Learning providers know full well the value of their provision and so too does 19-year-old apprentice James Davies

As an apprentice currently working with HIT Training, I’m lucky to have first-hand experience of working with a provider and would absolutely recommend the apprenticeship route as a credible, viable alternative to anyone who may feel that going to university or college, or settling for any old job, is not for them.

Although HIT is a leading specialist provider of work-based learning and apprenticeships in the hospitality sector, I’m working as a technical support apprentice at the company’s headquarters, in West Sussex. This means that although I have day-to-day direct links with the hospitality industry, my specific role is help maintain, support and track all of HIT’s IT equipment, and to give advice and support to any of the 400-plus staff who may be experiencing technical issues with their equipment or systems.

But when I left school my plan wasn’t to be an apprentice at all. I spent two years at art college and then went on to do a further six months at university before deciding that classroom-based learning wasn’t for me. I started to look at alternative ways into an industry that I felt I would enjoy and would enable me to develop a career.

Perhaps one of the most important qualities to demonstrate when applying for an apprenticeship is enthusiasm — it’s vital to show you have a passion for whatever industry you are trying to enter.

The value of a good apprentice can be under-rated in some industries — it would be good to see more employers from different sectors taking part in apprenticeship programmes. School pupils, too, should be given more opportunities to learn more about the apprenticeship route, so that ultimately they have a greater understanding of the options available to them and that learning and training are not necessarily only available through university or college.

Working as an apprentice really does give you the best of both worlds — I earn while I learn and all the while I can see a direct link between the skills I am learning and the way in which they contribute to the business.
Practical experience and work-based learning enables you to see straight away how certain skills can be used in the workplace and, personally, I felt that this combination of practical learning in a business environment was much more valuable to me than time spent in a classroom.

For the learner, an apprenticeship is a valuable experience as you really feel that you are contributing to the day-to-day business of your employer. For employers, investment in apprentices can really pay dividends as they develop a loyal member of staff who is totally immersed in the company culture — yet that person is also properly trained and qualified to help develop the business in the longer term.

Even though I am still a junior member of staff, HIT always welcomes my opinions and encourages me to explore new avenues for business development. I love keeping up to date with technical issues and always enjoy offering technological solutions which I feel could improve either ease of use or company productivity.

Right now I’m totally immersed in working towards my diploma in IT user skills, but once that is complete I’m planning to start a computer programming course.

And for the future? Hopefully, I’ll continue to work for HIT, but I’d also like to be able to plan my diary more efficiently to make room for my four nights a-week training in mixed martial arts and Brazilian jiu jitsu.

James Davies, technical support apprentice at HIT Training

Read the Employer’s point of view from Greggs resourcing manager, Karen walker here

Karen Walker is looking for enthusiasm and a willingness to learn among the learners she sees at Greggs

Greggs is a baker and a retailer with ten regional bakeries and a central savoury plant supplying more than 1,680 shops across the UK. We employ around 20,000 people.

We work with various disadvantaged work groups ranging from ex-offenders, homeless and the long-term unemployed.

With almost a million 16 to 24-year-olds currently unemployed, we want to play our part in providing training, mentoring and hands-on experience to help provide young people with a greater opportunity to get a job. So what have we done?

Working in partnership with Job Centre Plus, we offer our tailored work placement programme, A Taste of Greggs, to young people who are work-ready.

A placement can be a fortnight or four weeks and offers participants practical knowledge and skills to put on their CVs, allows us to provide them with a reference and, where vacancies have arisen, the opportunity for young people to secure employment with us.

People work in a variety of roles within our head office departments, shops and bakeries. Since launching the programme two years ago, we have been able to offer paid work to a fifth of the young people who undertook a placement with us.

We’ve had great feedback from people on the programme. They all said that without it they wouldn’t have gained valuable experience or a reference, and in a number of cases a new job.

One participant, who was offered a permanent role in our payroll function, described it as a “lifeline”.

We find that individuals who have never who have been unemployed for a long period of time find it difficult to apply for jobs through normal recruitment processes.

Without experience, employers don’t know their track record and it’s hard to establish whether they’re good at timekeeping or whether they would fit in.

To help with this, we work closely with selected work providers who source work-ready candidates for us to take through one of our group selection events, where we focus on customer service, team working and communication skills.

This enables individuals to build their confidence and gain experience of the types of recruitment processes in the jobs market.

The benefit of using work providers is that they focus on training for the skills we require in the workplace — skills such as food safety and customer service, and they help individuals develop their employability skills to help them work to a daily routine.

They also talk to them about working for Greggs, so that they know our history, roles and benefits before group selection.

Having identified a skills gap in the bakery industry, we also established a two-year apprenticeship scheme aimed at getting young people into baking.

We recruited five people onto our scheme in December 2011 in partnership with the North East Chamber of Commerce.

The apprentices have gained an NVQ in manufacturing operations and have been involved in all aspects of the bakery operation from food technology to logistics.

But we’re more interested in a young person’s employability skills than their qualifications and previous work experience. We’re looking for personality, attitude, flexibility and reliability.

We’ll look at their extracurricular activities such their volunteering achievements.

We have been able to benefit from the Youth Contract and we have reinvested this funding back into the work that we do with disadvantaged work groups, enabling us to do even more — it’s a win-win.

