‘Made in the trade’: youth attitudes toward apprenticeship certification

Abstract

This paper explores the value youth place on apprenticeship training and credentials. Our analysis of interview and survey data from former high school apprentices in two trades suggests that there are several influences on their attitudes toward completion of apprenticeship training. These include how they see themselves as learners and workers as a result of experiences at school and in their families, and possibilities for theoretically applied learning through integrated classroom and on-the-job training. Our findings help to explain the different trajectories taken by different youth and have broader implications for thinking about apprenticeship as a learning model.

Keywords:

• youth apprenticeship
• certification
• theoretically-applied learning

Acknowledgement

We appreciate funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to support this research.

Notes

1. Voluntary trades are those trades for which certification is not legally required to work.

2. The author notes that the term ‘completion’ needs to be defined since it may be important to divide this into those who complete the ‘on-the-job’ training, the ‘in-class’ training, and both (Prasil 2005, 16). Further, apprentices may complete both of these and not have written the certification exam and individuals may write the certification exam without having been registered as apprentices. Therefore pathways are complex.

3. The disproportion between carpentry and AST respondents was due to the differences in the size and completeness of student databases available for the two programs.

4. In the previous program of studies, students had three choices: a two-year practical program, a four-year program for those intending to enter the labour market or community college, and a five-year program leading to university. The decision to pass or fail a student depended on his or her performance across all courses, and there was little mobility across streams (Gidney 1999).

5. The carpentry apprentices in the program we focus on in this paper took their classroom training in a union training centre and were encouraged to keep working union. But most union work was in the Industrial, Commercial and Institutional construction sector, not in other areas of the trade, e.g., residential construction.

6. We use pseudonyms for participants.