Rail Skills Australasia (RSA) and leading apprenticeship organisation BUSY At Work have today launched a new apprenticeship program to help job seekers transition into a career with rail and meet workforce demands and solve skills shortages.
The Apprentices On Track program will be delivered in a partnership between RSA and BUSY At Work, and will help employers to manage and mentor their apprentices, increasing the prospects for employees to complete their training and move through to fill looming skills gaps in the rail industry.
It will also ease the red tape and regulatory pressure on employers, allowing them to focus on their core business.
RSA CEO Paul Daly said Apprentices On Track was another initiative to help ensure the rail industry had access to a supply of properly trained people who had a clear understanding of what to expect.
“Apprentices are often young school leavers who have very little to no knowledge of what the rail industry could hold for them,” Mr Daly said.
“The Apprentices On Track program aims to provide advice and mentoring throughout the apprenticeship process, as well as facilitate communication and ongoing mentoring of apprentice’s training, simplifying the apprenticeship process by half.
BUSY At Work CEO Paul Miles said the program would ensure the rail industry has a workforce skilled in the trades required when the need to fill these jobs arises.
“With new major construction projects coming online within the next five years, it will become crucial for rail to have highly skilled and properly trained workers to meet growing workforce demands,” he said.
The Apprentices On Track program was launched by the Assistant Minister for Technical and Further Education, Saxon Rice, who said it was an example of how training could be tailored to meet the needs of both employers and workers in a specific industry.
“The Newman Government is currently restructuring our VET sector to ensure it is responsive to the needs of the state’s economy and delivers graduates with a real-world understanding of their chosen industry,” Ms Rice said.
“It’s great to see industry and companies in the VET sector working together to help achieve this goal, particularly in an area of our economy as critical to our overall prosperity as the rail industry is.”
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Rail Skills Australasia (RSA) is a not-for-profit member based organisation comprising rail industry firms and peak bodies in the rail sector.
BUSY At Work is a leading Apprenticeship organisation assisting more than 25,000 apprentices and 13,000 employers annually.
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