Karen Walker, Greggs resourcing manager

Read the apprentice’s point of view from James Davies, technical support apprentice at HIT Training here

We need to use technology in many different ways to improve apprenticeships says Matthew Hancock

Following the Association of Employment and Learning Providers’ annual conference I want to encourage some of our most important providers of apprenticeships and other work-related training to be open to the potential of new technology to transform their efforts to deliver knowledge and skills.

E-learning is more widely used in schools, colleges and universities than it was when the government took office. Many have already discovered how, in our digital age, it has the potential to communicate with young people especially through a medium with which they are already more comfortable than the traditional chalk-and-talk. They are seeing, too, how it can free more of educators’ own valuable time to deploy their expertise to maximum effect.

Simply put, e-learning is one of a growing range of educational strategies which institutions these days cannot afford to be unaware.

Already, three-quarters of businesses which train their staff make some use of electronic media in doing so. I want the FE and skills sector — public as well as private — to take the lead, to embrace innovation and make the most of new technology.

Understanding the different ways that diverse learners in FE can use technology and making sure that it is used in a way that improves the quality, breadth of their learning and the impact is paramount. The way in which online learning is now being used to assist the rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders, and all the challenges in terms especially of safeguarding that have had to be overcome in the process, are good examples of what I mean here.

The key will be harnessing knowledge and expertise to identify and make sense of a complex and fast-changing environment”

The culture change required to see technology harnessed more widely and more successfully is not easy. FE is innovative and responsive. Of course this needs leadership, but it also involves teachers and support staff, too — making sure they are supported, and if need be, challenged. The price is clear: better learning for students. And that, after all, is what FE is all about.

From the ways in which qualifications are funded and the rules around delivery are implemented, to the way qualifications are regulated, we must all ensure that barriers to innovation are confronted and broken down.

To understand which, if any, technologies to use is a real challenge that I’ve heard before from colleges and other providers The key will be harnessing knowledge and expertise to identify and make sense of a complex and fast-changing environment.

And we need to use technology to ensure that relevant information about apprenticeship training is readily available to such companies.

The launch of a new search tool on the National Apprenticeship Service website has been developed in response to a recommendation in last year’s Holt Report on making apprenticeships more accessible to small and medium-sized enterprises. It will enable employers of any size to access directly information about which training organisations support what apprenticeship frameworks and job roles in their area. This will make it much easier for employers to make an informed choice about which provider will best meet their needs and those of their apprentices.

Over the last century and a half, FE and skills providers have confronted innumerable challenges successfully. The challenge of seizing the opportunities offered by new technologies and of reacting to how it is changing their customer base is the latest but by no means the least significant.

Matthew Hancock, Skills Minister

A number of apprenticeship reviews over the last two years have suggested the system might be broken. There may well be issues, argues Graham Hoyle, but it certainly doesn’t need wholesale fixing

As FE Week reported at the end of May, the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) has a serious difficulty with the apparent notion that a ‘major programme of reform’ is needed for apprenticeships.

It seems at odds with the government pronouncements, in its Rigour and Responsiveness paper, that the programme works and is a success.

This is not to say we shouldn’t be looking for improvement. But the National Apprenticeship Service recently released figures showing online applications were up 32 per cent and that there was an average of 11 applicants for every vacancy.

My members noticed long ago that the fight to gain a place on an apprenticeship in some sectors and for some employers had become almost as tough as winning a place at a Russell Group university.

Entry requirements were being raised and while this has improved the perception of the programme among businesses and young people, there was a danger of a large number of young people being excluded from the government’s flagship skills programme.

This is why AELP pressed for traineeships to act as a ladder to full apprenticeship for young people who left school without the necessary qualifications.

The various reviews and inquiries on apprenticeships over the last two years have said much about provision quality and we would be more comfortable with the recommendations if they stemmed more from what is actually happening on the ground.

For example, we are told employers are not at the centre of designing apprenticeship standards and qualifications.

This is totally unfounded as Sector Skills Councils play a key role in the development and approval of all frameworks.

The Richard Review had some harsh criticisms on how the training of apprentices was assessed. But the 92 per cent satisfaction rates would indicate businesses do already trust and value the assessment delivered in apprenticeships.

Employers should be encouraged to make maximum use of the highly-experienced and skilled assessors employed by training providers.

Currently, assessments are subject to both internal and external quality assurance, being covered by the QCF regulations and with Ofqual having the statutory powers to address concerns.

This rigorous system, with a strong cadre of awarding organisations, should be retained.

The biggest challenge to building on current successes is engaging more employers.

Our training provider members work with 368,000 employers and they simply wouldn’t exist if they did not know how to engage successfully with them.

So they know a thing or two about how to sell the idea of apprenticeships to local companies and what they tell us is that the existing funding system is not an obstacle to engaging more employers; it just needs to work better.

We are therefore discussing with the Skills Funding Agency its performance management rules for next year so funding can be more easily and more quickly switched to providers who can show evidence of demand for apprenticeships.

This is a better solution than wholesale change to the direct funding of employers and on the basis of what we are hearing, the effectiveness of the Employer Ownership pilots especially in terms of outreach to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), will require careful evaluation.

The direct funding option should be available to employers, but it must not be the sole funding route and we remain seriously worried this proposal would decimate SMEs’ involvement in apprenticeships.

While we must all work together to maintain standards in the programme, there is a danger of reforms leading to bureaucratic overload.

The end product of an apprenticeship must be a fully-rounded apprentice with the competencies required to do the job.

Too much regulatory concentration on process will be counterproductive.

Graham Hoyle OBE, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers