Do you need certification to be able to operate a piece of machinery? The answer to this question is no. If you go to a lot of farming areas, you will see people operating equipment without certification. Chances are that they have spent their lives around heavy equipment and know a great deal about its operation. Were they to train, they would learn a thing or two, but basically they would have a very good understanding of the workings of the heavy equipment that they have been using. If you are operating equipment on your own property, then you don’t really need certification, but it is always good to have. If, however, you want to operate heavy equipment off your property, then you absolutely must have certification.

You need certification if you want to use heavy equipment anywhere else. All the skills in the world will not help you get a heavy equipment job without certification. It doesn’t matter if you have been operating equipment for many years, without that piece of paper, you have less claim to the salary and benefits from your years of training than someone who graduated from a training center yesterday. Their certification makes them legally qualified to operate the equipment; not having it relegates you to unskilled labor. Now, if there were ever to be a shortage of skilled workers in your company, you might be in line for training, but there is no predicting if or when that would ever happen. So why not get that certification?

A lot of people put off getting their certification because of the cost and time that are involved. There is no way around it, certification costs money. Look at it from a business point of view. Here at Associated Training Services we need to hire teachers, we need to purchase and maintain equipment, we need land for our training centers and we need an administrative staff to help everything run smoothly. If you go to any training school around the country, it is the same story. Training for heavy equipment is going to cost. On the other hand, it does not take all that long for the training to pay for itself. Once you bite the bullet and actually do the training, you can then start moving on and earning a lot more money. The sooner you train for your certification the sooner you can earn a higher wage.

If you are interested in training with us to obtain your certification here at Associated Training Services, please feel free to contact us. We look forward to helping you take the first steps towards your certification and entering more rewarding employment.

Heavy equipment careers can be extremely rewarding, but it does take some commitment and the right sort of character to really succeed as a heavy equipment operator. There are plenty of jobs to go around, the thing that you need to ensure is that you are right for the job. Some people do not enjoy the responsibility that comes along with any of the various heavy equipment careers. What responsibilities are these?

• Being an integral part of your work unit. People in heavy equipment careers must be dependable, end of story. Depending on the size of your company, there may not be too many people around that are capable of replacing you if you take a day off. This is something about heavy equipment careers that some people have difficulty comprehending. You really need to have a strong work ethic to make the best of your heavy equipment career.
• You are responsible for the safety of your fellow workers. Accidents happen, but imagine how terrible you would feel if, as a heavy equipment operator, the accident was your fault. Safety of fellow workers is a great concern to all who work in heavy equipment careers. You need to drive your equipment safely and you need to promote safety around your equipment. Even if you are not the boss, you need to show a little leadership, that is a big part of many heavy equipment careers.
• You are the face of your company. Whenever you drive your heavy equipment in public places, you are an ambassador for your company. You are representing your company; because of the equipment that you drive, you will be much more noticeable to the general public.

There are many more responsibilities that are a part of heavy equipment careers. For some, this is part of what they like about the job; for others it can be quite stressful. If you know what you are getting in for, however, things do tend to go more smoothly. If you are interested in heavy equipment careers, please feel free to contact us at Associated Training Services.

Life can be tough without certification. If you have been living without certification, it is a fact that you will know about all too well. Sure, some people manage to get by and some even do very well, but for the bulk of the population that has no training, life is very difficult. If you don’t have certification, then chances are that you will have experienced what it is like to live from paycheck to paycheck. What can certification give you?

• Peace of mind! This might seem like a somewhat abstract concept, but it isn’t. All jobs are stressful to a certain extent, certification won’t change that, but it will make life a lot easier and that goes a long way to making people happy. Imagine if you could wake up every morning and feel confident that you will have a job to go to next week. Not everyone has that luxury, but people with certification often do.
• Stability – Certification will allow you to stay in one job long enough to work your way up through the ranks. You can enjoy a career as opposed to an endless string of jobs.
• A sense of achievement – It takes guts to get out there and do the training that you need for your certification. After you go through the process, you will have a wonderful sense that you have accomplished something that not everyone can do.

If you are interested in obtaining some heavy equipment certification, please feel free to contact us at Associated Training Services

For many people, big front loaders are special pieces of heavy equipment. They are impressive to look at, as they tend to dwarf a lot of other machinery. Many people confuse front loaders with bulldozers, but they are a very different piece of equipment that performs an entirely different function. First lets look at the similarities between the two and see why they are so commonly mistaken for one another.

