New Zealand had fewer people learning a trade on the job last year than in any year since 2011, and the pipeline kept shrinking through the first quarter of 2026, just as the building industry that employs half the country’s apprentices began to pick up again.
Education Ministry figures published in New Zealand’s workplace-based learners show 108,315 people were in workplace-based learning in the year to December 2025, down 12 percent on 2024, a fall of 14,075 learners. That is 32 percent below the 158,570 recorded in 2022, the highest total since the ministry’s series began in 2011.
The drop was sharper among apprentices, who do longer programmes at level 4 and above, than among trainees, who tend to be existing workers picking up shorter qualifications. Apprentice numbers fell 14 percent to 59,720, while trainees slipped 7.9 percent to 49,110. Apprentices have outnumbered trainees every year since 2021.
What sits behind the apprentice figure matters more than the headline number. The ministry’s data shows the fall was driven by a 24 percent collapse in new entrants, 3,145 fewer people starting an apprenticeship than in 2024, together with 5,480 fewer apprentices carrying on from earlier years. Trainee entries fell 16 percent, or 3,205 people.
Put another way, the share of the New Zealand workforce serving an apprenticeship dropped from 2.4 percent to 2.1 percent in a single year. For men it fell from 3.8 percent to 3.3 percent. Women made up 17 percent of apprentices, unchanged since 2023, and 0.7 percent of the female workforce.
Construction carries the load. It hosted 49 percent of all apprentices in 2025, some 29,040 people, well ahead of healthcare and social assistance on 5,300, retail on 5,100 and manufacturing on 4,745. Just under 10 percent of everyone working in construction was an apprentice, though the gap between men and women in the industry is wide, at 11 percent of men against 3.2 percent of women.
By field of study, RNZ reported on 3 September that agriculture and environmental studies has been worst hit, halving since 2022 to 9,390 learners. Engineering and related technologies dropped by a third to 29,870 and architecture and building by 29 percent to 28,650. A July briefing to Tertiary Education Minister Penny Simmonds showed enrolments in the first three months of 2026 running 11 percent below the same period a year earlier.
Energy and Infrastructure Industry Skills Board chief executive Philip Aldridge told RNZ the fall was a worry. “We have certainly noticed it and we are concerned,” he said. He expects business to improve but thinks the current downturn will leave a mark.
“We’re going to struggle for labour and that means we’re going to have difficulty resourcing up for key initiatives, whether its roading, water, extractive projects and we’ll be over-reliant on immigration to fill those gaps,” Aldridge said.
“Water for example, there’s a $48 billion investment plan over the next 10 years with the new water entities and that requires 6000 new people and so we’re worried about where we’re going to find those people because the training pipeline is nowhere near 6000 people.”
Building and Construction ITO chief executive Jason Hungerford said the shortage is not of willing apprentices but of employers confident enough to sign them up. “At BCITO for the trades we cover we’ve got around 600 people ready and willing to start an apprenticeship right now. What we don’t have is perhaps the confidence of some of those employers that are willing to take that next step and take them on,” he said.
Hungerford said 75,000 people had left the sector over the past year or two, and that the churn was itself a problem for the industry’s skill base. “I think a bigger issue than growing our apprentices is how do we retain them,” he said.
Retention is one of the few numbers moving the right way. The share of apprentices still in training after their first year rose from 66 percent to 71 percent in 2025, and the proportion of trainees finishing a qualification within three years of starting lifted to 54 percent. The longer measure went backwards, with the five year completion rate for apprentices falling three percentage points to 40 percent. A total of 12,930 apprentices and 16,090 trainees finished a qualification during the year.
Primary Industry Training Organisation chief executive Ginny Vincent said part of the fall in her sector was a comedown from unusually high enrolments after Covid and part of it was the economy. “If I talk about primary sector businesses they’re probably operating cautiously because of cost pressures and some uncertainty, probably not recruiting as much as they would so employers are deferring starting any new apprenticeships or trainees,” she said.
Vincent also pointed to years of upheaval in how training is organised. “From an industry perspective, six years-plus of structural change has meant considerable disruption and a little bit of uncertainty around how the workplace training is funded … and how things are being arranged and delivered,” she said.
That upheaval reached another milestone on 1 January this year, when ten regionally governed polytechnics and eight Industry Skills Boards began operating in place of the centralised model. “Industry knows the skills it needs, and these Boards will ensure apprentices and trainees gain qualifications that employers trust,” Simmonds said at the time. The boards will set standards, endorse programmes and manage work-based training through a two year transition.
Funding shifted too. The ministry notes that eligibility for the Apprenticeship Boost employer subsidy was removed for second year apprentices and for some fields of study during 2025, on top of the earlier end of the Targeted Training and Apprenticeships Fund in 2022.
The ministry is blunt about the main driver, saying workplace training generally rises in times of economic growth and falls in periods of low growth, because employers need enough work coming in to carry learners who are less productive than other staff. Building activity fell away in 2023 and 2024 and started growing again in 2025 without getting back to 2022 levels, which is close to the shape of the apprentice numbers.
The timing is the awkward part. Construction volumes have only just turned, with building work rising in the June quarter for the first time since 2023, and firms that let their apprentice intake fall away in 2024 and 2025 will not have qualified tradespeople ready when the work arrives. The Manufacturing and Engineering Industry Skills Board told RNZ its industries were already there.
“However, our manufacturing and engineering industries have seen continuing signs of recovery and growth over the past year, and many companies now face skills shortages and are consequently looking to take on more apprentices,” the board said.
An apprenticeship signed today produces a qualified worker in three or four years. On the current intake, the people who will build the roads, pipes and houses of the early 2030s are not yet in training.
Are you an employer who has stopped taking on apprentices, or someone who cannot find a start in a trade? Tell us what you are seeing in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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