Apprenticeship Management at National and Company Levels: Research Based ‘Good Practice’ Principles

International Journal of HRD Practice, Policy and Research 2016, Vol 1 No 1: 35-52
Apprenticeship Management at National and Company Levels: Research Based ‘Good Practice’ Principles
Erica Smith, Federation University, Australia

HRD professionals are often involved closely with apprenticeship systems. Apprenticeships operate within companies but are almost always linked to a national apprenticeship system which provides legislation and regulation around aspects of apprenticeship. Most countries around the world have a formal apprenticeship system, although systems vary widely in their nature, their relative size and their sophistication.

The paper aims to provide a contribution to both policy and practice. It draws together and analyses three pieces of research undertaken between 2007 and 2013 by the author: one international comparative study on national apprenticeship systems, and two Australian projects on the ways in which companies manage their apprentices. The paper shows how the findings about good practice in apprenticeship management can be used at both national and company levels. The international study was funded by the International Labour Organization and the World Bank, and the Australian studies were funded by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research.

Introduction
Apprenticeships have been undergoing a revival for the past decade (Rauner and Smith, 2010) accelerated by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and its effects on youth unemployment. Countries have been revising their apprenticeship systems (e.g. in Ireland [Doran, 2015]), often looking to international comparisons in order to adopt practices that have worked elsewhere. As apprenticeships are, in almost all countries, employment-based, the system depends on employers being willing and able to offer jobs to would-be apprentices. A large proportion of companies in many countries therefore have an involvement with the apprenticeship system, ranging from employing one or two apprentices at any one time, to managing systems for hundreds of apprentices at multiple sites in the home country and sometimes overseas.

In order to gain maximum value from this common model for training and employment, it is helpful for both policy-makers and employers to examine good practice across the world. The international comparative research reported here involved eleven countries and a team of international researchers. The enterprise-level research studies were confined to Australia and focused on larger companies that had apprenticeship management systems in place. They were undertaken as part of national projects related to quality in apprenticeships and traineeships. For both national and company-level apprenticeship systems, principles of good practice, derived from the data, were proposed, and this paper draws together and further analyses these principles.

Because of the nature of the topic — systems which involve national governments, millions of companies world-wide, and many millions of apprentices — it is difficult for research to capture either the diversity or the complexity of apprenticeship systems, or to extract good practice principles that can be applied by companies. This paper makes a contribution by providing analyses drawn from both system-level and company-level research. In the projects reported here, country case studies and company case studies alike were produced in a structured way, allowing comparisons to be drawn in a systematic manner. Moreover, the initial reports of all three projects were peer-reviewed, helping to ensure that the data are trustworthy.

Volume 1, Number 1