As the title says im looking for a forum exclusivre to gen techs, i have had a look on the trade specific list but im not too accustom to the RAF slag for each trade.
(im sorry if i have posted this in the wrong forum)
Just realised you are a new joiner entering Phase 1 training - good luck m8
Just so you know the history as to the suggested naming convention....
General Technician Mechanical or Gen Tech (M) - M is bracketed because it is an interim trade, is fairly new. Before this there was 2 trades:
General Technician Ground Support Equipment - Gen Tech GSE and
Mechanical Transport Technician - MT Tech
These 2 trades had 60%+ skill overlap and were therefore amalgamated to save costs and to save the MT trade following introduction of lease hire 'white fleet' vehicles. Thats not a dig at MT Techs BTW, just a statement of cold fact (sorry)!
The various trades in the RAF are grouped together in trade groups (TG) eg aircraft trades are now all TG1. MT Tech were in the same TG as MT drivers TG6 and following assimilation they moved to the General Engineering trade group 5.
Trade Group 5 has, in today's reality, 3 trades in it:
Gen Tech (M) - heavies - superhero fix anything anywhere types
Gen Tech E - Electricians or Leckies, Dog $haggers etc. Lazy gits whose natural habitat is leant against radiators in minor E bays. Never available for Friday afternoon clean up.
Gen Tech WS - Workshops - Metal Bashers. They do welding, turning, milling etc. Excellent trade, really handy, unfortunately they don't deploy enough and may be in for a shock come the next redundancy round. I think they are one of the few trades that save the RAF money as they can manufacture aircraft parts instead of buying at horrendous expense from industry. unfortunately the MOD is very short sighted and will probably ignore this as these days Depth Maintenance is considered non-core and is out-sourced.
Gen Tech M & E tend to be labeled as Geffries (because we tend to work in GEF General Engineering Flight - though these tend to be called Support Engineering Flight (SEF) these days, the metal bashers also reside there) or Grippers - shortened from Ground Equippers. There are probably several less savoury names that I won't go into. Needless to say these are borne of jealousy
So endith the lesson
Nick