An apprentice intake figure tells a board almost nothing

Every year Australian manufacturers announce how many apprentices they have taken on. The figure appears in annual reports, sustainability statements and ministerial announcements, often beside a photograph of new starters in clean overalls. I have supplied that figure to our own board. My position is that it tells directors almost nothing about whether a company is renewing its trade workforce, and that a board should ask instead for completions, second-year retention by gender and the number of experienced tradespeople whose job is to teach.

An intake figure records a decision made in a single month. A completion figure records four years of supervision, pay, facilities and patience. Only the second tells a board whether there will be a boilermaker to weld a mill liner in 2031.

The number in the annual report

When I became chief people officer of Quarrington in 2021, the Ferrison foundry was taking on eighteen apprentices a year, and we reported that figure with some pride. When I asked how many of the apprentices who had started between 2014 and 2017 had finished their trade, the answer took two weeks to assemble, because nobody had asked for it before. It was 52%. Nearly half the people we had recruited, inducted, equipped and partly trained had left before qualifying, most of them in their second year. We had spent the money and lost the tradespeople.

That pattern is common in heavy industry, and an intake figure hides it. A company can double its intake while its completion rate falls, and its annual report will look better for several years before anyone notices that the qualified workforce is shrinking. At the time a third of our boilermakers and fitters were over fifty-five, and we were sponsoring 96 tradespeople from overseas on employer-sponsored skilled visas because we could not find them at home. Sponsorship kept the plant running. It was not a substitute for training, and the training figure we reported did not show how far behind we had fallen.

Where the second year goes wrong

Our exit interviews told a consistent story, and I suspect most manufacturers would hear a similar one. The first year of an apprenticeship is new and closely watched: the apprentice spends blocks of time at the training college, has a coordinator who calls and receives some attention on the floor. In the second year the attention fades. The apprentice is productive enough to be useful and not skilled enough to work alone, and is usually placed beside a tradesperson whose own output is measured and who has no time set aside to teach. The pay gap bites hardest then. A second-year apprentice at Ferrison earned noticeably less than a labourer at the meat processor across town, and several of ours left for exactly that reason.

The women who started with us left for further reasons. There was one women's change room on the whole site, protective clothing was cut for men, and supervisors did not reliably stop the remarks that told a young woman she did not belong. None of those problems is solved by recruiting more women. Recruitment fills a funnel whose bottom is open.

From 2022 we changed what we spent money on. Four senior tradespeople left the tools to mentor full time, each responsible for about twenty apprentices. Their job is to be on the floor in the second and third years, to fix a placement that is not working and to notice when an apprentice has gone quiet. We paid an adult apprentice rate to anyone over twenty-one, so that a 27-year-old with a mortgage could afford to start a trade. We spent A$1.9 million on change rooms, bathrooms and protective equipment that fits. We ran a twelve-week paid pre-apprenticeship, open first to women and mature-age residents of the town, so that people could find out whether foundry work suited them before committing four years to it. In 2024 we funded childcare places with early opening hours, after three women left in their second year because shifts began before the town's only centre opened.

The results are encouraging and incomplete. Of our 2021 intake, who had mentors from their second year, 83% finished. Our 2026 intake is 41, nine of them women. Sponsored tradespeople across the group have fallen from 96 to 58. The programme costs about A$2.9 million a year more than the one it replaced, and in 2023 the time we took from production made us late on one order. I would make the same choice again, but I would not pretend it was free.

What a director should ask for

I would ask a manufacturing board to replace the intake figure in its reporting with four measures. The first is the completion rate for each cohort, reported when the cohort's nominal term ends and counting those who finished with another employer. The second is retention at the end of the second year, by gender, since that is where most apprenticeships fail and where a problem can still be fixed. The third is the ratio of apprentices to people whose role includes teaching them, with the time actually allocated. The fourth is the relationship between sponsorship and completions: if sponsored numbers are not falling as apprentices qualify, the company is renting a skill base rather than building one.

There are objections. Completion data arrives slowly, years after the decisions that shaped it. That is why second-year retention matters, because it moves within a year. Mentors are expensive, and taking the best tradespeople off the tools costs output in exactly the periods when a manufacturer most needs it. I accept both points. The alternative is to keep paying for apprentices who leave, and to keep sponsoring their replacements from overseas.

A related objection is that small manufacturers cannot afford full-time mentors. Many cannot, and group training organisations, which employ apprentices and place them with host businesses, exist partly to share that cost. The principle still applies at any size: someone must have time set aside to teach, and the board or owner should know who that person is.

None of this is an argument against reporting intake. It is an argument against reporting intake alone. A director who sees only how many apprentices started is being shown the cost of the programme without its result. The result is the number of qualified tradespeople still on the floor five years later, and that is the figure a board should ask management to stand behind.