“Should I stay or should I go?” Exploring high school apprentices’ pathways

Abstract

Completion rates are one measure of the success of apprenticeship training. But little is known about outcomes for youth who begin an apprenticeship in high school. This paper draws primarily on interviews with youth who did not continue training or work in their high school apprenticeship trade in two Canadian provinces. Our analysis focuses on why these youth decided to enrol in high school apprenticeship, why they did not continue and what they did afterwards. Findings suggest that a narrow focus on apprenticeship training completion diverts attention from the complex learning and work transitions experienced by most youth. Instead of assuming a linear pathway from school-to-trades work, we argue that partners involved in high school apprenticeship and policy-makers could do more to raise student awareness of multiple trajectories and skills transfer, make apprenticeship training more expansive, and increase the flexibility of pathways by providing greater articulation between different post-secondary education pathways and opportunities to change direction.

Keywords:

• apprenticeship
• youth
• transitions
• policy

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant. We appreciate the help of Zane Hamm in conducting some of the interviews.

Notes

Our title borrows from the 1981 song by ‘The Clash’

1. The Red Seal is part of an inter-provincial standards programme in Canada that provides work mobility for trades workers who attain this certification. This programme was developed because apprenticeship is under provincial jurisdiction and therefore trade requirements and training differ across regions of the country.

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. Ratios specify the maximum number of apprentices to journeypersons to encourage quality training and discourage the use of apprentices as ‘cheap labour’ while the designation of a trade as ‘mandatory’ (as opposed to voluntary) means that the trade is regulated and certification is required to work.

4. Our survey data suggest that over 80% of former RAP/OYAP apprentices who were employed were satisfied with their ability to learn from supervisors and develop and use their knowledge and skills (Taylor et al. 2013).

5. The numbers do not add up to 25 because the categories are not mutually exclusive; for example, a RAP apprentice in trades-related work had completed a university degree.

6. We argue that Ontario youth tend to have greater access to universities, while there is a high demand for oil industry trades in Alberta.

7. A national survey in Canada (Livingstone and Raykov 2011, Custom tabulations) found that the percentage of respondents with a non-university postsecondary diploma or certificate whose parents were university-educated declined with age. For example, within the group of 17–24-year-old participants with a non-university postsecondary diploma or certificate in Canada, 28.7% had a father and 23.9% had a mother with university education. However in the 40–65-year-old age group, only 8.9% had a father and 7% had a mother with university education.

8. Our RAP/OYAP survey showed that 28% of respondents aspired to own their own business (Taylor et al. 2013).