The time to worry about recruiting and training young tradies was about a decade ago. You can’t make a bunch of kids into 10+ year skilled journeymen in 3 or 4 years, and unless employers are forced they’re going to continue fighting over the most experienced employees and leave the apprentices to rot without an opportunity to be trained.
Industry and government should have taken this seriously when it was brought up years ago that there was a big generation drop-off in most trades, but it looks like someone tossed that mess down the later-tube and now, it’s later. They should have been mandating mandatory apprentice ratios in workplaces years ago, instead of letting apprentices be used as labour and then fail their exams due to not being taught their trade.
Just starting an electrical apprenticeship in a couple weeks. I’m very interested to see how this plays out. Seems to me like there’s a lot of complaints on both sides between “nobody wants to hire apprentices” and “nobody wants to work anymore”. From my experience in hospitality, I feel like there’s a feedback loop of people don’t want to invest in real training because they feel those staff are just going to move on and staff keep moving on because there’s no room for advancement within an employer so they have to jump somewhere else to get ahead. I imagine a similar thing happens lots of other industries.
Which kind of mandatory apprentice ratios are you thinking of? Many trades have a cap so you can’t hire more apprentices without first bringing in more journey persons to train them. If you mean the other way where a place would actually have to be bringing in apprentices, I don’t think that’s practical unless you can perpetually grow your business exponentially as those apprentices are being trained.
The time to worry about recruiting and training young tradies was about a decade ago. You can’t make a bunch of kids into 10+ year skilled journeymen in 3 or 4 years, and unless employers are forced they’re going to continue fighting over the most experienced employees and leave the apprentices to rot without an opportunity to be trained.
Industry and government should have taken this seriously when it was brought up years ago that there was a big generation drop-off in most trades, but it looks like someone tossed that mess down the later-tube and now, it’s later. They should have been mandating mandatory apprentice ratios in workplaces years ago, instead of letting apprentices be used as labour and then fail their exams due to not being taught their trade.
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is today.”
Just starting an electrical apprenticeship in a couple weeks. I’m very interested to see how this plays out. Seems to me like there’s a lot of complaints on both sides between “nobody wants to hire apprentices” and “nobody wants to work anymore”. From my experience in hospitality, I feel like there’s a feedback loop of people don’t want to invest in real training because they feel those staff are just going to move on and staff keep moving on because there’s no room for advancement within an employer so they have to jump somewhere else to get ahead. I imagine a similar thing happens lots of other industries.
Which kind of mandatory apprentice ratios are you thinking of? Many trades have a cap so you can’t hire more apprentices without first bringing in more journey persons to train them. If you mean the other way where a place would actually have to be bringing in apprentices, I don’t think that’s practical unless you can perpetually grow your business exponentially as those apprentices are being trained.
We can import TFWs though.