these tools are used by most trades.

"They are very useful for anyone to know."

Ms Shewring started SALT in 2009 from her home in Maianbar, south of Sydney.

Researching before she embarked on the journey, but was particularly struck by the large volume of talk and almost no action she discovered.

"I was quite determined that whatever SALT did, we were going to be action based,'' she said.

"So it took us a little to work out exactly what we were going to do.''

As well, she was continually struck by how women tradies - often working in the same trade - came to the sector through such a variety of pathways.

While some completed an apprenticeship at an early age, Ms Shewring became a painter and decorator about 30 years ago by chance and through necessity.

A single mother of five children, she was understandably struggling to make ends meet.

Then she met a painter and decorator - "who became their step-dad'' - who invited her to come work with him.

"I thought 'why not?','' she said.

"I didn't realise I was going into a non-traditional area for women at all.

"I had no idea.

"But once I had been working in it for a while, and I was good at it, I thought 'why are there not other women in my trade?' and I started to look into that.''

Eventually, she sashayed into working as a teacher at TAFE for 18 years.

"During that time, I ran short courses for women in a department, called Outreach, which was designed to engage women and get them back into the workplace,'' she said.

"That was brilliant.

"I had all these women who absolutely loved painting and decorating.''

Ms Shewring said her TAFE classes were deliberately project-driven - with the class task set around a project in the community which would help people.

"Then I started to get more and more engaged in trying to get more women into trades, because they are such great careers,'' she said.

It was this background which led her to dream up SALT.

A key part of her early research was looking into what had made a difference to women who already had sustainable, successful trades careers.

She said one of the strongest factors she identified was that they had all been taught to use tools at a young age.

"That is what happens on the land as well, and is traditionally normal when you are living in a farming community,'' she said.

"So we decided that it would be a good thing to teach people to use tools, because at the end of it, they would have life skills, even if they weren't interested in pursuing a trade.

"It would still be beneficial not matter what."

With no money, but significant resolve, a group of seven founding women got to work - they obtained $25,000 in seed funding, had a trailer built and filled it with tools and developed their trades-based mobile workshop.

"It was very much a volunteer organisation to begin with,'' Ms Shewring.

"I put a lot of personal money into SALT, I still do."

SALT started to deliver the mobile workshops in 2012, but with a limited budget, they could only manage to work locally.

That changed when NSW's career advisors got behind the organisation and its horizons quickly expanded.

"We went up to places such as Gunnedah, Moree and Lightning Ridge, places that were rural and remote,'' Ms Shewring said.

"It was very successful, but I was still working full-time, so were were only doing 10-12 workshops a year."

Having celebrated its 10-year anniversary last year, Ms Shewring now works full-time in SALT's head office with three other "hard-core'' original founders and a fourth tradie who joined in its second year.

"Even to this day, SALT is unique in the world,'' she said.

"There is no other mobile workshop that covers the areas we do.

"We have been in every single State of Australia now, we have covered thousands of kilometres and gone to hundreds of schools,''

"It is very, very successful.

"But it is almost hard to get across how inspiring it is, until somebody sees it in action."

While there's no doubt that technology can grab and hold modern-day tennager's quick attention, Ms Shewring said humble tools could also hold their own.

For example, she has had careers advisers on the phone in tears, grateful that the progam has been able to effectively engage at-risk and disengaged youth - who can prove a handful in the classroom.

"They have said to me that they have never seen these students so engaged,'' Ms Shewring said.

"That is the quantum leap that it causes in the individual.''

Ms Shewring said SALT had a well-established network of female tradies across the country who could be called upon to help run the workshops - with each working with about four to five students.

SALT also pairs with industry where it can - working with big companies and career organisation, such as Apprenticeship Support Australia, and other industry groups, many of which are seeking to change the make up of their trades' cohort.

The process works, she said.

"Years ago, we did a lot of work with Sydney trains - within three years they had grown to 18 per cent female intake and they have sustained that,'' Ms Shewring said.

Such is the demand for the workshop in new places, that only in in the past year, SALT has begun to return to some of the schools they visited in the program's first years.

In Cobar, Broken Hill and Gundagai, the school's careers advisers were the same and reported that about five or six of the young women in the first group of about 30 students had each entered a trade after school.

"Cobar and Broken Hill are both industrial towns, with big mining sectors, so that made sense - and it is relevant to Western Australia actually, with the massive opoprtunities in mining,'' Ms Sherwing said.

"But Gundagai is agricultural and not industrial.

"I was blown away."

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While the majority of SALT's workshops are run in high schools, they can also be delivered to year five and six students in primary school - which the team loves to do.

Both boys and girls can be included - the choice is up to the school - but many opt to offer it just for female students.

"We believe you have to get kids thinking along broader lines when they are young,'' Ms Shewring said.

"They are pretty open to things then.

"The year 5 and 6 students are brilliant - they can get the trigger control of an impact driver way faster than somebody who is 15.

"They get it instantly, they are so good.

"We love teaching in primary schools because they are so open, so interested, they just can't get enough of it."

For the WA tour, SALT partnered with the WA Department of Training and Workforce Development to deliver career experiences to regional and remote schools as part of the State government's $22 million Career Taster Program.

It saw 20 trades career workshops delivered to about 400 year 9 students from 22 regional schools.

Department director general Karen Ho said the 4.5 hour, hands-on workshops showcased demonstrated a variety of trades, highlighted regional industries and offered information on local career pathways.

The WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI) also sent an apprenticeship support mentor to all 22 workshops - which were delivered over 8.5 weeks.

The partnership had the ongoing benefit of encouraging the students back into the CCI's website to look at careers and get more trades information.

"Of the 141 Career Taster Experiences available for year 9 students, more than 30 were made available in the agriculture, forestry and animal care industries in 2022,'' Ms Ho said.

"These experiences are in addition to the 40 SALT workshops planned for 2023, helping to inspire regionally remote students about the career pathways in their region."

Big WA employer Rio Tinto had staff go to two SALT workshops and BHP staff attended one.

"Rio Tinto's tradies, in particular, really wanted to support and help us,'' Ms Shewring said.

"They all belonged to SALT, so that is how they knew we were coming.

"They were so keen to be involved, they were almost tripping us up.''

Ms Shewring said she hoped SALT will get back to WA soon.

"And I hope that if we do get back we get to involve more local tradies because we love doing that,'' she said.

Ms Shewring sees many connection between what SALT's mission and the needs of agriculture.

"It really doesn't matter what trade you are, because the key point is that we are all hands-on people, which is what you need in the trades and on the land,'' she said.

"You need people who are practical.

"The smartest people I know are tradies, their skills are in problem solving and that is the same on the land.

"It is about problem solving and workplace ethics - it is exactly the same."