How do you include apprenticeships in your workforce planning?

Equally good for recruiting school leavers, university graduates, ambitious professionals or career changers – apprenticeships are also fantastic for retention. As well as broadening your workforce with new apprentices, you can upskill your existing staff while bringing the latest innovations to your organisation.
But how exactly do you integrate apprenticeships into your workforce planning? 

Of course – as apprenticeships are a type of higher education – at UCAS we’re uniquely placed to share our insight and recruitment expertise with you.

Your first decision is whether your organisation wants to act as a training provider in its own right.  If so, you can set yourselves up to manage and administer your own apprenticeships by following the detailed rules from the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) and the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) too. There’s plenty of support available to help you.

Find out more about running in-house apprenticeships

If your payroll exceeds £3 million, then your brand is already contributing to the national apprenticeship levy, which is currently set at 0.5%. This is worth taking advantage of if you’re not already, and it’s better done sooner rather than later – as the government automatically claims it back after 24 months. Not to mention when forecasting the costs of your workforce planning, accessing the levy can be a huge boost to your budgets.

As employees often leave organisations to further their career development with a new role or to complete additional training, there’s inevitable staff turnover in every workforce. Apprenticeships are brilliant ways to minimise turnover – using the levy to invest in your staff. Whether they remain in their current roles or step up to a more senior role, on an apprenticeship they’ll increase their knowledge and develop their skills on the job. You’ll also be bringing the latest industry techniques and insights into your organisation.

Whichever aspects of your business are facing a shortage of skills or expertise, apprentices can bring in the very latest expertise from their studies and immediately implement it with you. As the demand for technical skills is increasing particularly quickly at the moment – for many organisations the time is right to begin generating their own talent pipelines.

School leavers think about their options well in advance – especially around the January UCAS deadline for applying to universities, and coming up to exam results day in summer, when they find out whether they’ve been successful or not. We offer a variety of products that are suitable for different stages of that journey, and can help you understand which days you’ll be best able to reach students on. When is the best time to reach students?

By engaging and working with us to support your recruitment efforts, you access our long-term relationship with students. As the trusted gateway to higher education, we sign up 700,000 students every year – and have over a million at various stages of their journey to higher education.

Through UCAS, students are free to apply both to universities and to your apprenticeships – at the same time. So the earlier you can raise awareness of your brand and your opportunities to this audience, the more they’ll consider them as equal alternatives to traditional study.

While you can of course list your opportunities on our apprenticeship and graduate job search, it’s even better if you can engage with some kind of activity at all times. We can help you with all sorts of early career marketing – like going into schools to make students aware of the opportunities that are available at your brand. That way they won’t be so far committed to traditional undergraduate study that their mind is already made up.

How to kickstart your apprenticeship workforce planning

• List your apprenticeship vacancies on our apprenticeship and graduate job search.
• Use our links with schools to provide early careers information.
• Promote your brand with our employer profiles.
• Use our advice on how to communicate with students.
• Create a warm candidate pool with our student marketing opportunities.

We’ve spoken to a lot of employers and we know apprenticeships can be incredibly valuable as part of a business’ workforce planning. If there’s anything we can do to help you with yours, please get in touch with us.