Labor has released a policy to create 10,000 places in a pre-apprenticeship training program to tackle high drop-out rates of young apprentices.
The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has welcomed the package but said its modest size and impact on costs of apprenticeships may limit its effectiveness.
The proposed Apprentice Ready program is a 20-week course delivered through Tafe colleges, to introduce young people who have been unemployed for six months or more to trades.
Labor said in a statement the program would “give young people the skills they need to be job-ready and provide a ‘taster’ of high quality trades”, specifically those on the skills needs list.
It hopes the program will help young people choose an apprenticeship that suits their interests to help address the drop out rate of 30% within the first 12 months of training.
Labor has also promised Tafe-based student-industry liaison officers to connect participants with employers and provide mentoring in the first year of their apprenticeships.
Employers would receive an extra $1,000 incentive payment to hire apprentices who had completed the program.
Labor also proposed a pilot program to help 5,000 mature-aged, retrenched workers turn their work experience into formal qualifications.
The package will cost $62.5m over four years. It follows Labor’s earlier promise to set a quota of 10% of workers on government-funded projects to be apprentices.
The ACCI’s employment, education and training director, Jenny Lambert, told Guardian Australia the package was “welcome but modest”.
Lambert said the training “will help in determining whether that person likes the work, and whether they’re suitable for the work”.
“It will be useful, but it won’t fix the problem … the very essence of the reason the trades have fallen off is due to economic conditions, employers are not taking anybody on at the moment. Preparing people for jobs does not create jobs.”
Lambert said the $1,000 payment would encourage employers to hire from the disadvantaged jobseeker cohort who completed the program, but not all would get jobs. Also “the vast majority” of businesses who hire the 180,000 trades apprentices in training would miss out, she said.
Lambert said high wage rates for apprentices, after a pay rise for adult apprentices in 2013 had made it hard to take them on.
The vocational education and skills minister, Scott Ryan, said: “Labor gutted Australian apprenticeships, cutting employer incentive payments nine times between 2011 and 2013, a total of $1.2bn.”
“In contrast, the Coalition has not cut a single incentive payment to employers of apprentices.”
Ryan blamed the cuts to incentive payments for a 25% drop in take-ups, with a total of 85,000 fewer apprentices starting training between 2012 and 2013. Labor blames the Coalition because apprenticeships have dropped almost 20% between September 2014 and 2015.
The Coalition is encouraging apprenticeships through loans that have been taken up by 40,000 apprentices, a support network program to match apprentices to trades, and a $4,000 incentive payment to employers who hire apprentices.
The Coalition is also advocating its PaTH internship scheme from the 2016 budget in which young people complete six weeks of job readiness training followed by a work experience of up to 12 weeks.
Jobseekers will complete up to 25 hours of work a week and be paid $100 a week on top of their welfare payments. Businesses will get $1,000 to employ an intern and a further subsidy of between $6,500 and $10,000 if they decided to hire the jobseeker at the end of the internship.
The Coalition has also said tax cuts for companies with a turnover of more than $2m, which Labor opposes, will boost employment, including of young people.
Lambert said Labor’s apprentice policy was similar to the PaTH scheme because it targeted young people who had been unemployed for six months or more.
She said ACCI was a “big supporter of the PaTH program because it includes work experience”.
“You can’t have endless cycles of training … any package with work experience included with training is better than just training or just experience alone.”
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