Bulldozers and front loaders are both available in a range of sizes. The tractor part of the equipment looks almost identical. You can find closed cabin and open cabin configurations of each, so here they are almost the same. Front Loaders can sometimes be fitted with bulldozer blades to allow them to do light dozing. They are not as good at dozing as bulldozers but they can do an acceptable job when the requirements are not too heavy. Seeing front loaders with bulldozer blades only deepens the confusion for most people. The attachment that is regularly used for front loaders is a bucket. It is designed to scoop and carry loads from one place to another. It looks a bit like a bulldozer blade, but is actually very different. Yes, bulldozers can also be fitted with a bucket.

The difference is a little closer to the ground. If you look at comparatively sized bulldozers and front loaders, the bulldozer will always sit lower to the ground. Front loaders tower over everything because of the enormous wheels that are attached to them. Bulldozers run on tracks. Wheels mean that you can use front loaders almost anywhere. The tracks of a bulldozer can damage paved surfaces, but they give great traction and allow them to drive over very rough terrain.

If you are interested in learning more about front loaders or bulldozers, please feel free to contact us at Associated Training Services.

If you want to make the most out of your heavy equipment training then you need to put it to use straight away. This might involve some hard decisions, but is worth it in the end. If you are working somewhere where the opportunities to advance are limited, sometimes it is better to move on rather than wait for an opportunity to find your. Your heavy equipment training and certification is an enormous asset in the job market and will make finding your next job a relatively straightforward process.

Reasons to Change your Job

• Not enough opportunities to put your training to use.
  This can be particularly frustrating and it will cause your skills to dull. What’s more, it is a waste of all of that effort that you put into honing your skills.
• Not enough pay.
  If you are spending your time and money on training and your company is not upping the ante, find one that will. Do your research and find out what heavy equipment operators with your level of training are earning and find somewhere that will give you at least that.
• Lack of Security
  If you see people fired for punitive reasons, or you feel that your company might be in financial trouble, you might be better off to find a company that holds onto its employees.
• Poor opportunities for advancement.
  If your dreams for the future are bigger than your place of employment can offer, consider moving on.

With the training that you receive at Associated Training Services you can enjoy a competitive place in the workforce. There will be plenty of opportunities for you to find a job that puts your training; you don’t have to settle for second best.

Backhoes are one of the most functional pieces of heavy equipment in existence. Sure, there are bigger pieces of equipment out there, but backhoes get a great power to weight ratio and you can take them virtually anywhere. The thing that makes backhoes so good is that they are tractor mounted, which makes them easier to drive in most situations and incredibly easier to maneuver.

Typical backhoes do not have the power of a large excavator; they don’t move the volumes of earth that a bulldozer or front loader is able to move. What they do is a little bit more precise. There are many times where you need a hole, but an excavator is overkill; that is where backhoes come in. For landscaping work, backhoes are second to none. A skilled backhoe operator can really get creative with a garden landscape.

Track mounted backhoes are popular too, but not all applications require tracks. As great as tracks are; wheels do have a few advantages in light applications. Wheeled heavy equipment moves more quickly and is easier on roads and paved surfaces. Track mounted heavy equipment can handle rougher terrain which makes it a more popular choice for heavier work.

If you are interested in learning how to drive backhoes, please feel free to contact us at Associated Training Services.

Here at Associated Training Services, we do our utmost to get our graduates into rewarding heavy equipment careers; our commitment extends to offering job placement to our graduates. It is not always easy to get a job after completing any kind of training course. But for a lucky few, most people do not have a job that they can walk into. Getting that first job also happens to be extremely important. The longer that you go without a job, the more difficult it becomes to retain all of the new skills that you have learned. To some, job placement seems a nice touch, but we consider it to be very much a part of the training process.

How do we offer such an extensive job placement program? The answer to this question is remarkably simple. Associated Training Services has been around for many years and has built up an extensive network of connections. Our job placement program has placed people with thousands of different companies over the years and our graduates speak volumes for the caliber of the training that they received. In short companies have been happy with the heavy equipment operators that we have given them and have come back to us time and time again.

If you are currently involved in a training course and are interested in learning more about the job placement process, you can always talk to the staff at the training center which you attend. They will be happy to give you more details about what is involved. If you are a prospective student and would like to know more, feel free to call us in business hours or contact us by email at any time.

If you are interested in the idea of a heavy equipment career but not all too interested at the thought of spending most of every day on a construction site; dump trucks are worth considering. Driving dump trucks is a rewarding career that combines many of the better aspects of heavy equipment operation and truck driving. While a dump truck falls more correctly into the category of trucks rather than heavy equipment, you will see that dump trucks and heavy equipment go hand in hand in many situations.

As a driver of dump trucks there are many different opportunities open to you. Of course dump trucks are big in the construction industry, but you will find a lot of them in mining and fairly large numbers in other sectors as well. This is a great way to get a break from an industry while retaining a career. It is also useful if ever you feel the need to relocate. Dump trucks are everywhere and drivers can find work all over the country.

