Apprenticeships in Ireland:
An Expanded Route to Skills

Outcomes: qualification volumes doubled by 2020

The CSO qualification series shows qualified apprentices rising from 1,225 in 2015 to 2,685 in 2020 — more than doubling in five years. The trend was not linear: after a stable 2015–2016 period, qualifications lifted sharply in 2017 and 2018, stabilised in 2019, and surged again in 2020 with a year-on-year increase of approximately 37%.

Source: CSO StatBank AOQY01 — Qualified Apprentices

The field composition of qualifications underscores that expansion through 2020 remained anchored in Ireland’s traditional craft and industrial base. The largest qualification volumes in 2020 were in engineering and engineering trades, electricity and energy, architecture and construction, building and civil engineering, and motor vehicles/ships/aircraft. These fields showed the clearest upward trajectories across the period, with engineering trades and electricity-related qualifications driving much of the aggregate increase.

Source: CSO StatBank AOQY03 — Qualified Apprentices by County and Field

While the system expanded, its core sectors did not materially shift in the CSO outcome years. Smaller fields — business and administration, ICT, and non-trade services — remained marginal in the qualification data up to 2020. That matters analytically: it tells us the completion engine at the end of the 2010s was still overwhelmingly oriented toward high-volume craft and industrial programmes, so any diversification we now see in the post-2020 registration pipeline is a genuine widening of the apprenticeship footprint, not a continuation of something already underway in completions.

The gender breakdown highlights a persistent challenge: female qualification counts were effectively negligible through 2018, rising only in the final two years of the series. Even in 2020, female qualifiers numbered approximately 120 out of 2,685 total qualifications — under 5% of completions. Female completions begin to move only at the end of the CSO data series: a sign of momentum, but from a very low base.

Pipeline: registrations surge after 2020

Where the CSO outcomes data ends in 2020, NAO/ACSS intake data takes over. New apprentice registrations rose from 5,326 in 2020 to 9,352 in 2024, with a forecast of 9,659 in 2025. The standout movement was 2021, when registrations jumped by 62% compared with 2020 — the largest single-year increase in the series.

Source: National Apprenticeship Office — Progress Report 2024, Plans 2025 (Appendix 1 & 2)

Post-2020 growth is not a blip: intake has stabilised at a new, higher level and continues to rise. After a modest dip in 2022, growth resumed in 2023 and accelerated again in 2024. The registration pipeline suggests that, when CSO publishes post-2020 completion data, it should show substantially higher qualification volumes than the 2,685 recorded in 2020.

Category mix: core trades dominate, long tail grows

Registrations by category in 2024 confirm that the expanded pipeline continues to be dominated by core craft and industrial areas. Electrical apprenticeships alone accounted for 3,549 registrations in 2024 — by far the largest category. Construction (1,928), Engineering (1,135), and Motor (1,012) form the next tier. Together these four categories account for the majority of new starts.

Source: NAO Progress Report 2024, Plans 2025 (Appendix 2)

At the same time, a visible long tail of smaller categories points to genuine diversification. Hairdressing, hospitality and food, logistics, finance, sales, property services, ICT, biopharma, and emerging areas like arboriculture remain small compared to electrical or construction, but they are meaningful in two specific ways:

• Breadth. They expand apprenticeship into new occupational spaces — professional services, technology, life sciences, horticulture — that sit outside the traditional craft perimeter.
• Participation. They attract cohorts historically under-represented in crafts, including women, and therefore matter disproportionately to the gender composition of the system as a whole.

This diversification is clearest in new registrations. Updated CSO completion data will show how fully it carries through to qualification — a critical question for whether the widened footprint proves durable or remains concentrated at the entry point.

Gender: slow but consistent improvement

The NAO apprentice population data for 2022–2024 shows female participation rising steadily, if from a low starting point. Total apprentice stock increased from 26,325 in 2022 to 29,772 in 2024. Female numbers rose from 1,950 to 2,579, lifting female share from 7.4% to 8.7%. Within the 2024 intake, 1,165 women registered as new apprentices (of which 192 in craft programmes and 973 in consortia-led programmes), according to the NAO 2024 snapshot.

Source: NAO Progress Report 2024

Women remain under 10% of apprentices overall, but the direction is consistently upward. Programme-level detail explains the pattern. Female-majority participation is concentrated in newer or service-oriented apprenticeships such as hairdressing, accounting technician, property services, and recruitment. Meanwhile, most high-volume craft trades remain strongly male-dominated — though the NAO notes continuing growth in women entering traditional craft pathways as well, with the number of women craft apprentices in the apprentice population passing the 500 mark in 2024. The combined effect is a gradual uplift in female share, driven by two mechanisms simultaneously: slow change in core trades and faster growth in diversified programmes where women start from a higher base.

Interpreting the system as a whole

Placing data on apprenticeship outcomes and on registration pipelines side by side points to a system scaling up in a coherent way. Completion capacity was already rising strongly up to 2020, and registrations then accelerated sharply thereafter. Because completions lag intake by several years, the two series are not directly comparable in level — but their combined patterns support a story of sustained system growth rather than short-term volatility.

Recent years’ registration growth should translate into higher completions once CSO publishes post-2020 qualification data. The structural story is therefore one of growth with continuity:

• Continuity in the dominance of electrical, construction, engineering and motor trades — the same core that drove the pre-2020 completion engine.
• Growth in total scale and in occupational breadth, with the long tail of smaller programmes genuinely widening the apprenticeship footprint.
• Progress in gender participation, real and consistently in the right direction, but incremental rather than transformational.

Conclusion

From 2015 to 2024, Ireland’s apprenticeship system moved into a higher-volume phase. Qualification outcomes doubled up to 2020, and registrations since then have reached new highs, with forecasts pointing to continued expansion in 2025. The system’s centre of gravity remains in high-volume trades, but diversification is steadily widening the occupational footprint. Female participation is still below 10%, yet rising consistently, supported by both diversification and growing female uptake in some traditional areas.

The key evidence gap now is updated CSO qualification data beyond 2020. When published, it will show how strongly today’s enlarged intake pipeline is converting into completions — and whether gains in occupational breadth and gender participation are being sustained through to qualification, or whether they are concentrated at the entry point of the pipeline. That is the single most informative piece of evidence still missing from the picture.

Data sources