ACROSS Europe, apprenticeship programs train millions of young people for skilled jobs. In the United States, where millions of young people leave high school without much hope of entering skilled, well-paid trades, apprenticeship programs barely exist.
Logically, this ancient form of job training seems due for an American revival, given the rising demand for skilled workers to master the complex computerized machinery and the new technologies that are constantly changing work practices. An effort is afoot to give apprenticeship in America a shot in the arm. For teen-agers who do not go on to college, becoming an apprentice would be a middle ground between high school and full-fledged work.
The Commission on the Skills of the American Work Force, a panel of business and union leaders, is issuing a set of proposals today that asks Congress to create a nationwide government-regulated apprenticeship program, financed partly through a payroll tax. Separately, the Labor Department has created the Office of Work-Based Learning to support pilot apprenticeship projects. And the Secretary of Labor, Elizabeth H. Dole, is recruiting 25 industry, government and labor leaders for an advisory group that will suggest ways to expand apprenticeship training.
'We are actively promoting school-to-work programs, but we are not calling them apprenticeship,'' said James D. Van Erden, administrator of the Office of Work-Based Learning. ''The word carries connotations of the union movement and we don't need this negative baggage.'
Apprenticeship means learning a trade, over three or four years, through a combination of classroom study and on-the-job training. Most of the nation's electricians, carpenters, plumbers and ironworkers acquire their skills this way, but outside the construction industry, apprenticeship programs exist only sparsely, for some auto and aircraft workers, machinists, mechanics and a few others.
The Fitzgerald Act, passed by Congress in 1937 to correct abuses inflicted on apprentices, empowered the Labor Department to register the programs and to set standards, like a minimum of 144 hours a year of classroom training. Nevertheless, only 300,000 people are in registered apprenticeship programs, roughly unchanged since 1950. Most programs are the fruit of union agreements, although the military trains 50,000 of the apprentices as an inducement to re-enlist.
From colonial times until well into the Industrial Revolution, being an apprentice was standard job training. With the advent of the assembly line, millions of jobs were limited to two or three simple, quickly learned tasks. As a result, apprenticeship training retreated to crafts like carpentry and electrical work, which still required complex skills. But now, with the rise of a flexible workplace -one that requires ingenuity and complex skills to carry out a variety of tasks - apprenticeship training is coming back into vogue.
Reacting more quickly to the change, West Germany, Sweden, France and other European countries are well ahead of the United States in government-sponsored apprenticeship training, often financed through special taxes. ''You can sustain profits in two ways in the international arena,'' said F. Ray Marshall, a Labor Secretary during the Carter Administration. American companies opted for cost-cutting through layoffs and limits on wage increases, he said, while other industrial nations sustained wages, but trained workers so they could produce more.
Lately, however, some big American companies, like Motorola, Ford, General Electric and American Express, are spending tens of millions of dollars on job training that resembles apprenticeships. They are, in effect, beginning to adopt the European approach. But from a corporate executive's viewpoint, incorporating this individual company training into a national apprenticeship program has two big drawbacks as well as one big advantage.
The advantage is that the companies could pay a training wage with Government sanction. Ironworker apprentices, for example, currently start at between 35 percent and 50 percent of a journeyman's wage, moving up each year toward full pay. One drawbacks is that companies would have to comply with Federal regulations, particularly rules that insist upon minority hiring for the programs. And they would have to issue nationally recognized certificates to newly graduated apprentices, who could then depart with their licenses for new jobs, just as journeymen carpenters move among employers, offering their licenses as proof of their skills.
Whatever the pros and cons, other leading industrial nations are moving to train their workers and increase their productivity. 'We do this for college-educated people,' Mr. Marshall said. 'But we do virtually nothing for people who don't go to college.'
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