Apprenticeship programs are becoming even more important for organizational stability – academic explains business case for HR amping up programs
Statistics Canada’s latest data show Canadian employers are leaning harder on apprenticeships, but completions and certification still lag the demand for skilled workers.
New registrations in apprenticeship programs reached 101,541 in 2024, a 5.9-percent increase from 2023 and the highest level since 2008. However, there were 46,971 apprentices who certified in 2024 – a figure largely unchanged from 2023.
For employers, those numbers translate into continued pressure to both attract and develop people into trades roles, particularly in sectors facing retirements and project backlogs – but employers are hesitant to take on level 1 and 2 apprentices, according to industry experts.
This hesitancy is one of the factors leading to a decade-long decline in certified tradespeople.
Assistant professor Oluseyi Sode, who teaches organizational behaviour and human resource management at Wilfrid Laurier University, says apprenticeship needs to be understood as a core capability tactic for organizations, not just a narrow training line item.
In his view, employers can use apprenticeships to build workers’ capacity to adapt, not just to perform a static set of tasks.
“Rather than just training employees in an apprenticeship program to satisfy current needs, they should be trained via meta-learning principles to learn at on the fly, to learn how to learn, learn how to adapt to the changes AI and automation brings,” Sode says.
“As such, it will help the organizations that they're working in become more competitive in their pursuits, in their business.”
Apprenticeship as strategic learning
Although there was a national general increase in new apprentice registrations, StatsCan revealed, six provinces and two territories showed year-over-year declines in 2024. National pre-pandemic levels of new certifications in 2024 remained below pre-pandemic levels.
Sode links apprenticeship design directly to the way employers respond to artificial intelligence and automation on the shop floor and in offices – programs that only teach current compliance and skills miss the broader shift in work design and technology.
Some employers think of apprenticeships as “old-fashioned,” he adds; they question if apprenticeships make sense when AI can perform more routine work. His take is that this makes apprenticeships more important, not less.
Employers should think of apprenticeship in the broader context of rapid technological change, demographic shifts and diversity in the workforce, Sode says, explaining that bringing apprentices into a workforce can raise the watermark for the whole organisation.
In practice, that means designing learning infrastructure that extends beyond an individual cohort or trade; he also notes that apprenticeship is no longer limited to traditional trades, and that program formats can evolve as work becomes more hybrid.
“A functional, well-structured apprenticeship system helps the organization to lay out a learning infrastructure... not just for the individual apprentices, but for the organization as a whole. It's not just training. It helps to build competitive advantage.”
The business case for apprenticeships: reduced turnover
A common concern for employers hesitant to invest in apprenticeship programs is the time supervisors and journey workers spend training and the lower productivity of new entrants. Sode acknowledges that productivity may dip, but frames it as an investment decision.
First of all, programs can be tweaked to involve more on-the-job training up front, to ease the early cost, he says. Plus, when the costs of turnover, attrition and new hires is weighed against the cost of investing in apprentices, the business case can be clearly made.
“To hire new employees from the outside, research shows it's costlier than building employees from within,” he explains.
“We see roughly about 30 to 50 percent lower turnover rates versus when there are external hiring pipelines in place, trying to fill positions in the organization.”
Internal pipelines, quality and safety outcomes
Many employers already rely heavily on casual or temporary workers, particularly in manufacturing and production, but do not always link that practice to formal apprenticeship design; Sode says that using those internal pools to recruit apprentices can make both integration and culture fit easier overall.
Essentially, this practice creates loyal, integrated employees out of already invested but unattached workers, he explains.
He also links internal worker development to better quality and safety outcomes. Because they are already familiar with the work environment and tasks, the risk profile of an apprenticed workforce looks different than when hiring external candidates who must learn both the job and the organization.
Another design consideration is how quickly apprentices reach full productivity, and how much tacit knowledge remains in the organization as other more experienced workers retire. Apprentices learning inside the organization tend to reach competence faster, Sode says, because they have seen the work performed, sometimes for years already.
“Because they are learning within the organizational space, we see a faster ramp-up of apprentices to execute projects … and we see better retention of tacit knowledge,” Sode says.
“They've already seen those roles and those functions, those duties being performed – at least it's registered in their cognition that, ‘This is how this is done, but this is how I can better execute when I start doing it.”
