Kirby comes of age: the birth, difficult adolescence, and future prospects of traineeships

This discussion paper, commissioned by Dusseldorp Skills Forum (DSF) and Group Training (GTA) for a roundtable discussion on traineeships held in April 2006, analyses what has happened to traineeships in Australia in the changing labour market in the last 20 years since the Kirby report (indexed at TD/TNC 85.649) was published, and contributes to the debate about the direction, funding and quality of skills development. The paper argues that ‘the concept of traineeships has expanded from their original role of alleviating the high unemployment rates of young people in order to accommodate a number of deliberate institutional changes’ and has come to occupy a much more prominent role. Findings include: there has been enormous growth in traineeship commencements, reaching a peak of 238,000 in 2003; much of the employment growth over the past two decades has been in high skill jobs; the chief beneficiaries of traineeships, as they have evolved since the mid-1990s, have been employers; and take-up of school-based New Apprenticeships is growing rapidly, with 15,300 commencements in 2005. Show less