An apprenticeship is a system of training a new generation of practitioners of a trade or profession with on-the-job training and often some accompanying study (classroom work and reading).  Apprenticeships are an effective way for young adults to transit from school to work life while improving links between industry and training institutions. Apprenticeships are successful because they facilitate ‘learning by earning’ and ‘learning by doing’, combining formal education with hands-on experience.

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Situation of Apprenticeship in India:

• India has a highly underutilized and mostly unknown formal apprenticeship system that began in 1961.
• Our roughly 700,000 formal apprentices are less than 0.01% of our labour force (Germany has 2.7%).
• We have only about 35,000 employers appointing apprentices (UK has 200,000).
• The low penetration reflects the “regulatory cholesterol” for employers that thought of apprenticeships as a job rather than a classroom.
• The Apprentices Act has been amended four times, but the 2015 amendment laid the foundation for reaching an ambitious goal of 10 million apprentices.
• Two important changes are pending: more employers and linking apprentices to higher education.
• A compliance mindset has sabotaged employer adoption, but apprentices deliver three outcomes; lower people supply chain costs, lower attrition and higher productivity.

Significance of apprenticeship:

• Apprenticeships and other hands-on post-secondary programs provide an optimum balance between theory and hands-on experience.
• However, many traditional programs often fail to teach the specific skills and techniques required on the job.
• Employers provide about 90% of apprenticeship training in the workplace. This is complemented with classroom instruction on theory. This combination of training creates a highly skilled workforce
• The natural learning-by-doing and learning-while-earning make apprenticeship more sustainable, scalable and self healing than other skill programmes.
• Apprentices can make the system self-healing – the global experience in this regard is positive. Germany has Europe’s lowest unemployment rate because of apprenticeships and UK has found that employers gain 26 times their investments on apprenticeship stipends.
• With rising tuition in colleges and universities, the concept of hands-on learning and “earning while learning” is very attractive to many young people.
• apprentices can cut hiring costs by more than 50% because aggregation costs are shared by educational institutions, the government, parents, and non-profit foundations
• There are three upsides of well-structured apprenticeship programmes: soft skills are becoming more valuable than hard skills and are best learnt on the job; apprenticeship programmes are the shortest corridor to jobs; and increasing higher education connectivity means kids get the social signalling value of degrees almost free if they complete their apprenticeship period.
• Apprenticeship programmes can cut attrition by 25-50% because their structure of learning-while-earning and learning-by-doing allow employers to take employees for a test drive, and employees to understand the organization, job and colleagues while creating additional incentives for completion of the apprenticeship period.
• Employee productivity is a complex cocktail of hard and soft factors like motivation, tools, process, skills, culture, industry, location and much else.
• The productivity impact of industry and functional skills rises considerably when combined with the firm-specific skills that are often embedded in company work cultures.
• The practice of apprenticeships before employment nurtures social, intellectual and knowledge capital, and makes people productive 25-50% faster than direct hires.

Measures needed:

• Recent amendments to the Apprenticeship Act of 1961 create the space for innovation, scale and higher education linkages for state governments.
• Fixing schools is an important skill agenda.
• Second, exploding the number of employers offering apprenticeships -today, India has only 25,000 versus more than 200,000 for Germany – will ensure skills keep up with work.
• More focus on job creation and skill development because there is no such thing as India’s labour market. Active state government apprenticeship programmes could take India’s numbers to the same proportion of the labour force as Germany’s (this would take India’s current 300,000 apprentices to 15 million).
• Each state set up a State Apprenticeship Corporation (SAC) as a public-private partnership co-chaired by the chief secretary and the chairman of one of the state’s largest private employer.
• SACs will anchor programmes on state strengths such as tourism in Rajasthan, information technology in
• Karnataka and manufacturing in Tamil Nadu; target employers with different strategies for companies headquartered and those operating in the state
• The best form of corporate social responsibility is a well-run apprenticeship programme that readies candidates for in-house absorption, in addition to supplying job-ready candidates to other industry players and the economy.

Government of India has taken up many schemes for apprenticeship development:

• National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme under Ministry of Skill Development where Union Government will provide financial incentives to the employers to engage apprentices and will directly share 25% of the total stipend payable to an apprentice with employer.
• SHREYAS under Ministry of Human Resources and Development to provide industry apprenticeship opportunities to the general graduates exiting in April 2019 through the National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS). It aims to enhance the employability of Indian youth by providing ‘on the job work exposure’ and earning of stipend.
• The National Apprenticeship Training Scheme under MHRD is a one year programme equipping technically qualified youth with practical knowledge and skills required in their field of work. The Apprentices are imparted training by the organizations at their place of work.

Conclusion:

Apprenticeship Training is considered to be one of the most efficient ways to develop skilled manpower for the country. It provides for an industry led, practice oriented, effective and efficient mode of formal training.