I completed the late '70s standard UK engineering apprenticeship in Electrical & Electronic Engineering as a basis for a career working with CNC machine tools. This comprised a first year "off the job" at an apprentice training school, with one day being "Day Release" at college (long days, those - 8.30am through to 8 pm). Then two years of on-the-job training, working through two training modules, having to write up assignements & get these assesed by the GTB examiners - the Day Release college continued. Then another experience year under supervision (along with the seemingly never ending Day Release). At that point I was "signed off" and deemed comptent enough to start doing the job without being a danger to others ! The learning never stopped over the next 40-odd years until I retired.

The scheme under which I was trained was administed by the local Group Training Asscociation (GTB) of the Engineering Industry Training Board (EITB). AFAIK all gone now, with appreticeships dumbed down to being little more than limited training schemes run to the narrow requirements of employers & completed in many cases in under a year. This has worked (after a fashion) for the last 20 or so years as employers were happy to take trained European (often East European) workers rather than invest in training their own workers - always seems to be someone else's job to invest in training workers, not theirs. The ready supply of "trained by others" imported labour has largely dried up, yet our remaining industries still don't want to do anything more than complain about the lack of suitable employees without wanting to invest in the training themselves.

Until we get MPs & others in Govenment wwho actually have experience of working in a business environment there is probably little chance that things will get turned around. They politicos may well have good intentions with their various "schemes" but every time they throw lots of (our) money at the training problem they get bamboozled by the scheme recipients who take the money but don't provide the broad-based training required to benefit the trainees & the country in the long run i.e. Universities changing the job description of existing (ofter older) employees to "apprentices" to get Government apprentice training subsidies.

Rant over !

Nigel B.