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8 April 2013updated 22 Oct 2020 3:55pm

Apprentices 15% more employable” than everyone else. Why only 15?”

You choose plumbing over philosophy; you expect to get a job.

By New Statesman

For a while now we’ve been given to believe apprenticeships are the solution to all sorts of problems, like the current gap between the skilled employed and the unskilled unemployed. As I wrote a couple of months ago:

There seems to be a disconnect between educators and employers – the sectors crying out for workers (IT, engineering), match the university courses with the empty lecture halls.

How do you address this? Well, one idea is to pour money into apprentice schemes and funded places at technical colleges – which the government is, to some extent, doing. (For example, there’s the Employer Ownership Pilot, a 250m funded training scheme for employers).

And last month George Osborne announced an extra £180m of funding to create 50,000 new apprenticeships. Are the schemes and the push working though? Well today the BBC has reported that qualified apprentices are 15 per cent “more employable” than people with other qualifications, according to a survey of 500 firms.

Here’s the BBC:

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Skills Minister Matthew Hancock said: “We want apprenticeships or university to become the new norm for young people leaving school and higher apprenticeships are an excellent way to enter high-profile careers while also achieving a degree-level qualification.”

David Way, executive director, National Apprenticeship Service said: “We know that apprenticeships deliver real business benefits for employers.”

15 per cent sounds great – but if you make the decision to study, say, plumbing, rather than philosophy, you are likely to be basing that decision on the idea that plumbing makes you quite considerably more employable. Maybe even completely employable. Yet in the survey apprentices scored 7.36 out of a possible 10 for “employability” as opposed to a 6.382 average of other qualifications (hence the 15 per cent difference) – still quite some way off the desirable 10.

Many problems with the government apprentice scheme have already been highlighted – inadequate training, false advertising, exploitation by employers. But it’s worth noting that this survey is just an opinion poll (no commitment involved) – looking at whether employers think these kinds of schemes make people more likely to get jobs. It seems there’s still some convincing to do.

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