From October, taxi and private-hire car drivers who wish to become bus captains can choose part-time or full-time training under a newly introduced training pathway for point-to-point transport drivers. The part-time on-the-job training arrangement also allows drivers to continue taking bookings while they train.
What makes this arrangement noteworthy is not simply that it adds another training pathway, but that it recognises the practical difficulties workers face in moving from their current jobs to new roles.
How much income will they lose during training? Can they balance training with family and caregiving responsibilities? Will their previous experiences be recognised? And how long must they get by before they secure a stable income in their new role?
These factors can be described collectively as “career transition friction”.
A career transition pathway must address at least three considerations: income should not be abruptly cut off, schedules should retain some flexibility to accommodate work and family caregiving, and previously acquired skills should not lose their value.
The new training pathway allows drivers to apply their accumulated driving experience to related roles such as bus captains, while offering the option of part-time training. With this approach, “retraining” need not mean “starting from scratch”.
When assessing the effectiveness of career transition programmes, we should therefore look beyond enrolment figures, completion rates and employment rates to ask: at which stage are trainees most likely to abandon the transition?
For example, while safeguarding trainees’ privacy, a few key data points could be compiled: the extent of income loss during training, the time taken from the start of training to securing a stable new income, and the most common obstacles faced by those who drop out.
If many people quit halfway because a course is too long, the problem may lie in its design. If trainees complete their training but still face a long wait to start work, the problem may lie in the link between training and employment. If they have job offers but give them up because of caregiving arrangements or short-term income losses, the real bottleneck lies elsewhere.
Unpacking why people fail to complete a career switch reveals more about the problems a programme actually solves than completion figures alone.
Increasingly, people are not just dealing with a simple cycle of getting laid off and job hunting again. Instead, they are navigating a transitional phase of working, upskilling, and testing new waters simultaneously.
So when we assess career transition policies moving forward, we should look beyond headcounts of how many people were trained, and ask a more pertinent question: Have we made the transition from an old job to a new one sufficiently frictionless for the everyday worker?
