I guess it just goes back to the one in five skilled trades employers engaged with apprenticeships. Those employers would tell you that it's an absolute no-brainer. It's the best thing for their business. It's giving them the future leaders. It's giving them their ability to compete. It's contributing to their ability to develop people with the skills and knowledge they need to be productive within their business.
It's that four out of five who aren't engaged that I'm much more worried about. I think that in some cases they think that an apprentice, particularly in those first couple of years, is not as productive as they are throughout the later stages of their apprenticeship, so it's costing them the time and the money to invest in the training. That's where we start to think about how government can incent those employers to participate.
Number one, governments maybe can provide some wage subsidies to the smallest employers that are facing those resource constraints. Number two, governments can be the ones that are hiring and training apprentices instead of poaching them from the small companies that are doing the training. Also, they can find ways to support a business imperative for apprenticeship training, and this is where you start to get into infrastructure and procurement contracts that include provisions for apprenticeship hiring and training. This is important, because employers who may think it's too much time and too much money to hire and train an apprentice will start to think that the business imperative to getting that job is to be actively involved with training.