My first taste of "work experience" was labouring for a week with a
couple of electricians on a barn conversion in Derbyshire (admittedly
in the 1970's). My jobs included chasing out the walls for the
sockets in as straight a line as I could from one corner of the wall
to the diagonally opposite one, and mixing the plaster for the
'professionals' to plaster straight over them when they'd wired the
sockets up.

Don't know why they did it that way, but one has to wonder why someone
doing a barn conversion in the Peak District would employ electricians
from over fifty miles away at a time of high unemployment, unless they
were exceedingly cheap.

Probably they were cheap. Though as it happens my first experience of
electrical work was as a teenage apprentice to a couple of electricians, in
Derbyshire, in the 1970s; they paid me 20p per hour which even at the time I
thought somewhat, well, economical. Learnt a lot though, not least an
abhorrence of bodging. I still remember the old lady in Kettleshulme
(actually I think that's over the border in Cheshire) whose cottage we were
wiring up for the first time ever. She was surprised to know that we had to
put cables in: "Oh I thought you just screwed the sockets onto the wall and
the electricity came out of them dear!".