Career pathway explained

Examples of this are our Air & Defence College and our Construction College.

Working with firms like yours, we have developed five day a week intensive study programmes over two years to give young people additional technical qualifications and expose them to the workplace on a regular basis.

They complete industry-set challenges and take part in extensive work experience.

Business leaders give talks to students, who wear workwear uniforms and are exposed to the culture and values of supporting businesses. This employability training creates a highly skilled and productive pipeline of new recruits for your business.

We first launched this model with the RAF, Thales, Raytheon and AAR to provide a talent pipeline for the Air and Defence sector. This has now been expanded to two new partner Air & Defence Colleges at New College Stamford and the College of West Anglia.

This involves spotting the potential of interview candidates, employing them on a part time basis to bring them into the fold and allowing us to develop them at College to turn them into the finished article.

With this model, as part of a joint recruitment process, you hire new recruits on a two day a week basis and we simultaneously enrol them on a three day a week industry training programme.

While they’re at College they wear your uniform in a branded classroom and learn more about your business and the wider industry while completing a technical Diploma.

By the time they graduate they’re ready for a full time role or apprenticeship in your business. If any of the students develop quicker than expected, you can cherry-pick them to start full time apprenticeships with you at any point.

We first launched this model with FTSE 100 firm Team Knowhow, based at Newark.

Here we enrol apprentices for you, but for the first year they spend most of their time at College, with either a day a week in your business or scheduled block periods. In Year 1 we work on technical upskilling, employability skills and safety, so that in Year 2 they can really hit the ground running as full time apprentices.

We first launched this model for Made in Gainsborough, a really exciting collaborative approach taken by competing engineering firms in West Lindsey. They got tired of poaching each other’s staff and spiralling wages due to the skills gap and decided to work together. We developed this approach to nurture local talent that wasn’t quite there yet, into a strong pipeline of motivated, skilled new recruits.

Here we are talking about recruiting work-ready apprentices straight into your business, or developing existing staff to the next level via Intermediate, Advanced or Higher Apprenticeships.

It’s here we always remind people that apprenticeships are just training schemes in the workplace – it’s not exclusive to new young recruits. Very often our apprenticeship partners utilize Government funding to upskill their existing staff.

What makes us different is our diversity, capacity and access to wider Government funding. We can add to this technical training with a huge range of fully funded level 2 qualifications, literacy and numeracy training and English for Speakers of a Foreign Language (ESOL) training where appropriate.

It’s here that we leverage apprenticeship training to succession plan your leadership teams. You can put your staff through Institute of Leadership and Management (ILM) and Chartered Management Degree Apprenticeship qualifications to develop them for the future or underpin their current jobs with enhanced knowledge.

Again, we are different to private training providers because we add real value. We will bolt on additional training courses according to need. These might include; Business Improvement Techniques, Lean Principles, Challenging Behaviours in the Workplace, Finance and Managing Budgets, Cyber Security and GDPR.

For senior leaders, our CMDA courses benefit from our Career Degree Bursary Scheme. This entitles all CMDA apprentices to £500 per year of study to invest in additional industry qualifications.