Jazmin Cash

On a Tuesday evening in late January 2019, a fourth-year carpentry apprentice from Logan walked up to the front of a Rotary Club function and collected one of the most respected apprentice awards in the southeast — the Merv Samin Apprenticeship Award. Her name was Jazmin Cash. She was an All Trades formwork carpentry apprentice, only the second woman ever to take the prize, and she'd swapped a Bio-Medical degree for a nail bag less than four years earlier.

Her story is worth telling properly — not just because she won a trophy, but because every part of her journey points to something bigger about what an apprenticeship can actually do for a young Queenslander who's willing to back themselves.

From the lab bench to the formwork deck

Picture it: a uni student halfway through a Bio-Medical degree, sitting in a lecture theatre, staring down the barrel of a career spent in an office or a sterile lab. For some people that's the dream. For Jazmin, it wasn't.

"At university I wasn't excited by the future I saw with being constrained by working in an office or a lab," she said. "I was inspired to apply for an apprenticeship because I wanted to earn while I learn."

That phrase — earn while you learn — is the slogan apprenticeships get sold on, and for good reason. While her uni mates were stacking up HECS debt, Jazmin was on the tools, drawing a wage, and building the kind of practical experience that doesn't show up in a textbook. She was also being mentored by tradies who'd been pouring slabs and stripping formwork for longer than she'd been alive.

The inspiration came from closer to home, too. Her uncle is a builder, and watching him put up his own house planted a seed.

"My dream would be to one day accomplish building my own house, just like my uncle has," Jazmin said.

That's the kind of goal you can't really chase from inside a lab coat. You can chase it with a tape measure, a string line and four years of structured training.

What the Merv Samin Award actually represents

The award itself carries real weight in Logan. Merv Samin was the Charter President of the Logan Rotary Club, which he helped establish on 11 September 1975. He was also a carpenter — and a respected one. When Merv passed away, the club created the award in his name as a way of honouring both his community legacy and his trade.

"As he was a carpenter, we specifically wanted to look for the best apprentice carpenter within the Logan area," said Tony Capitano, the Logan Rotary Club President who presented Jazmin with her award. "After two consecutive women have received this award I am looking forward to continuing to watch women thrive within their trades."

Jazmin was the second woman in a row to take the prize, following 2018 winner Rachel Winter. Two years, two female apprentices, in a trade where — let's be honest — blokes still make up well over 98% of the workforce nationally. That's not a coincidence. That's a shift.

Formwork carpentry: the trade most people overlook

Most people, when they hear "carpenter," picture timber-frame houses, decking, maybe a bit of cabinetry. Formwork is a different animal. Formwork carpenters build the temporary moulds that hold wet concrete in place while it cures — everything from suspended slabs on high-rise builds, to bridge piers, to the columns and cores of major commercial projects.

It's a trade that lives at the front end of every serious commercial build in Queensland. No formie, no slab. No slab, no building. The work is physical, precise, and unforgiving — your line, level and plumb has to be right, because once that concrete pour kicks off you can't exactly hit the undo button.

For an apprentice, formwork is also one of the most direct routes into big civil and commercial projects. You'll find formies on hospital builds, on stadiums, on the bridges and infrastructure jobs the state government is funnelling money into. If you're starting out and weighing your options, it's worth having a poke around [All current job listings](/jobs) and seeing what's actually out there — formwork, framing, fit-out, the lot.

The reality of being a woman on a Queensland building site

Jazmin was generous about her experience, and it's worth quoting her properly because she didn't sugarcoat it but she didn't whinge either.

"I have had such a great experience within my apprenticeship with All Trades and my male colleagues have been so supportive throughout my journey," she said.

That matters. Because the story you sometimes hear about women in trades is a story of hostility, harassment and being shut out. It happens — and it should be called out hard when it does — but it isn't the universal experience. There are crews up and down Queensland where a competent apprentice gets respect regardless of what's on their birth certificate, and where the senior tradies actively want to bring through the next generation of skilled hands, full stop.

The numbers are slowly creeping the right way. Queensland Government training data and the federal Australian Apprenticeships programme have both reported steady year-on-year growth in female apprentice commencements across construction trades. It's still a small base — but a growing one. And every Jazmin Cash who finishes her Cert III makes it easier for the next woman to start hers.

