Return to apprenticeships: a comparison between existing apprentices and newly recruited apprentices

In England, half of all apprentices are now of adult age. Most of them—and many of younger age, too—worked with their training firm for some time before starting their apprenticeship. In this article, we estimate the benefit of apprenticeship completion making the distinction between groups of newly recruited and existing staff. To deal with sources of endogeneity resulting from apprenticeship completion, we exploit an exogenous change in minimum duration of training affecting apprenticeship completion. Our findings show much higher benefits for new compared with existing staff. Also, increasing apprenticeship training only creates positive effects for new entrants, but not for existing workers. Therefore, policy should aim to refocus apprenticeships to be a mechanism of labour market entry combined with education to provide access to and acquire competences required for actual occupational roles, but not as a generic mechanism to train existing staff.