Guest editorial

Citation

Smith, E. and Grollman, P. (2007), "Guest editorial", Education + Training, Vol. 49 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/et.2007.00449faa.001

Guest editorial

This special issue of Education + Training focuses on the issue of quality in apprenticeship. Apprenticeship remains an important model for the development of qualification-based skills, especially for young people, in the economies of many countries around the world. In 2005, Education + Training published a special issue looking at the role of apprenticeships in economies and societies. The 2007 special issue turns the focus onto the quality of apprenticeships. While apprenticeships are important as a policy instrument for reducing unemployment and producing qualifications, in the end the system can only be said to work when it involves high quality training.

Papers were invited to address the following themes:

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  Why do employers recruit apprentices, and what recruitment methods do they use to attract high quality applicants?

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  Do apprenticeships provide a return on investment for employers, during or after the period of training?

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  What roles do apprentices play in employers’ strategic planning for current and future skill needs, and how does the employer’s intent affect apprentice training?

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  What pedagogical processes used by employers and by external training providers produce high quality outcomes? How much interaction is there between employers and external training providers, and does this affect quality?

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  What is the role of tradition in employers’ engagement with apprenticeship, and how can these traditions be transferred to newer occupations and industries to improve quality?

In all cases, authors were asked to include a section explaining the apprenticeship system in the relevant country, including the distribution of apprentices’ time among different learning sites and a description of any regulation (by governments or other stakeholders) designed to uphold the quality of training in apprenticeship. The reason for this request was that apprenticeship models vary considerably from country to country and therefore readers require an introduction to the different national systems that are being discussed.

The six papers in this issue address the above themes very well. We are fortunate to be able to include a spread of papers covering Germany, The Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK, the USA and Australia, authored by some of the leading researchers in the area of apprenticeship.

Three of the papers, those by Grollman and Rauner, Fuller and Unwin, and Smith, report on data collected as part of a project undertaken in 2005-2006 by researchers in an international collaborative research network known as INAP1 – the International Network on Innovative Apprenticeship – which is managed from the University of Bremen, Germany. The aim of the collaborative network is to get a deeper insight into the practices of apprenticeship on the level of companies and individual learning, since little is known about that in an international comparative scale. The new knowledge gained will lead to the embedding of local enactments of apprenticeship into the wider context of possible policies and practices. This can help to identify patterns and directions for change and innovation. The triangle of costs, benefits and quality is the lens through which the research in the international network has been focused. The 2005-2006 project used a semi-standardised interview guideline that was developed by researchers in the Institute for Technology and Education (Ines Herrmann, Felix Rauner and Philipp Grollmann) in co-operation with the international network partners. In addition criteria were formulated for the identification and selection of potentially innovative case-study sites across a range of occupations. It was found that there are many ways of aligning organisational and business purposes with individual development and learning. The examples also show that the conditions for realising such a balance are also extremely diverse. This does not only relate to structural conditions but also – and more importantly – to the “softer” organisational features of the cases looked at. For the comparative study of innovative apprenticeship, that means that apprenticeship needs to be conceptualised more as a specific form of learning and interaction between the individual and the work environment rather than as an institutional arrangement cast in concrete. This insight can be useful to practitioners and administrators because it helps to recognise the essence of learning in apprenticeships.

With this publication the project has its first opportunity to present its work to a wider audience. Further publications are in preparation providing a more comprehensive account of the results achieved in the network.

The three papers that are not immediately connected with the INAP project give valuable insights into apprenticeship in different countries. The paper by Glover, Clopton, McCollum and Wang reports on the challenges of introducing structured apprentice-like training into the US environment where apprenticeship is not a common feature, and the ways in which such training must justify itself to organisations as well as deal with the different viewpoints of management and labour. The paper describes the particular case of the transit industry, which faces many challenges including technological advances, looming retirements and a growth in demand. In contrast, in the Netherlands apprenticeship is well established and unlike in the USA it is training provider-based rather than workplace-based. Onstenk and Blokhuis’s paper describes the ways in which workplace experience can best be integrated with school-based learning to provide quality apprenticeship in the Netherlands. The paper by Snell and Hart uses qualitative research to shed light on recent debates in Australia about the quality of training in apprenticeships and traineeships, focusing particularly on the meaning of low completion rates.

It has been a privilege to edit this special issue as we have had the chance to read and comment on emerging research of significance, and to consolidate and extend the network of apprenticeship researchers internationally. This has been achieved through working both with the authors and with the international reviewers who willingly agreed to offer detailed and thoughtful comments on the papers that were submitted. We invite others working in apprenticeship research to contact us.

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