Apprenticeships are an obvious solution to youth unemployment

THE RECENT long weekend celebrating Youth Day provided numerous discussions in the various media on how best to tackle the problems of equipping youth for the working world.

Strangely, no discussions I was aware of gave time to the once wellpractised method of apprenticeships. I started my working life as an apprentice in the old GPO in Cape Town when they ran the telephone system. I was exposed to their extremely thorough training methods for large numbers of apprentices.

This included, at their wellrun training centre, each training course being followed by on-the-job exposure. Once a week throughout the five-year apprenticeship there was a full day at the Cape Technical College for set technical courses, which included mathematics.

Much later in my working life while I was the HR manager for a large international manufacturing and distributing company, they had an apprentice training centre on site at their Durban base, where at that time 4 000 people were employed.

At any one time up to 60 apprentices were signed on. In that context they spent a third of their time at the on-site training centre, a third on the job and a third at the local technical college doing related theoretical courses for a four- or five-year contract, all paid for by the employer.

At the end of their time they were sent for testing at the apprentice testing centre on the Reef for two days.

If they passed and qualified they could become a registered artisan. If the company could not employ them they had little difficulty securing work elsewhere because they were well trained in their field of expertise. When I left high school the artisan skill field was wide ranging. It extended from building construction to ship building, various electrical and mechanical skills and more.

At a totally different level I had friends who, on completing matric, became articled clerks with auditing firms. They worked during the day and attended university lectures after hours.

Thereafter they had to write the qualifying exams to become an auditor. Tough, but it resulted in qualified young people with high work ethics.

My experience was that starting as an apprentice does not limit further academic achievements and job improvements.

Why are these training models not up for discussion? They were once very effective.