Her advice to anyone thinking about following her in?

"I encourage any women wanting to take this career path to push for your goals — if you are dedicated and focused you will be able to do it. Every day is a learning curve, it's okay to get things wrong, don't be afraid to ask questions, enjoy a laugh with your colleagues, have confidence within yourself and stick it to those that say you can't."

Hard to argue with any of that.

Why the "earn while you learn" model actually works

Here's the maths that doesn't get explained often enough. A four-year carpentry apprenticeship in Queensland sees you paid from day one, with award rates stepping up each year as your competency grows. You finish with a nationally recognised Certificate III, no university debt, and four years of real on-site experience that's directly translatable into a wage as a qualified tradie — or into running your own ABN if you want to go that way.

Compare that to a three or four-year degree where you graduate $40,000–$60,000 in the hole, and you're still going to need a year or two of entry-level work before you're earning serious money.

That's not an argument against university — plenty of careers genuinely need it. It's an argument for thinking honestly about the path that actually suits you. Jazmin worked that out partway through her degree. Some kids work it out at 16. Some work it out at 30 after a career change. The Queensland training system, through the Department of Employment, Small Business and Training, supports all of those entry points.

If you're sitting on the fence right now, take a proper look at [Apprenticeships in Queensland](/apprenticeships) and see what's available. Carpentry, electrical, plumbing, mechanical — the spread of trades on offer is wider than most school leavers realise.

Beyond the apprenticeship: where carpentry can take you

Finishing your Cert III is the start, not the finish line. Jazmin's already talking about building her own house one day. That's a perfectly reasonable five-to-ten year horizon for a switched-on formie. Get qualified, work a couple of years as a leading hand or foreman on bigger jobs, knock over your builder's licence, and you're in a position to put your own home up — or to put up other people's for a living.

Carpentry also opens doors well beyond residential and commercial construction. The same trade skills, lined up with the right tickets, will get you into mine site shutdowns, civil infrastructure crews, and remote project work where the day rates are genuinely solid. If that side of the industry appeals, the [Mining and FIFO roles](/mining) page is a decent place to see what kind of money's actually on the table for qualified tradies prepared to fly in and fly out.

There's also the small-business path. A lot of Queensland's most successful builders started exactly where Jazmin is now — fourth-year apprentice, decent reputation, eye on the future. Five years after their Cert III they're running a crew of three or four, doing extensions and renovations across their patch. Ten years later they're putting up multi-unit developments. The trade rewards people who keep learning and keep their word.

What employers should take from Jazmin's story

If you're a host employer, a builder, or a project manager reading this — there's a lesson in here too. The talent pipeline for Queensland trades is going to have to look different over the next decade. The infrastructure pipeline alone, sitting in the lead-up to Brisbane 2032, is going to demand more qualified hands than the traditional recruitment patterns can supply.

That means giving genuine consideration to apprentices who don't fit the standard mould — career changers, women, mature-age starters, kids who took a different path through school. Jazmin walked off a Bio-Medical degree onto a formwork deck and four years later won a major apprenticeship award. Imagine how many other Jazmins are out there right now, doing a job they don't love, ready to make the jump if someone gives them a fair go.

It also means being honest about culture on site. Jazmin praised her crew specifically because her crew earned that praise. Not every site does. The companies that get the next decade right will be the ones that build sites where competence is what gets respected, full stop.

The bottom line

Jazmin Cash's Merv Samin award isn't really a story about one trophy on one Tuesday night in Logan. It's a story about a young Queenslander backing her own judgement, picking up a trade most people overlook, and proving — quietly, with her work — that the construction industry is bigger and more welcoming than its old reputation suggests.

Her uncle inspired her to start. Her crew at All Trades supported her through it. The Logan Rotary Club recognised her at the end of it. And somewhere out there right now is the next apprentice — male, female, school leaver, career changer, doesn't matter — who's reading a story like this and wondering whether they could do the same thing.

The answer, as Jazmin would tell them, is yes. Push for your goals. Ask questions. Have a laugh with your colleagues. And stick it to anyone who says you can't.