Often people believe that apprenticeships are just for young people starting a career or looking for a new job, but apprenticeships are also a good way of training and upskilling an existing workforce. Many businesses don’t think about apprenticeships when they are looking to upskill their staff. We want this to change because there are so many advantages of using apprenticeships to upskill over other more conventional ways of training and upskilling.
There are many reasons you might want/need to upskill your staff. Upskilling staff boosts morale and productivity in the workplace, it lets your staff know that you care about their continuous development. The staff member or members being upskilled will feel valued and it will show other staff that there is possibility of training and development. According to the Association for Talent Development, companies that offer comprehensive training programs have 218% higher income per employee than companies without formalised training. This, in turn, helps with staff retention, with boosted morale, productivity and the knowledge you, as an employer, care, your staff will often have more loyalty to you. A recent national survey of over 400 employees spanning three generations (Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennial’s), 70% of the respondents indicated that job-related training and development opportunities influenced their decision to stay at their job. You may also need to upskill staff for the promotion they desperately deserve, having existing members of staff who would be perfect for the promotion with a little extra training is a great reason to upskill.
So why upskill using an apprenticeship? There are plenty of reasons to upskill using an apprenticeship over other ways of training. With an SCCU apprenticeship, all learning happens at the place of work, no days off for offsite training or days/hours on end of online training. Our tutors will visit the learner once a month to catch up on progress and set the new work. Your training costs for apprenticeships are often a lot lower, the way you pay depends on your business type. Levy businesses (those with a payroll of over 3 million p/a) will have the entirety of the training costs taken out of their levy pot, this is something a levy-paying business has to pay into and is ‘use it lose it’. Non-levy businesses only pay 5% of the total training cost, the government will pay the other 95%. This makes it a much more cost-effective way of training your staff than other methods, whilst still providing recognised qualifications.
