Every week a young Berliner reports on their training. Today it’s 28-year-old Lucienne Salgado.
Your training soon?
I am 28 years old and am in the second year of my apprenticeship as a bespoke shoemaker at the stage service of the Opera Foundation in Berlin. Here I am learning all the techniques for shoe repair and shoe construction, such as pinching, doubling and piercing.
What interests should you bring to your training?
It’s nice to have a love of detail and to work with different materials. Skilled hands also help enormously, as we work with a wide variety of tools and machines.
© Maria Bartel/HWK
What is particularly fun and why would you recommend this apprenticeship?
I really like the variety of the training because I get different tasks every day that I can practice on. The team and working atmosphere couldn’t be better. A particularly exciting moment is when I last shoes; only then can I see whether I have worked cleanly and precisely.
How long does the training last and how much is the salary?
The training lasts three years and the remuneration in Bühnenservice Berlin is 1086.82 euros in the first year, 1140.96 euros in the second year and 1190.61 euros in the third year.
What else should we know?
We build the shoes here from scratch, which isn’t easy, but you develop quickly and get a better feel for the individual work processes. Even if my hands sometimes go numb, I love working in one of the oldest crafts in the world.
The series “My teaching“ is created in collaboration with the IChamber of Commerce and Industry and the Chamber of Crafts Berlin.
