Blog

How do you prepare for Machinist comprehensive exam?

The Machinist Trade has evolved dramatically in the past 20 years with the widespread adoption of CNCs and development of revolutionary cutting materials and tooling. Depending upon the workplace it is often not possible to gain experience in every Red Seal Task or Sub-Task that will be tested on the exam.  With this in mind, how do you start your preparation and studies for Machinist exam?

The starting point for any exam challenger should be the curriculum for which you will be tested.   The exam will be based on this curriculum and in most cases the curriculum will identify the exam concentration for each topic/task.  The Machinist Trade is a Red Seal Trade and therefore the curriculum can be easily accessed here http://www.red-seal.ca/

After becoming familiar with the curriculum to be assessed, the next challenge is to determine your mastery of each Machinist Exam Task/Topic within the curriculum and work on your areas of need. At XLR8ed Learning we divide the curriculum up into individual tasks/topics and offer learning and assessment tools (questions and answer explanations) for each.  This allows for concentrated self-assessment and studies. We offer a Free Trial to demonstrate our format. As well, our website offers a short video to show the layout of the Red Seal Machinist Course and the respective Tasks/Topics.

Question banks are always a good way to self-assess your understanding of the topics on the Machinist Exam.  However, simply having a question bank that only provides questions and the correct answer does very little for understanding.  This is why our question bank provides a complete answer explanation / justification for every question. Samples of our Red Seal Machinist Questions and Answer Justifications / Explanations can also be found on our site.

Red Seal Machinist License – Do I need a License?

Currently the Machinist trade is not a Compulsory Trade.  What does this mean?   A license is not required by law in order to work in the field as in other trades such as electrical.  Given this, why bother becoming licensed?  Depending upon your workplace, it can be a condition of employment and condition for wage advancement.  However, some employers do not require you to become licensed in order to maintain employment.  This situation usually works fine until work slows down.  Typically, unlicensed trades are among the first to be laid off and to make matters worse, it is far more difficult to gain new employment without a license.