Description
Do pre-apprenticeships help individuals to obtain an apprenticeship? This research applies propensity score matching to the National VET Provider Collection to explore this question for Western Australia. It finds that, for students both at school and not at school, a pre-apprenticeship roughly doubles their chances of obtaining an apprenticeship. However, this is still less than a quarter of all pre-apprenticeships. This research was funded through the NCVER Fellowship Program.
Summary
About the research
Pre-apprenticeships have been popular for many years with both prospective apprentices and employers — they give prospective apprentices a taste of the relevant trade and therefore should be helpful in ensuring a match between the expectations of a new apprentice and the reality of the trade. However, pre-apprenticeships are by no means the only route into an apprenticeship.
The purpose of this research is to look at the relative impact of pre-apprenticeship programs on the probability of undertaking an apprenticeship.
Any comparison of the effectiveness of pre-apprenticeships in leading to an apprenticeship must be relative to a counterfactual. In this case the counterfactual is students who are undertaking the same courses in Western Australia but not as part of a formal pre-apprenticeship program. In order to take into account that the students undertaking a course as part of a pre-apprenticeship program are likely to have different background characteristics compared with other students undertaking the course, Stromback employs propensity score matching, which matches an individual in the comparison group with an individual in the pre-apprenticeship program. The match is based on factors that explain statistically whether a student is part of the pre-apprenticeship program or not. The most important characteristics turn out to be sex, age and Indigenous status.
Key messages
- For the not-at-school group, the increase in the probability of going on to an apprenticeship the following year is around 11 percentage points if the student is in a pre-apprenticeship program (23% compared with 12% for the comparison group).
- This effect is much smaller than a simple comparison of the two groups, indicating that the differences in personal characteristics are quite important.
The one caveat to these results is that it is likely that those undertaking the pre-apprenticeship program are inherently more interested in the possibility of an apprenticeship than those in the comparison group. Thus the impact of pre-apprenticeship programs cannot really be deduced from the comparisons of the pre-apprenticeship program students with the other students, but they do provide a useful indication of the order of magnitude of the program's effect.
Tom Karmel
Managing Director, NCVER