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Apprenticeships ease the school-to-work transition, preparing the youth for corporate world and increasing their job prospects, writes Shveta Raina

There is a massive disruption in the employment segment, as technology makes several roles redundant while at the same time creating new roles. With the increasing demand of new forms of non-standard employment like ‘gig economy’, the industry observers and policy makers are realising the need to shift from the traditional academic-only approach to teaching through skills-building programmes in the educational institutions. Hence, they foresee enormous potential in expanding apprenticeship, which combines work-based learning under a supervisor with academic knowledge of the subject in addition to facilitating wage earning as a stipend. Moreover, apprenticeships are far more cost effective in teaching employability and occupational skills, than pure schooling.

Outcomes of apprenticeship

One of the most significant benefits of apprenticeships is that they ease the school-to-work transition, making the youth work-ready and increasing the probability of them landing a job faster. Irrespective of the industry, investment in an apprenticeship plan can reap good benefits and contribute to the growth of an organisation. The sectors such as aerospace, engineering and manufacturing have a long history of first-class apprenticeships. Countries worldwide invest heavily in apprenticeship schemes to make the youth employable and bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical skills.

Apprenticeship majorly delivers three significant outcomes – lower attrition, lower people costs and higher productivity. Let’s understand these in more detail. Firstly, increasing attrition rate continues to be one of the biggest challenges that any corporate faces. Most early attrition i.e. within the first 6 months happens because of miss-communicated job details, poor cultural fits, weak soft skills and mismatched expectations. How can apprenticeship help solve this problem? As soft skills are becoming more valuable than theoretical knowledge and are best learned on the job, apprenticeship happens to be the shortest corridor to the job. The apprenticeship facilitated structure of learning-while-earning and learning-by-doing allows employees to understand the organisation, job, and colleagues, majorly affecting the anxiety to resign.

Secondly, the corporate sector, particularly in India, spends huge amounts on the people supply chain. The reasons are many - uneven demographic; concentrated and poor-quality urbanisation; and lower employability of those with formal education. It is estimated that companies spend somewhere between one to three months' compensation on hiring. With apprenticeship schemes, these costs can be reduced by over 50% as aggregation costs are shared by government, parents, educational institutions and so on.

Lastly, employee productivity is a mixture of hard and soft skills like motivation, tools, culture, process, industry knowledge, location and much more. While there is much focus on polishing hard skills, intangibles like soft skills, fit and teamwork often remain unaddressed. The practice of apprenticeships before employment can help nurture social, intellectual and knowledge capital, thereby, increasing productivity.

Current structure of apprenticeship

According to the 2017-18 annual report of the Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship, more than 80% of the apprentices in India are from ITIs and more than 89% of the apprentices engaged are from the engineering sectors. The services sector, though having a lot of potential, largely remains untapped.

As per the FICCI survey of 2018- Industry Engagement in Skill Development, out of the organisations engaged in skill development programmes (49%), the majority i.e. 74% were from large sector companies, followed by medium and small companies. Poor or no finance and training infrastructure at all remains one of the main reasons for the low engagement of small and medium industries in skill development.

Policy gaps

Though the apprenticeship policy in India has evolved over the years, its amendments mostly focus on scope and coverage and do not efficiently address how to equip educational institutions and the education system to meet the increasing need of apprentices. There exists a mismatch between demand and supply of skilled labour force, a lack of coordination for the successful execution of too many schemes and a lack of awareness about the importance of apprenticeship among the youth and parents, among many other issues.

Additionally, to the above mentioned statistics, as per the Union Budget 2020, finance minister - Nirmala Sitharaman addressed the lack of skilled employments and announced that about 150 higher educational institutions will start apprenticeship-embedded degree/diploma courses by March 2020-21. This initiative by the government is a testimonial to the importance of skill-enhancement and thus, apprenticeship in the country

(The author is founder, and CEO, Talerang)