5 Leadership Lessons for Tradies from Electrical Apprentice Leon Simmons

Guest: Leon Simmons

Episode: Season 1, Episode 15

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Leon Simmons left a secure, well-paid career to start again as an apprentice electrician in his 30s and built an online community documenting the journey. With his existing workforce experience prior to his apprenticeship, Leon's approach to leadership as an apprentice shows how we can demonstrate leadership at any level.

Here are the lessons Leon learned along the way.

Lesson 1: Leadership Without a Title as a Trade Apprentice

Leon is well aware of the stereotype that comes with being "just the apprentice", the person assumed to be doing the least skilled, least wanted work on site.

He doesn't let that define how he shows up.

When other trades approach him with questions, he answers what he can and, when he can't, makes a point of tracking down someone who does rather than shrugging it off as not his job.

"Even though I do have an apprentice title, I still try and be somewhat of a leader on site," he says. "I still think that an apprentice can be a leader in their own way."

For Leon, stepping up regardless of title is simply what showing up well looks like, day to day.

Lesson 2: Building Confidence as a Junior Onsite

At 35, Leon is regularly mistaken for a qualified A-grade rather than a first-year apprentice, and he's learned to lean into the confidence that comes with it rather than undercut himself the moment someone asks a question he can't answer.

Years managing restaurants and bars before switching careers taught him how to operate under pressure and handle people, skills he says translate directly to a job site even without electrical experience behind them.

"You're allowed to not know what the answer is, but finding out is more important," he says. His standard response is a simple "let me get back to you" rather than either bluffing or freezing up.

Lesson 3: Taking Responsibility Beyond Your Job Description

Leon often works on sites with only two or three people, which means there's rarely someone else around to fall back on if he doesn't understand what's happening more broadly on the job.

Rather than sticking strictly to his own tasks, he makes a habit of staying across information that technically isn't his responsibility to know.

"You have to take responsibility of what's going on," he says. "I just like to know things, it's gonna help you grow as a person as well." Deflecting anything outside your exact role, he says, tends to make life harder down the track, not easier

Lesson 4: What Makes a Good Mentor in the Trades

Leon counts himself lucky with the tradesmen who've trained him: patient, willing to explain things more than once, and quick to hand over genuinely skilled work rather than keeping him on menial tasks indefinitely.

He contrasts that with stories from peers at trade school, some of whom described A-grades who'd throw a screwdriver at them for a mistake rather than explain what went wrong.

"Most of the A-grades... give you the time of day to learn," he says. "If you don't know, just ask, and it really fills you with confidence."

He traces that culture directly back to the top of the business, and says some of the A-grades who trained him have since become genuine friends.

Lesson 5: Building an Online Community as a Tradie

Leon started posting online purely because he loves tools and wanted a record of his own journey from apprentice to qualified electrician, not with any plan to build a following.

Brands reaching out with free product genuinely overwhelmed him at first; he says it felt surreal for something that started as a personal record to suddenly attract that kind of attention.

Alongside the occasional bit of online abuse, which his wife has taught him to simply ignore and delete, he's built real relationships with people he's never met in person, some of whom he doesn't even know by first name.

"Creating these genuine relationships with people has just been really nice," he says. "They're the reason sometimes why you do posts, because they're just genuinely nice people, and they want you to do well."

What started as a personal record of his own journey has become something closer to a two-way support network, one he didn't set out to build but doesn't take for granted.

Leon’s Advice on Everyday Leadership

"Just be nice to people. Everybody's learning, and just showing up and being nice to somebody else will definitely help."

He points out that every A-grade handing out grief to an apprentice was once an apprentice themselves, and the cycle only breaks if someone decides to actually break it.

Catch the full conversation with Leon Simmons on Tradies Who Lead for more leadership lessons for tradies, out now wherever you listen to podcasts.