The apprenticeship paradox
The economy needs 250,000 tradespeople. It just made them harder to train.
The UK needs 250,000 new tradespeople to meet its housing and infrastructure targets. 104,000 electricians alone by 2032. Heat pump installations, EV charging, the retrofit programme that keeps getting announced and then quietly re-announced with a lower number. The demand is real, funded, and growing.
Apprenticeship starts are falling.
The NI increases and the rising living wage have made it more expensive for small firms to take on apprentices. A plumbing firm with four employees does not have an HR department to navigate the levy. It has a bloke called Dave who does the books on Thursday evenings. Dave looked at the numbers and decided he could not afford to carry a first-year apprentice at the new rate. So the apprenticeship did not happen.
Multiply Dave by tens of thousands of SMEs and you get the paradox: the economy is creating demand for physical work at exactly the moment it is defunding the pipeline for physical workers.
I wrote about this in the book. Chapter 3 lays out the four-tier exposure map, and the bit that surprises people is the bottom tier. Trades requiring physical presence, care work, roles with regulatory human oversight. These are not “safe from AI” in some romantic sense. They are structurally less exposed because the body has to be in the room.
Which brings us to Gareth. He is a composite character in Chapter 11, but the pattern he represents is not composite at all. Plumber, 36 years in, heat pump certified, charges £85 an hour in the Tewkesbury area. Two ex-accountants applied for apprenticeships with him last year.
Read that again. Two people who trained for years to work in professional services looked at the labour market and decided that learning to fit boilers was the better bet.
Here’s the thing. The book’s argument in Chapter 3 is that the plumber who earns £60,000 a year is structurally more secure than the marketing director who earns £75,000. Not because plumbing is better work. Because AI cannot do plumbing. It can do marketing orchestration. The exposure inversion is real: AI hits the educated and well-paid first.
The trades were supposed to be the fallback. The thing you did if university was not for you. That framing was always patronising, but it also had a structural logic to it. There was a professional track and a vocational track, and the professional track paid more.
The Next Rung is a book on how AI is quietly dismantling the middle of knowledge work, and what you can do about it before the market decides for you: pre-order it before it publishes in January.
That gap is closing. In some cases it has already closed. Gareth’s son is at college doing electrical installation. He will walk into a market with six-figure demand and shrinking supply. The marketing graduate from Bristol UWE who applied to 43 positions and got zero offers would swap places in a heartbeat.
But here is the paradox at its sharpest. The government wants 250,000 new tradespeople. The same government raised the costs that make it uneconomical for small firms to train them. The pipeline for the work that actually survives AI displacement is being squeezed by policies designed to fund other things.
And the people who might retrain into trades cannot afford to. You cannot retrain into a trade when you cannot afford to stop working for a week, let alone six months. That is Ryan’s problem from Chapter 11. Three platform jobs, £18,000 a year, rent at 63 per cent of take-home. He is not retraining into anything.
The Next Rung is a book on how AI is quietly dismantling the middle of knowledge work, and what you can do about it before the market decides for you: pre-order it before it publishes in January.
The apprenticeship paradox is not a policy failure in isolation. It is a symptom of a system that has not yet understood what is happening to its own labour market. The knowledge economy is shedding orchestration roles. The physical economy needs workers it cannot train fast enough. And the bridge between the two, the retraining infrastructure, is neither funded nor designed for the scale required.
I keep coming back to the same line from the book: the mechanism that made it fine last time is gone. Previous transitions had a next rung. Displaced agricultural workers moved into factories. Displaced factory workers moved into offices. This time, the next rung for displaced knowledge workers is trades and care work, and we are actively making it harder to get there.
The demand is real. The supply pipeline is broken. The irony writes itself. Except it is not funny if you are Dave, looking at the numbers on a Thursday evening, deciding he cannot take the risk.