Myth-Busting Apprenticeships: Your Guide to Getting Started
By Ben Rowland
Apprenticeships are not what some people think they are.
Some people still think apprenticeships are:
- For youngsters who aren’t that bright
- For people who can’t go to university
- In trades, like plumbing and being a brickie, where you need either overalls or a hard hat – or both
- For people who are ‘good with their hands’ (code for ‘not good with their brains’)
- In manual/dead-end jobs
- Not aspirational…in fact, maybe a bit embarrassing (university is the only route for bright, aspirational students, right?)
These people are wrong.
Apprenticeships have changed, almost beyond all recognition.
Iconic companies like Rolls Royce and BAE Systems compete for students for their apprenticeships, along with banks (JP Morgan, Lloyds), tech giants (Google, IBM), ‘magic circle’ law firms and the ‘big 4’ (Deloitte, PWC, KPMG and EY). In between these large companies, tens of thousands of employers up and down the country are using apprenticeships to find and nurture young people into their organisations. Often, they are doing so in preference to graduates, as I discovered in a number of the employer case studies in my book Understanding Apprenticeships: A Student’s Guide.
Apprenticeships are now available in literally hundreds of occupations, including the ‘traditional’ ones (did you know that a scaffolder with 5 years’ experience can earn around £75,000 a year?), as well as advanced manufacturing and engineering (someone is going to need to create all that green energy infrastructure), arts, crafts and creative occupations, professional services and health and care roles.
So when a student asks you about apprenticeships and whether they could be a good option for them, the answer should ALWAYS be “yes, they could be an option”, even if (especially if!) that student is an Oxbridge candidate. My experience is that getting students who end up pursuing the university route to think about apprenticeships significantly sharpens their understanding of why they want to go to university – and for many, finding out about the fast-track career opportunities and lack of student debt that apprenticeships offer leads them to change their minds.
But there are challenges in advising students and other young people when it comes to apprenticeships.
The first of these is that we are so used to thinking that university is the ‘best’ option wherever possible, that as advisors we have to be like salmon swimming upstream against the flow of society.
Even assuming we can leap up the waterfalls and get to our spawning grounds (I’ll leave the metaphor here I think….), there are further challenges.
Apprenticeships are jobs – not courses. That means that unless an employer is offering an apprenticeship, there isn’t an apprenticeship, however much a college, training provider or university (or one of your students) might want it to exist. Even allowing for my earlier paragraph about the amazing employers now offering apprenticeships, it is also true to say that not enough employers are offering them (something the Government has in its sight to change). This means that your student’s ideal choice may not be available, but that does not mean an apprenticeship is the wrong option. After all, we know that our first job is likely to be a springboard for our next job, and that it may take several steps to find the ideal career. So helping students find a good apprenticeship (as opposed to a perfect apprenticeship) is a worthwhile target.
Next, it can seem a bit of a minefield to apply for apprenticeships – certainly it’s very different from the super-smooth, super-familiar and super-easy process of applying for university places through UCAS. This is because (as per the preceding paragraph), they are jobs, which means each employer wants to get to know the candidate and test whether they are right for this particular job. How you support students to select a few opportunities becomes really important. I always suggest starting with no more than 5-10 (any more than that and it won’t be a good application), and being ready to use any rejections as opportunities to learn and hone the next round of applications.
Finally, there is a lot of ‘white noise’ out there about changes to government funding, new types of apprenticeships and whether a college, training provider or university is the ‘right’ one. The key things to focus on through all of this are the job, the employer, and empowering young people to do their due diligence on an employer and trust their judgement on whether it feels right for them or not.