Apprenticeships are many things to many people... To some, they evoke images of medieval stonemasons teaching youngsters to chip at a block of stone to create something more beautiful, while to others, a more Dickensian image springs to mind.
This is what a lot of people still imagine when they hear you're an Apprentice, but NEWSFLASH: This is the 21st Century and we need new definitions for apprenticeships. And for those who've actually undertaken an apprenticeship, there may well be memories of fetching, carrying and even, perhaps, being sent to the supplies department for a tin of striped paint.
However, according to the Business Innovation and Skills Select Committee, there is no formal definition of apprenticeship and the government should create one. After an eleven-month inquiry into apprenticeships, the Committee said the National Apprenticeship Service should be given the responsibility of raising the awareness of apprenticeship within schools.
But how to define those apprenticeships? There's the question. Perhaps the government shouldn’t just come up with a single definition of the word, but two. After all, it's not just schoolchildren who should be taught the value ofn apprenticeship: far too many adults have found themselves out of work, through no fault of their own ... and without an outlet for the skills they've been building up over the years before the company they'd been working for had to close down, for whatever reason. For them, the choice is stark: spend their working day fruitlessly searching for work ... working for peanuts (if anything) under some new DWP scheme where they'd otherwise lose their benefits ... or re-training for another, completely different career.
So if the government could create just two different definitions for “apprenticeship”, a word with so many meanings and memories, things might start moving again. We need one definition for those young people fresh out of school learning their first trade and another for those adults who need to re-train for another career – without necessarily being sent to the supplies department for another tin of striped paint.
