Construction Employment News: May
Apprenticeship starts rose 12% and completions fell. Both numbers matter, and only one of them is good news.
May’s figures carry a pattern worth flagging: apprenticeship starts are up 12% year on year, and completions are down 4%. Starting more people and finishing fewer is not a pipeline. It is churn with a training budget attached.
Why people leave partway
We asked our own leavers, and the answers were unglamorous and consistent.
Travel was first. An apprentice on a site forty minutes away by car is an apprentice with no car, because they are nineteen and on an apprentice wage. When the job moves, they leave.
Second was being parked. An apprentice who spends three months on the same repetitive task because it is convenient for the site stops seeing a trade and starts seeing a job. Rotation costs supervision time and nothing else, and it is the single cheapest retention measure available.
Third, and less often admitted, was being treated badly. A trade with a tolerance for casual unpleasantness toward newcomers will train them and lose them, indefinitely.
What changed for us
Two things, both dull:
- We pay travel from home to site for every apprentice, not from the office. It costs about $1,800 per apprentice per year.
- Every apprentice has a rotation plan signed by a site manager, and it is reviewed at eight weeks.
Our completion rate went from 61% to 84% over three intakes. The travel budget is a rounding error against the cost of replacing somebody in year two.
The sector-wide version
If starts keep rising and completions keep falling, the headline number will look healthy for another two or three years and the shortage will get worse the whole time. The metric to watch is completions, and it is not the one anyone reports.