This paper addresses the attitudes towards training of three mature-aged construction workers elicited through the posing of a series of questions. The narratives that resulted were considered through the lens of vocational identity and specifically through the themes of training as a challenge, a possible means of procuring alternative forms of work, and as an irrelevance. The understanding of occupational identity used in this paper differs from more 'essentialist' approaches to identity formation research that is based on either of structuralism or individual agency. Rather, we show that the study participants work in both active and passive ways to fashion vocational identities for themselves that are constantly re-storied within the evolving structures of individual workplaces and the broader globalised economy in which those workplaces are situated. It is these stories about training, told at a particular time by each of the workers to the interviewees, which are the focus of this paper