7 reasons to consider hiring an apprentice

Apprenticeships are a great way to tackle skill shortages and fill persistent vacancies, helping you to upskill employees and introduce new faces and ideas into your business - especially with the government offering to fund potentially all of the training costs

Since the announcement of the apprenticeship levy in 2015, young people's interest in apprenticeships has soared. During this period, Prospects has seen, per listing, a:

• 90% increase in views
• 115% increase in applications.

According to the Institute of Student Employers (ISE) there are 22 applications for each apprenticeship vacancy and Prospects has found it to be even higher.

With many potential apprentices to choose from, you would expect any hire to demonstrate both a high level of skill and potential. So could hiring apprentices be a business opportunity?

Which industries are currently hiring apprentices?

Unsurprisingly, apprenticeships are found in areas that are drastically short of graduates. The most popular sectors are:

• health and public services
• business, administration and law
• engineering
• retail.

Significant numbers can also be found in construction, ICT, and leisure, travel and tourism.1

Why employers should be looking at apprenticeships

1. You set the syllabus. The contents of apprenticeships are set by employers, who decide which skills their ideal employee needs, before working with an education provider to create a curriculum that can develop them. If you find that your new graduates lack certain key technical skills, or that you have a vacancy that you just cannot fill, setting up an apprenticeship can be one way to fix that.

2. Apprenticeships are a way to upskill current workers. A large proportion (59%) of post-levy apprenticeship starters are aged 19 and above.2 It's likely that most of these individuals were put on an apprenticeship by their current employers.

Perhaps you have a worker who would benefit from an MBA to fast track their managerial career. Or maybe one of your employees has exceptional potential and under-utilised soft skills but lacks the technical skills an undergraduate or even postgraduate degree could provide.

While university might not be viable, an apprenticeship could be.

3. You may have already paid the apprenticeship's costs. If you're unfamiliar with the terms of the apprenticeship levy, here's a quick overview of how the funding works.3

• Levy-paying employers - pay a 0.5% tax on their entire payroll over £3million, whether this is spent on apprenticeship training or not. If it is spent on training, then any apprenticeship costs will be paid out of this tax. If it's not enough to cover tuition fees, then you will have to pay 10% of the remainder (the government covers the other 90%).
• Non levy-paying employers (more than 50 employees) - pay 10% of any apprenticeship training costs.
• Non levy-paying employers (under 50 employees) - still pay 10% of any training costs. However, if the apprentice is aged 16 to 18 or they are 19 to 24 with an Education, Health and Care (EHC) plan, then their training is completely free.

There are also incentive payments of £1,000 for each apprentice aged 16 to 18 or 19 to 24-years-old with an EHC plan that you hire.

However, the government will only pay 90% up to the top of the appropriate funding band. Any costs incurred over this limit must be paid in full by the employer.

Assuming you stay within your funding band, the most you will have to pay to train an apprentice is 10% of the total costs.

4. Apprenticeships address soft skill shortages. While graduates are often technically excellent, many of them have no experience of normal working life, meaning they haven't developed workplace skills including, but not limited to, up-management, negotiating/influencing, commercial awareness, and business communication.4 Apprenticeships, however, embed education within employment so apprentices will develop these business skills alongside their technical education.

5. Apprenticeships keep knowledge up to date. Completing an undergraduate degree is a long process involving a broad range of material, often including content that is looked at briefly in one of maybe 30 modules and then never thought about again.

Re-mastering these technical skills in the workplace could take graduates a while, whereas apprentices apply their learning every day, which will improve their understanding and recall.

Manchester Metropolitan University, one of the UK's leading universities for apprenticeships, have seen some apprentices and some programmes achieve results above what is expected of students at their level (and above that of their traditional undergraduate colleagues). They believe that the applied nature of apprenticeship education is the cause, although research is needed to confirm this.

6. Apprentices can free up senior staff. There are low-level tasks that need to be done in every businesses department that take time away from the crucial issues that you need your most senior staff tackling.

However, these low-level tasks present a perfect learning opportunity for an apprentice, while for senior staff double-checking an apprentice's work is certainly less time-intensive than doing it all themselves. Apprenticeships are a great workload balancing tool, allowing senior employees to focus their attention where it is most needed.

7. Young people offer a fresh perspective. Employers are well aware of the value of diversity, so much so that in 2018 it is their top-ranked priority. Diversity isn't just a case of race and gender - age is also a key differentiator.

If your clients are of a younger demographic, then hiring apprentices at 16 or 18 could give you a much greater insight into the behaviour of your clientele. Even if your clients are older, younger employees will come in with fresh ideas and challenge practices. If you've ever used the line 'we've always done it that way', perhaps a new perspective could give you a reason to change.

When aren't apprenticeships the right fit?

Apprenticeships aren't right for every business however, and there are many factors that can influence their success. One of the strengths of an apprenticeship is the ability to embed academic theory in the workplace. Consequently, if you can't find tasks that allow an apprentice to apply their learning then you won't get the most out of them.

Apprentices may also need a different type of line manager to your other workers. Their manager must be adept at working with someone very different to them, who thinks very differently to them and who has life experiences very different to theirs. Techniques that helped experienced senior staff to flourish will not necessarily work on a 16-year-old who is straight out of school.

Their managers must also be patient, as new apprentices (especially those with little workplace experience) have a steep learning curve ahead of them. They're also developing their knowledge as they go - in the way a graduate may make errors in a tutorial class, an apprentice might make errors at work.

However, many of the difficulties faced with apprentices are due to them being picked up early in their development cycle. You should bear in mind that this rawness and ability to be moulded is also one of their biggest strengths.

Whether it be to upskill an existing employee or take on someone new, the question on every employer's mind should be: how we can get the most out of apprenticeships?

Notes

1. Apprenticeships geography and sector subject area PivotTable tool: starts and achievements 2017 to 2018 reported to date, GOV.UK, 2018.
2. Apprenticeship and levy statistics: January 2018, GOV.UK, 2018.
3. Apprenticeship funding guide, Construction Industry Training Board, 2017.
4. The ISE 2017 Annual Survey, ISE, 2017.
5. The ISE 2017 Annual Survey, ISE, 2017.

Written by

Michael Grove

Information analyst

Prospects