As National Apprenticeship Week (7-13 February) gets underway, new research from Grant Thornton UK LLP shows that East Midlands medium sized businesses are increasingly making use of apprenticeships as a means of upskilling their people at all levels.
With job vacancies and resignations at record highs, Grant Thornton’s latest Business Outlook Tracker survey shows that there’s an upward trend of apprenticeship use in the mid-market which is set to expand in 2022. 66% of respondents in the East Midlands agreed that more of their people will be trained using apprenticeships this year than in 2021.
Employers saw additional strategic benefits to apprenticeships, with two thirds (66%) of the business leaders surveyed saying that apprenticeships had helped to improve social mobility in their business and more than half (60%) agreed that formal development supports employee wellbeing.
The study found that mid-market organisations are now using apprenticeships at all levels of the business from entry level to senior management. The majority of those surveyed (54%) said that the Apprenticeship Levy had been a motivating factor in the increased use.
This growing use of apprenticeships in the East Midlands mirrors the national picture. From the 601 UK-wide respondents to Grant Thornton’s latest Business Outlook Tracker survey, all but one business said that they currently use apprenticeships to develop their people. This has increased from a similar study conducted by the firm in 2018, when 86% of mid-market respondents said they used apprenticeships in their organisation.
Sue Knight, partner and practice leader at Grant Thornton UK LLP in the Midlands, said: “Apprenticeships are increasingly being seen as an agile and valuable tool that can help businesses achieve a variety of goals. Most notably, with job vacancies and attrition currently reaching record highs, the ability to attract and retain key talent has become a priority challenge for many employers in the East Midlands.
“Thanks to the personal developmental potential that apprenticeships offer, they are being embraced as an effective solution to this problem.
“We’re seeing businesses become ever more strategic with their use of apprenticeships to address a variety of issues such as improving diversity in the workforce, achieving sustainable recruitment and replacing traditional graduate programmes with highly desirable qualifications.
“The ability to tailor apprenticeships to specific development requirements is especially useful, with many firms using courses to add valuable new skills in the fields of digital, finance and data analysis into their organisation.”
According to rolling data from Grant Thornton’s Business Outlook Tracker, investment expectations for skills development in the East Midlands mid-market have fluctuated greatly throughout the challenges of 2021. At the start of 2021, 58% of businesses in the East Midlands said they intended to invest more in skills development over the next six months, a figure which has gone up and down throughout the year, last recorded in December at 32%.
Sue Knight suggests that this dip in investment expectations has less to do with appetite for skills development than it does with rapidly changing priorities: “The expectations for investment in skills reacts according to the confidence that businesses have in the strength of the economy. In short, when optimism is high, expectation for investment in skills is high.
“The upheavals that firms have faced since early 2020 means that whilst businesses recognise the need for development, they also require cost effective solutions tailored to their business needs. The Apprenticeship Levy helps with this and has become an integrated part of Learning and Development funding for many employers by providing full funding for qualifications up to master’s degree level.”
