Canberra apprenticeships hit a brick wall in the middle of a construction boom

ABC NEWS (Australia)

Canberra’s building boom is hiding a concerning drop in people taking up and completing trades training. New figures show the construction labour force is strong with an increase of 10 percent in the last two years, but there has been a 20-per-cent fall in the number of apprentices. Bricklaying has been hit the hardest, with just seven apprentices left in training across the whole ACT.

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00:02Canberra is in the middle of a construction boom, but fewer people are learning the tricks

00:07of a trade.

00:09There's actually only seven apprentice bricklayers currently in training in the ACT, which is

00:14alarming.

00:15Apprentices need a boss to take them on.

00:18Daniel Swan is a third generation bricklayer.

00:20I've got Jacob, he's 21, but there's a big gap between 21 and the next guy, so I don't

00:28know what it's going to be like in 10 years' time.

00:29Third year apprentice Jacob has always wanted to learn a trade.

00:33It was a hard gig, like I was a little skinny boy, and yeah it was hard to really get

00:39pushing

00:39and pushing more boroughs and stuff, but then I kind of just stuck through it.

00:43Bricklayer Lynn Sheffield runs a trade school teaching apprentices skills.

00:48I really feel that we should be educating them first away from the job site and then bringing

00:54them into the job sites.

00:55And the bosses will use them more in their trade instead of just using them as labourers.

01:01We go to school once a month and it's not enough time for us to learn at the start of

01:04our apprenticeship.

01:05And it's just really hard.

01:06When you're third year and you can't lay bricks properly, you need that skill straight

01:10away.

01:10It's a qualified trade, but currently you don't need a licence to work as a bricklayer in the

01:16ACT.

01:17We don't even have to have our qualifications, so when you look around the job sites there's

01:23a lot of bad work.

01:25We have a lot of labour, but not skilled labour.

01:29Putting that in context of the target of building 30,000 homes over the next five years, we've

01:35got a long way to go.

01:36Rethinking apprenticeships before skills hit a brick wall.

01:41Rethinking apprenticeships before skills hit a bricklayer in the middle of the next five years,

01:44You can just take a bricklayer in the middle of the next six years, so that we've got that

01:44And at the end of the year, when we put our tech, we're going to have our aluminum

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