Engineering Apprenticeships: Youth Transitions, Industrial Capital and the Role of Working-Class Households

Using biographical methods, the study explores the lives of 34 young people undertaking engineering apprenticeships in Teesside, Northeast England. It examines why working-class youth in a deindustrialised region might be attracted to engineering, how they might secure apprenticeship, and the invaluable role households play in orchestrating and sustaining these relations. To understand such youth transitions we develop the concept of 'industrial capital', deployed by adult male family members to leverage employment opportunities in working-class neighbourhoods. Where apprenticeship studies tend to focus on schools, training centres and workplaces, we argue for a need to connect these wider circuits of labour to the political economy of working-class households. In doing so, we explore how inter-generational labour histories may engender attitudes and dispositions, formative of 'respectable' work. Furthermore, the article discloses how working-class households ultimately finance the current apprenticeship system, which has implications not only for them, but for those from low-income backgrounds.