First Call: Becoming a Funeral Director — Licensure, Apprenticeship and the Two Years in Service (A Field Guide)

Somebody handled your mother's funeral well. You have not stopped thinking about it since.Funeral service attracts people at a particular moment - usually after they have been on the receiving end of it done properly. What almost nobody can find out is what happens next: which schools are accredited, how the apprenticeship actually works, and what the first two years genuinely ask of a person.The route is more variable than it looks. Apprenticeship length is set by your state and runs from one to three years, and states differ on whether it comes before, during or after your schooling - which is the difference between a two-year plan and a four-year one. Licensing rules vary too, and not every state licenses the same way.This book is written for the forty-something leaving nursing, teaching, policing or hospitality for something that means more, and for the younger career changer coming out of caregiving or hospice who has already decided. Chapter one is an honest self-test - the removal, the arrangement conference, the two-in-the-morning call - followed by locating your nearest accredited program and your state's exact apprenticeship rule.The published shelf here is memoir and exam preparation, and nothing in between. Nobody has written the practical route: choosing a program, surviving the apprenticeship, and understanding what corporate consolidation of funeral homes does to a first job and a first wage.It is careful with numbers, because the official statistics in this field bundle several different occupations together and are easy to misread. Where a figure covers more roles than it appears to, this book says so. An Australian appendix covers the separate local training and regulatory position.It is not a morbid job. It is a service job, on the worst day of someone's life.