Bridget Bottcher had been a chef for eight years when COVID hit. Like many Australians, the time out of work gave her a chance to think about her career, and at age 27, she decided to turn to trades.

Although nobody in Bottcher’s family was an electrician, she could see the field offered consistent work, no unsociable hours, and about $30,000 more a year than her chef’s salary.

To get started, she enrolled in Australia’s first female-only pre-apprenticeship course for electricians at Victoria’s Holmesglen Institute. Sixty-three women have already graduated from the training, with more than 85 per cent going on to get jobs.

“I saw it as a really good opportunity to create a network of women who each understood what we were going through, and we could support each other,” Bottcher says.

Having an inbuilt network of contacts is something she believes is vital in a career, particularly a new one. “You need a strong backing to be successful and this can be hard to do in such a male-dominated industry,” Bottcher says.

Advocacy organisation Tradeswomen Australia (TWA) notes that although 65 trades are on Australia’s national skills priority list, women represent only 2 per cent of the trades workforce.

For some organisations, such as Endeavour Energy in western Sydney, the statistic is starting to budge. The organisation recently revealed that 60 per cent of its 2022 apprentice recruits were women. While these are impressive numbers, they are not represented industry-wide.

‘You need a strong backing to be successful and this can be hard to do in such a male-dominated industry.’

Bridget Bottcher

It’s one reason that earlier this year, Tradeswomen Australia joined Empowered Women in Trades and the National Association for Women in Construction to welcome measures announced in the federal budget that will help start to address the inequity for women in Australian trades.