Apprentice training has significantly risen in Queensland in the last four years, according to figures from the State Department of Education, Training and the Arts. The state has acquired nearly 20,000 more apprentices since 2004, and this is thanks to more and more young people opting out of university courses in favour of trades.

Mr. John Love, an electrician whose company John Love Electrical was named 'Employer of the Year' at the 2007 Australian Training Awards, says that the public's perception of trades a 'second-best' career path was changing.

CEO of the Electrical and Communications Association (ECA), Malcolm Richards, said that the push during the 1980s and 1990s for students to attend university had resulted in the skills shortage.

The attitude that bright school-leavers should go to university to foster their academic skills, rather than join a trade, is now on the way out Mr Love feels, because kids "realise they can make $70,000, $80,000, $90,000 a year," he says.

Mr Love has trained about 60 apprentices in the past two decades, and says that he has been approached by numerous private school students who would have been expected do get high-grades and go onto to tertiary education, but they are actually keen to do an apprenticeship.

Mr Love's company, which employs 120 people, had developed an apprentice training program in conjunction with TAFE that other employers now used.

However, the pressure of the skills shortage issue means that employers may see the four years it takes to train an apprentice as an impediment, especially if other companies later poached qualified apprentices. "We want them to be long-term employees," said Mr Love, but his company has had to reject work because it could not meet demand.

Mr Richards from ECA feels that "we have plenty of kids willing to do apprenticeships but employers are unwilling to take them on to train them for four years." The unwillingness was due to uncertainty about the economy and resources boom, he said.