Despite the new stories pouring out about tech layoffs, there is still a huge demand for digital skills. Government data shows 82% of all jobs in the UK list digital skills as a key requirement. But despite the need and the higher salary ranges listed in job adverts employers still struggled to fill one-third of these vacancies last year.
This is forcing a lot of organisations to reassess their tech recruitment practices by looking toward new tech talent pipelines, shifting away from more traditional candidates and broadening the pool of talent to include candidates from alternate education paths.
Recruiting and re-skilling your workforce to become effective in brand-new digital skills can involve time, effort and investment. But if you’re looking to drive your organisation towards rapid growth in the near future then you need to adapt fast with long-term goals of building skillsets fast and retention of talent in mind. The answer to this conundrum is front-loaded digital apprenticeships.
Apprenticeships: A quick recap
Introduced in April 2017, the apprenticeship levy makes large organisations with a payroll of £3 million or more set aside 0.5% of their payroll for apprenticeships. This generates a pot of funding for organisations to use on bringing in new talent or upskilling existing employees. Unfortunately, if you don’t use it then you lose it, so why waste something that you have technically already paid for?
It has been reported that from 2019 to March 2022, employers have given back to the UK Treasury more than £3.3 billion in apprenticeship levy funds they could not use. This means that businesses are losing out on the equivalent of £1.1 billion per year or £95 million per month.
If you’re looking to find great diverse tech talent but are hitting resistance when it comes to spending your levy then look no further as we help address some common misconceptions around apprenticeship to help you get that all-important internal buy-in.
Challenging 5 common business misconceptions about apprenticeships
Myth 1. Apprentices are school leavers with a lack of experience in the world of work
There is a widely held assumption that apprenticeships are for 16-year-olds who are looking for an alternative to traditional education. In reality, there’s no upper age limit for an apprenticeship and earn and learn opportunities are very attractive to a range of career changers.
At Makers, we focus on harnessing the power and quality of the career-switching generation because we see them as an untapped quality pool who are committed to retraining. In addition to steely determination, they bring with them a wealth of work experience, industry knowledge and soft skills meaning they can add value to your business from day one. As a result, they often accelerate up the career ladde twice as fast as their graduate peers.
Myth 2. Apprenticeships will take too long to make an impact
Traditionally apprentices would spend four days with their employer and one day at a college or with a training provider. This approach not only interrupted their workflow but limited the apprentice’s ability to contribute to the business requirements.
Front-loaded apprenticeships deliver a block of training at the start of the apprenticeship to help apprentices gain key knowledge and skills early on. Our immersive coding bootcamp is tailored to a business’s tech stack needs over 12- 19 weeks so that once apprentices are trained they can be deployed into a team and make an impact from the outset.
Our Level 4 apprenticeship programmes in Software Development, DevOps, Data and Quality Engineering are the equivalent of foundation degrees and the approach can accelerate talent from junior to mid-level roles in under 24 months!
“Makers graduates all hit the ground running. That’s been pretty consistent. Our Makers graduates have been our highest engaged with the teams and with the business.”
Gary Stevens, Director at Comparethemarket
Myth 3. I don’t have the resource or the time to set up and run an apprenticeship
The process of using the apprenticeship levy and recruiting, training and deploying talent into an organisation may seem daunting especially if you haven’t done it before. But we have specialised in delivering apprenticeships for over five years and have worked with over 300 organisations from small-scale start-ups to big consultancies, to leverage the power of the levy and boost their tech team talent.
Our Partnerships Team helps you to understand, navigate and gain buy-in for using the apprenticeship levy in your organisation. They work closely with our Hiring Partner team to induct you into the programme ensuring that it is tailored to your specific needs. We then work with community partners to run talent attraction campaigns to ensure businesses get the best undiscovered diverse tech talent. The Selection Team interview candidates once they have passed our technical challenges and creates shortlists of exceptional talent that meets our partner's requirements.
Apprenticeship partners from Google, DWP Digital, Simply Business, Financial Times and Zaizi explain what it’s like to work with us as an apprenticeship training provider.
Client testimonials for apprenticeships with Makers
The support isn’t limited to businesses, we also help apprentices through their placement by providing them with Placement Coaches and IT Assessors. Placement Coaches meet with learners once a month for wellbeing checks as well as line manager meetings where they discuss the learner’s progress, and milestones and set short and long-term goals. IT Assessors ensure candidates' work is to the highest standard and give meaningful feedback at key points on their journey, to ensure they’re ready for their End Point Assessments (EPA). As a result, 98% pass their apprenticeship and 42% of Makers apprentices pass with distinction or merit — that’s 2x higher than industry standards! We also have a super retention rate of 87%, which is significantly higher than the UK average of 59%.
Myth 4. There is a lack of diverse tech talent available
Our commitment to inclusive but selective training means we find and train incredible undiscovered talent from all backgrounds who have not previously worked in the industry and offer them the opportunity to join the tech industry — no degree needed. We do this by creating bespoke campaigns and working with community partners and grassroots coding organisations to elevate your brand and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds. Our focus is on aptitude rather than education and we look beyond a person’s CV, using a combination of coding challenges and interviews to evaluate aptitude, mindset and collaboration skills.
As a result, we receive over 10,000 applications to join our programmes every year. And our ability to be selective and inclusive means 43% of Makers identify as women or non-binary (2x the UK tech industry average) and 54% of Makers are from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds (5x the UK tech industry average).
Myth 5. My company doesn’t have a payroll of £3m and so we aren’t entitled to the levy.
Smaller employers with a total annual pay bill of less than £3m pay just 5% of the cost of their apprenticeship training and the Government pays the rest. Get in touch with our Partnerships team to hear all about how we can help you leverage the levy.
Small businesses and charities across the UK are also benefitting from fully funded training donated by large organisations who have decided to put their unspent apprenticeship levy to good use. The people that power those organisations are learning and applying the latest tech skills to drive their careers and the wider digital economy forward. Does your business have any unspent apprenticeship levy? Find out how you can work with us to donate it to small businesses and charities across the UK.
We also have a full suite of scalable hiring and re-skilling solutions to suit all budgets — from hiring our tech bootcamp talent to building your teams fast with our Accelerator Programme. The Accelerator programme is designed to help you find and hire quality talent trained in your tech stack in under 4 weeks. Developers are hired in a 12–18 month day rate contract and can convert to permanent for free after 12 months.
We are now the UK’s largest Software and DevOps apprenticeship provider in the Uk and We’re expanding our offer to include Data Engineering and Quality engineering.
If you would like to know more about how we can help you grow and diversify your tech teams please reach out to our Head of Partnerships @Katie Crichton
