Apprenticeship Outcomes – Qualification Year 2020

Apprenticeship Data Sources

Data on apprentices comes from two primary administrative sources, the National Apprenticeship Office (NAO) and Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI). The NAO data contains data on enrolments and QQI collects data with respect to awards. Both data sources are used to build a complete picture of the apprentices' studies. The National Apprenticeship Office (NAO) data also contains additional information on the consortia-led apprenticeships related to course completions. Prior to the establishment of the NAO, SOLAS provided the CSO with data on apprenticeships and this data is also used in the compilation of these statistics. SOLAS continues to provide the CSO with data on behalf of the NAO.

National Framework of Qualifications

The National Framework for Qualifications (NFQ) was launched in 2003 and it is now the single structure mechanism for recognising all education and training in Ireland. All framework awards now have an NFQ Level, numbered from 1 to 10, which indicates the standard of learning and an NFQ Award-Type which relates to the purpose, volume and progression opportunities associated with a particular award. Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI) has the responsibility to develop, promote and maintain the Irish NFQ.

Traditionally, completed apprenticeships led to an Advanced Certificate at Level 6 on the NFQ framework, however more recently it is possible to obtain an award at all levels between 5 to 10. Note that this report is confined to NFQ Levels 5 to 8, covering the vast majority of completed apprenticeships.

International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED)

The International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) is a framework for assembling, compiling and analysing cross-nationally comparable statistics on education. ISCED has been revised several times, including in both 2011 and 2013. The 2013 revision focused on the fields of education and training (ISCED-F) which are used in this publication. ISCED-F contains 11 broad fields (2 digits), 29 narrow fields (3 digits) and about 80 detailed fields (4 digits).

In previous further education releases by the CSO, apprenticeships were analysed by five craft types: Motor, Electrical, Engineering, Construction and Printing & Paper Industry. In this release, these categories have been re-defined using ISCED-F. Thus, the previous three apprenticeship types categorised as Motor, Electrical and Engineering belong to the ISCED-F narrow field of Engineering & Engineering Trades (071).  

The narrow fields can be further subcategorised into detailed fields. For example, the apprenticeship programme Heavy Vehicle Mechanics belongs to the narrow field of Engineering & Engineering Trades (071) and is further subcategorised to the detailed field of Motor Vehicles, Ships & Aircraft (0716). 

Destination Outcome Categories

There are five classifications that describe graduate activities within each calendar year. 

• Substantial Employment only. This refers to qualified apprentices who meet minimum criteria for substantial employment or self-employment and are not enrolled in higher education within the same calendar year.

• Substantial Employment and Education. This refers to qualified apprentices that meet the criteria for substantial employment or self-employment and are also enrolled in higher education at some point within the same year. 

• Education only. This refers to qualified apprentices that are enrolled in higher education but are not in substantial employment.

• Neither Employment nor Education. This refers to qualified apprentices who do not meet the criteria above but have some activity in administrative records for that year. These qualified apprentices may have some record of (non-substantial) employment or claimed some benefit in that year.

• The remaining individuals are categorised as Not Captured. This means that they have no activity in the administrative data sources for that year. Most of this group are assumed to have emigrated, but there is no definitive indicator of emigration available in the administrative data.

The period since qualification for which outcomes are presented ranges between two and 10 years. Unlike higher education and most further level education, which tend to adhere to fixed academic years with standardised finish dates, apprenticeships do not have a set qualification date. This means that completion dates vary between programmes and also between individuals within the same programmes. 

Due to the varying nature of completion dates, and in order to ensure there is a minimum period of 12 months between an apprentice completing their studies and the outcomes being measured, 'two years after qualification' is first year in which statistics on destination outcomes are presented.

Earnings and Main Employment

Employment data from Revenue includes one record for each occupation of every individual. Each record includes the number of weeks of insurable work and the gross pay received by the employee. It does not include the hourly wage or the number of hours worked. The Main Employer for each individual is the one which contributes the single largest pay to that individual over the course of the year. The Weekly Earnings for each individual are found using data from the main employer only, and is calculated as the gross pay divided by the number of weeks of insurable work. Revenue's PAYE Modernisation System (PMOD) was introduced on 01 January 2019 as the new way of gathering employment data, replacing the P35 annual return system.

Each employer was assigned to a category for business size based on their effective number of employees:

Business Size	Number of Employees
Micro	10
Small	10 - 49
Medium	50 - 249
Large	250

For the analysis involving the employer during an apprenticeship, only records with a valid business identifier on the registration dataset were included. Missing or invalid information on either the registration dataset or the PMOD dataset was therefore, excluded.  

Overall coverage rate of the business identifier in the apprentice registration dataset has improved over time, however caution should be taken when interpreting data from years where the coverage was low.

Please see Table 6.1 for details on those that could be linked to the business register and Table 6.2 for those for whom a comparison could be made between their employer during their apprenticeship and their employer two years after qualification.

Note that changes in the earnings methodology have been implemented in the Educational Longitudinal Database (ELD) which means that the earnings in this release are not directly comparable to other releases derived from the ELD. For further details, see the section in the ELD methodology.

NACE - Classification of Economic Activities

NACE represents the Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community. The industry sectors in this report are based on the alphabetical letter of the NACE code under Revision 2 (see Eurostat website). In cases where a graduate had more than one employment in a single year, then the NACE code associated with that individual for that year was taken from the main employer. Note that the NACE code is associated with the main activity of the employer, rather than that of the employee.

Methodology Note

In line with CSO data protocols, all identifiable information from each of the data sources is removed, such as name, date of birth and addresses. The PPSN is replaced with a 'protected identifier key' (PIK) and it is this PIK which is used to link person-based data. The resulting data is then said to be 'pseudonymised' and this is what is used for all analysis.

All qualified apprentices (including qualified apprentices with missing/invalid PPSNs) are included in the "Overview of Apprenticeships" chapter.

For the analysis involving outcomes, qualified apprentices with missing or invalid PPSNs are excluded as they cannot be linked to other administrative data. The majority of missing PPSNs were associated with the 2010 cohort, specifically accounting for 115 records.

For the purpose of statistical disclosure controls (SDC), values have been rounded to the nearest five and thus, the sum of individual components may not add up to the totals shown. Similarly, values lower than five have been suppressed and median weekly earnings were calculated by taking an average (mean) of the middle five values in each cohort.

'Year of qualification' for craft apprenticeships is based on the QQI dataset and for consortia-led apprenticeships it is based on NAO completion dates.

For further details on the methodology used, please refer to the Educational Longitudinal Database page.