Mr. Brian Nolan:

On one piece of promotion, I am probably speaking from personal experience here as well in terms of dealing with some of our apprentices, some of our qualified craft workers and maybe looking a bit closer to home with my own children in terms of where their future might be. I have two that are involved in education and one young lady who is about to do her leaving certificate and is talking up the idea of an apprenticeship without me having to promote it whatsoever, which is great. Obviously, her route has been slightly different from those of the older two because she is looking at that. I am conscious of that and I am trying to dig down into what that is.

I have concern about the way we promote it, in particular, in trying to deal with diversity. As a union, we are predominantly male because we are a craft union and, historically, they have been crafts. We make every effort to try and change that. There are huge efforts made to promote female participation in apprenticeship.

The problem somewhat is not every girl wants to become a poster for apprenticeship either, and that tends to happen. When a young lady comes into apprenticeship, she suddenly becomes the face of a company and the face of apprenticeship. They want to be the apprentice but it needs to be seen as the norm, not as "You can be like Mary". They want to be like every girl that is in an apprenticeship or in a craft. There is a body of work that has to happen and time will help with that. I suppose we have the reverse dynamic that possibly nursing unions would have in the sense that people might a view that they would be predominantly female. It is something we ourselves have to look at as a union as well.

The promotion has to start from the cradle to the grave. Kids start off and lads and girls become more familiar with stuff in secondary school, once they come out of the primary cycle. Even in primary, you can be making people aware without being too forced. You can say there are options out there. When they go into secondary school, giving people an opportunity to participate is important. STEM is huge, but there are practical life skills. Teaching people how to do very basic things, such as how to cut a piece of wood, very much shapes what people do. By the time they gear towards exams, you are directing them towards it.

On a national scale, apart from the funding that goes with apprenticeship, possibly the national apprenticeship office needs as much help as possible to promote apprenticeship, on the airwaves and everywhere. It is one of those things. If you ran an ad campaign for ten months, after the eleventh month it would be forgotten about. It needs to be there and it needs to be relevant when people are making the choices. It needs to be everywhere that apprenticeship is there. I would say that you cannot do that unless you have the buy-in from the employers. You can promote apprenticeship but unless the jobs are on offer, you will have that problem.

The public sector side of the house is a primary example of where you could advertise the success story of apprenticeship.