Apprenticeship Week 2010: Day 4: 'Apprenticeships driving business'

Andrew Brown, SkillsActive - 04/02/10

Apprenticeships can help drive businesses in a number of ways, particularly by offering a route to harness fresh new talent. Skills shortages and recruitment difficulties are a massive threat to business performance and apprenticeships offer a means to address these issues. They ensure that a workforce has the practical skills and qualifications needed now and in the future. The mixture of on and off job learning ensures the skills learnt are appropriate for the business and can help develop the specialist skills required to keep pace with the latest working practices in the sector.

For Joe Lyons of the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation the need for ensuring that their employees had the right skills was a key factor behind their apprenticeship program, as they aren’t just looking for football coaches, but well rounded employees with a mix of skills:

“If you are a coach for us, you are not just teaching football. You might be teaching a session on oral health, cooking or something else entirely. We need to be sure the coaches that we send out have got the right skills for all of this, which they won't get from a two week training course.”

Over 130,000 companies across the UK offer apprenticeships because they understand the benefits that apprentices bring to their business – increased productivity, improved competitiveness and a committed and competent work-force. Apprenticeships deliver real returns to your bottom line, with a recent survey finding that the majority of employers believe that apprenticeships helped them improve productivity and to be more competitive. They also said that training apprentices is more cost effective than hiring skilled staff, leading to lower overall training and recruitment costs.

Apprentices tend to be eager, motivated, flexible and loyal to the company that invested in them and are in the programme because they want to be – they have made an active choice to learn on the job and a commitment to a specific career.

This was another part of the appeal for the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation, with Joe saying: “We need to be sure that the commitment we get from them is long term, that they’ll be with us for a year or more, but the apprentices also know that it is possible to feed into some of our other employment programmes and gain other qualifications.”

A committed and enthusiastic workforce, as well as a worthwhile return on investment, is something that Fit For Sport certainly found through their apprenticeship scheme, as mentioned in Monday’s article on Competitive Advantage.

Getting fully qualified and enthusiastic apprentices has meant that they save time and money by avoiding a long drawn out recruitment process. For an industry that depends greatly on the quality of front-line employees, the experience that the public and consumers have interacting with these employees is crucial, so enthusiasm and passion can be just as important as skills and qualifications. 

More headline findings from research into the business benefits of apprenticeships are that:

• 77% of employers believe apprenticeships make them more competitive;
• 76% say that apprenticeships provide higher overall productivity;
• 80% feel that apprenticeships reduce staff turnover;
• 83% of employers rely on their apprenticeships programme to provide the skilled workers that they need for the future;
• Two-thirds of respondents believe that their apprenticeship programme helps them fill vacancies more quickly, whilst
• 88% believe that apprenticeships lead to a more motivated and satisfied workforce;
• 59% report that training apprentices is more cost-effective than hiring skilled staff, with 59% believing that apprenticeships lead to lower overall training costs and 53% feeling that they reduce recruitment costs;
• 57% report a high proportion of their apprentices going on to management positions within the company;
• Over three-quarters of respondents expect apprenticeships to play a bigger part in their recruitment policy in the future.

To find out more, our apprenticeships pages explain the programme in our sector while the apprenticeships website hosts a wealth of useful information for businesses.