Value of Apprenticeships

The Value of Apprenticeships

The skills shortage is a huge topic in business right now. I hear lots of people saying that they’re struggling to find ways to keep key skilled posts filled, in all sorts of businesses. Meanwhile, we’ve got lots of new people entering the workforce, many with a great education, but an education that included no hands-on practical experience. Any way you look at it, there’s a link in the chain missing.

When I was younger, I was seriously concerned about my lack of qualifications, to the point that I let myself be intimidated when competing against candidates more highly academically qualified on paper.

Of course, I’d encourage everyone to make the most of their education – but the sad truth is that a CV showing great grades often won’t count for as much as many young people have been led to believe. Many feel let down, even cheated, when they start competing in the job market and find that their qualifications are passed over by employers looking for real-world skills.

Leaving university with a degree certificate that falls short of the Golden Ticket you were promised is bad enough, but leaving under the shadow of a towering debt can easily turn into the thirty thousand or so straws that broke the camel’s back. Many youngsters who would never have considered not going to university a decade ago are suddenly looking for other options – which brings me to the subject of apprenticeships.

For many, apprenticeships are proving to be a viable alternative, or valuable supplement, to more conventional further education. On the face of it, it’s an opportunity to “earn as you learn”. By comparison, an apprenticeship can offer significant advantages, both financially and in terms of opportunity.

Passion, enthusiasm and confidence are huge assets in the job market, and vital character-building attributes in their own right. Forward thinking employers are increasingly becoming open to spotting people with the right potential and training them up to meet their exact needs themselves.

Getting paid to learn something genuinely practical turns the whole concept of education on its head. When Catherine Hopkins joined our Accounting division as an apprentice, she had no formal grounding in the field from her educational background. An apprenticeship from RIFT offered her invaluable experience out in the real world, along with an immensely valuable and immediately applicable skill set.

Catherine’s not our only apprenticeship success story, either. After moving from Northern Ireland to Kent to be with her partner, Abbie Montgomery joined the company under the Kent Training and Apprenticeships Programme. She’s struggled to find a job, without much in the way of experience but successfully applied for a RIFT apprenticeship and settled right in. Starting as an administrative apprentice, she went on to land a full-time role as our Business Development Assistant.

It’s not like this is a one-sided relationship, either. At RIFT, we’ve learned to appreciate new blood and new ideas. We’re an innovative company working in a highly complex and technical field. It’s not just our own business that relies on us having incredibly skilled experts – it’s every single one of our clients across each of our divisions. Training the right people to fill the roles have proven time and again to be an indispensible means of maintaining the quality of our services.

Apprenticeships are becoming big business, with take-up growing by over 50,000 in the last year alone. By comparison, the number of students pursuing further education dropped by an astonishing 326,000 over the same period, according to statistics from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. With the government talking seriously about delivering three million apprenticeship schemes by 2020, we’re starting to be in a position to actively build the workforce we need. That’s an opportunity we can’t afford to pass up – and it really is a matter of business taking the initiative.

We have to take apprenticeships seriously, and make sure they measure up to the standards we ourselves require. After all, we ‘re in a perfect position to know exactly which links are missing from our own chains – and if we’re still fretting about skills shortages by 2020 we’ll only have ourselves to blame.

Blog Author : Jan Post Rift Group Managing Director