News

Using Apprenticeships to Train up your Existing Employees

January 19, 2018 3:53 pm

Say the word “apprentice” and most of us are likely to think of a school leaver in their late teens, but actually, anyone can become an apprentice. They don’t even need to be a new starter in your organisation. After all, an apprenticeship is just another name for a comprehensive, high quality on-the-job training programme so it makes perfect sense to consider this approach as a core component of your organisation’s Learning & Development (L&D) strategy. Below we’ve listed just a few of the benefits of doing so.

  1. If your organisation has an annual wage bill of over £3 million (approx. 120 employees) it will already be paying funds into a special apprenticeship training fund, even if it doesn’t use apprentices. This is a compulsory tax set up by the Government in April 2017 to encourage more companies to take on apprentices. If your company chooses not to use the money in the fund on apprenticeship training, it will be lost and so it makes excellent business sense to put this money to good use.
  2. Apprenticeships come in various “guises” from intermediate level (the equivalent to five GCSEs) all the way through to degree apprenticeships. By planning your apprenticeship programme carefully, you can instil organisation-wide, standard working practices. In doing so, you create a more cohesive working culture. Your organisation becomes more productive and delivers a high standard of output.
  3. Providing ongoing training by way of apprenticeships to your employees significantly improves staff retention and that has huge financial implications. As you’ll see in a recent article we wrote on staff attrition, it’s not just the recruitment agency fees which have an impact on your organisation’s bottom line if you need to employ more people. New starters take anywhere between 28 and 40 weeks to get up to speed in their role. The higher your staff attrition, the greater number of people you’ll have not capable of delivering 100%.
  4. And just to build on our last point, you could say that offering apprenticeships will enable your organisation to work beyond 100% of its original capabilities. Why? If you have employed a quality team of people which are already working at 100% and then provide them with ongoing, high quality training, they’re only going to get more productive and better at their jobs, delivering above and beyond what was originally expected of them.
  5. A company-wide apprenticeship programme is easy to manage. We’re not about to suggest it’s child’s play but if you’re responsible for L&D in a large organisation, we’re confident you’ll be dealing with tens, if not hundreds of separate training companies. All of them with their own ways of working, their own key point of contact, their own terms and conditions and of course, their own invoice. By using a company like the Apprenticeship College, however, you have none of these problems. We offer a single point of contact to discuss all aspects of your apprenticeship programme. We partner with hundreds of different training partners so you don’t have to. We’ll help you understand your training needs in the first instant and set up a bespoke apprenticeship programme on your behalf. We’ll even manage the training delivery, the ongoing testing, the reporting and the HR. In short, we can comprehensively manage your apprenticeship programme from the word go and that leaves you with more time to focus on other aspects of your role.

If you would like to learn more about the benefits you can expect from implementing an apprenticeship programme and discuss how to go about it in your organisation, talk to a member of our team today on 020 3651 4747.