The money in dump trucks is not bad either. If you are an owner operator, you can really do well, but those that are employed to drive for other people do quite well too. One of the best points about dump trucks is that they are all weather vehicles. You can keep operating your vehicle as long as your place of work stays open. That is not true for all other types of equipment. Drivers of dump trucks can at times enjoy more days of productive work than some types of heavy equipment.

If you are interested in driving dump trucks and would like to learn more, please contact us at Associated Training Services.

Financial aid is something that people need to think carefully about. When it comes to credit and borrowing, there are worthy and unworthy causes. Buying a house is a worthy cause. The value of the land tends to appreciate and it is an asset that can be resold, often with profit. Buying a car with financial aid is questionable in most situations. Unless the vehicle is actually enabling you to earn an income, it is hard to argue that a vehicle is an asset. Cars depreciate markedly in a very short amount of time, they cost money to run. If you sell them after you have bought them, they invariably lose money; in some cases a lot of money. One might argue that if you are borrowing money for something that appreciates in value, it is a credit worthy cause. If you are borrowing money for something that depreciates, it is not. Where does education and training fall?

Education is Credit Worthy

If you are looking for a way to earn a greater income and better your life then some sort of training is usually the best way to go about it. It can be difficult to break into a new career without training. While some construction companies will provide heavy equipment training to workers, it is only in exceptional circumstances that this happens. Realistically, the average unskilled worker stands very little chance of being handed a break. That doesn’t matter, because you can make your own chances. You just need to get the training.

How to value education.
How can you put a value on an education? Actually, it is very easy. You take the course that you are doing and look at the cost. For the purposes of simplicity, lets say the course costs $2,000. So the value of the course is $2,000, right? Wrong, the value of the course is not $2,000. A course alone is worth nothing. Once you have taken the course you cannot sell it. The value of the course that you take is the amount over and above your present salary that you will earn. Let’s say that the course allows you to earn an extra $200 a week, multiply that by the fifty-two weeks of the year and you get $10,400. Are you going to stop working after one year? Probably not, so you multiply that $10,400 by the years that you are going to work and you have something that falls short of the actual value, but a fairly substantial figure that is a lot higher than the original $2,000 that you spent. Education is credit worthy and is worth the expense of financial aid.

The fact is that training changes lives. Paying for the financial aid that you received can be a bit of a strain on the finances, but you will be able to earn more money and that will make the expense easier to cover. The thing that you have to think about when it comes to getting financial aid is, can I afford the repayments now? This question is absolutely crucial. If your answer is, “no,” then you should not get financial aid. If your answer is, “yes,” then you should go for it.

If you answered no, then you really need to start addressing some of the expenses in your life, figure out what you can cut out and do the math again. If you are a smoker you might want to consider giving up smoking. Look for ways that you can save a significant amount of money each week or each month and do it. Save a bit of money and then reconsider the option of financial aid.

At Associated Training Services we offer financial aid for our programs. In order to qualify for financial aid you will need a good credit record. If your credit record is poor then it is still possible to receive financial aid if you can produce a guarantor; feel free to contact us if you have any questions.

Getting started in a heavy equipment career is not as difficult as you might think. It is quite easy to get into this exciting and rewarding profession, all it takes is a little knowledge of how the process works and the right training. Today, we will explain the process of getting into a heavy equipment career and give you a little insight into what the training involves.

What you need to know before you start

We all know why many unskilled workers opt for a heavy equipment career. It can provide a better standard of living and the training takes a relatively short amount of time. Heavy equipment training also makes people more employable. So what do you need for your training?

• A budget – Training is not free, you are going to need to be able to cover the costs of training and subsidize yourself through any loss of income that comes from training when you could be working. Financial assistance can help with this.
• Time – you will need to attend regular classes either in the regular work day or in the evenings.
• A good work ethic – It sounds strange, but a Heavy equipment careers can be quite demanding. People are going to depend on you a lot more than if you are an unskilled laborer. If the heavy equipment operator is not there, sometimes work can not take place. For a heavy equipment career you need to be the person that misses work as an absolute last resort.
• Driving skill – In a heavy equipment career you are going to be handling complex machinery. If you struggle to control a motor vehicle, controlling an excavator will be nigh on impossible. It requires good hand-eye coordination, not everyone can do it.

If you think that you have what it takes to embark on a heavy equipment career, then you will want to know more about the training. Here at Associated Training Services, we have a number of programs to prepare people for a heavy equipment career. We can train people to operate just about every type of heavy equipment. At our website, you can see the range of heavy equipment programs that we have on offer. We offer both full time and part time courses to suit your busy schedule. All it takes is a few months of your life and you will be able to get started on your heavy equipment career.