Employability
We know many firms and sectors, particularly in technical industries, really struggle to recruit new staff.
No matter what qualifications young candidates have, they just don’t display the attitudes, work ethic, cultural awareness and skills required to hit the ground running. Apprentices can enter at any step dependant on the job role and experience.
Having engaged with a wide range of employers over a number of years, we’ve developed a number of solutions for this.
Micro-College
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.
Industry Blended - the 3:2 model
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.
Bespoke Apprenticeship Design
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.
Click here to view our full list of apprenticeships we offer
"We are developing qualified engineers with the skills we need to support and grow our business and provide great career opportunities for the successful students."
Jules Harrison - Knowhow Project Manager