Drywall apprentice and labourer job in Vancouver
$20 to $27 an hour
Full time, no experience needed, Vancouver and the Lower Mainland
A way into drywall that does not require you to already know it. You will spend the first stretch on protection, stocking and cleanup, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Then you get taught to cut and hang, and later to coat, in that order and for a reason. We are always willing to talk to someone who wants to learn the trade properly.
Or email quotes@vancouverdrywallguys.ca
and tell us what work you have done before.
The order it happens in
What the day involves, and what comes after it
Drywall gets taught back to front by a lot of employers, who hand a beginner a knife in week one and then complain about the sanding. We do it the other way round.
- 1
Protection, stocking and cleanup
Masking and covering floors and fixtures, carrying board to the right rooms before hanging starts, mixing compound, keeping tools clean, sweeping and bagging offcuts. This is where you start and it is the least interesting part of the job. It is also the part that decides whether a customer thinks we were careful in their house.
- 2
Cutting, lifting and hanging
Once you can be relied on for the first lot, you get put on the board. Scoring and snapping, rasping edges, holding sheets to a ceiling while someone fastens them, then hanging simple walls yourself. Most people reach this within a few months if they turn up.
- 3
Coats and finishing
Mud last, because it is the hardest to undo. Tape coats on straightforward seams under someone's eye, then sanding, then progressively harder work. Nobody is handing you a Level 5 skim in your first year and any employer who does is not teaching you, they are gambling with a customer's wall.
What we look for
Attitude, because the skill is our job to teach
We have no way to assess your drywall ability, because the role assumes you have none. So the conversation is about something else entirely: whether you will be there at 7:30 on the second Tuesday of a wet November when the job has moved twice and you are back on cleanup.
Being taught properly means being corrected often, and some people take that badly. A boarder telling you the sheet is a quarter inch out is not having a go at you, they are stopping you from doing it wrong for the next ten years. If you can hear that without it ruining your afternoon, you will learn this trade quickly.
The other half is care. Almost everything you do early on happens inside somebody's home or somebody's unit in a strata building, often with their furniture still in it. Carrying a sheet through a hallway without marking the paint is a real skill and it is the first one worth having.
What you need to have
- Work boots, a tape measure and a knife on the first day
- The ability to lift heavy awkward sheets repeatedly, all day
- Legal entitlement to work in Canada
- Enough English to take instructions safely on a live site
- A valid BC driver's licence and your own transport, which helps a great deal but is not a hard no
No experience, no certification and no course. There is no compulsory drywall trade certification in British Columbia, so nobody can require one of you and nobody should be charging you for one.
Before you apply
The parts we would rather you heard from us
People leave this trade in the first month for one of these two reasons, so read them properly.
Questions
About this role specifically
What pay can I expect with no drywall experience?
$20 to $27 an hour. That is the advertised range, published because BC's Pay Transparency Act requires it, and it is above the BC general minimum wage at the bottom end.
You start near the bottom of the band with no experience. What moves you up it is being useful without being asked twice, and then picking up cutting, hanging and eventually coating. Holding a valid driver's licence and having your own transport moves you up as well, since it changes which jobs you can be sent to.
Do I need any experience or any certification?
Neither. British Columbia has no compulsory trade certification for drywall, so there is no ticket to buy and no course you need before starting. Nobody is going to charge you for training.
If you have worked general construction labour, in a warehouse, in landscaping or in moving, that all transfers more than you would think, because the first stage of this job is carrying awkward heavy things carefully through finished spaces. Say what you have done, even if none of it was drywall.
Is this a registered apprenticeship with SkilledTradesBC?
No, and we want to be accurate about that rather than use the word loosely. This is paid on-the-job training with someone who finishes drywall himself, not a registered apprenticeship programme with technical training levels and a credential at the end.
What you get is the trade taught in the right order by people doing it. What you do not get is a certificate. If a formal credential matters to you, look at SkilledTradesBC directly and work out what you want before you take a job anywhere.
What should I bring on the first day?
Work boots, a tape measure, a utility knife and a hard hat if you have one. Lunch and more water than you think you need, because interior sites in July get hot and there is no shade to move into.
You do not need to spend money on tools before you start. Anyone telling a beginner to turn up with a full kit is either testing how keen you are or planning to charge you for it. You will add tools as you find out what you actually use.
What do you expect from me if I have no skills yet?
Turn up on time, every day, including the day after a bad one. Be honest when you have not done something before instead of guessing at it and hiding the result. Take being corrected without going quiet on us for the rest of the shift. Keep your phone in your pocket while a lift is up.
That is genuinely the list. Skill is teachable and we expect to teach it. Reliability is not something we can teach an adult, and it is the reason most people who do not last here do not last.
No drywall experience is fine, tell us what you have done
Email quotes@vancouverdrywallguys.ca with the role in the subject line and a short note on any work you have done, even if none of it was construction. The trial day is one day on a real job and it is paid.
7 days a week, 8AM to 8PM