Apprentice schemes vs conventional College

[paulears]

There is a post in the training section about apprenticeship schemes - but I thought I'd start one here because although many of us are familiar with the usual college courses, like the BTECs, none of us seem to know much about the apprentice system, and have no idea how it really differs from going to college.

 

Being old - I assume that basically you get a 'proper' job, then your employer sends you to a college for day-release, and although you get paid, it's maybe not brilliant money, because you are being trained, on the job - so I wonder if these new schemes are the same.

 

It would also be interesting to see what benefits there are to the employer for taking on apprentices> Do the Government give you lots of money ....... or not?

Paul

[phil dB]

I'll kick it off with my experiences as an ex-apprentice. My apprenticeship was an engineering one provided through a large company. It was basically a 3 year (ish) setup, with the first 6 months based in a training centre, covering an NVQ2 in basic engineering principles. From that, I went on to doing 3-monthly placements around the company in areas that would give me relevant experience for my final job. I was on day release to college for an ONC then HNC, and completed an NVQ3 in technical services and key skills level 3.

It was a very worthwhile experience as I got to see the bigger picture of how things work as a trainee, make a load of contacts in areas relevant to my final role, and get a structured on-the-job training program as well as doing a college course. The biggest benefit is you get taught theory at college, but get the chance to see it in the real world straight away so it helps you learn things.

I can imangine that a lot of employers are put off the idea by the level of work going into the training programme and lost man hours from someone training the apprentice, but there are schemes that help fund them, and at least you know the person in the role has been properly trained!

 

Here's a linky to a pretty good site about them - loads of info for apprentices and employers.

[kerry davies]

I too did an apprenticeship with a slightly different bias, in that I did 6 month block release and was destined for an office job at the end. The three levels were Craft, Technician and Student apprenticeships with the students at degree, we Techs at HNC and the craft at C&G levels of study.

 

The company was huge so had a 350 strong apprentice school where we learned everything from hand filing and scraping surface plates to running Societe Genevoise milling machines, from vehicle rebuilds to test-bed operations. Placements included production, machine commissioning, distribution and customer service with overseas visits and vehicle comparison strip-down projects.

 

I have been interested in the recent push for apprenticeships and must say have been disappointed by the reaction of many colleges who have seen a funding opportunity and gone for it without any reasonable industrial input. If you PM Dicky, down at Wales Milennium Centre in Cardiff, he has a good apprenticeship scheme for theatre which he has advertised on BR. He runs things as they should be but even so it is a reduced term from Ye Olde apprenticeships of five years.

 

Some companies use the modern apprenticeship badly and give minimal training, which is IMHO useless, and the three month "apprenticeships" for shelf-stacking are purely a government con job.

 

The great thing about them was that they allowed an indoctrination from 16 to 21, allowing the apprentice to mature in a protective environment. No matter what the young 'uns say they are not ready for adult responsibility at 16 or 18, neurological fact.

[ramdram]

And yet Kerry in Napoleonic times the RN had middies of 15 in charge of seamen two or thee or four times their age. So not altogether fully supportive of the neurological point.

 

However IF the apprentices are treated like children, given duff jobs, taken for granted as cheap labour and not eased into some form of responsibility then it is a con. It might also said to be a con if said apprentices finish their time and then get booted out because their employer has no vacant posts for them to inhabit. After all a company cannot keep expanding willy nilly.

 

I gather too that in some places apprentices were not that welcome because it was feared, quite reasonably too I suspect, that once an apprentice had "qualified as as useful craftsman" he could join a competitor and "migrate" the skills he had acquired from A to B.

 

Without getting into politics HMGs have not addressed the issues of growth for years...it seems to me to have been rather a show of how to stay in power...plus we have not invested anything like enough in UK per se. Manufacturing seems to have been hived off overseas and far too much reliance seems to have been vested in the financial industries...and we know where that led.

 

In my day we had Grammar Schools, Secondary Moderns and Technical Schools. There was structure in place even before you left school. We are now reaping the benefits of decades of tinkering by people who were as far removed from reality as it was possible to be.

 

I despair at the wannabe posts and the posts by nippers who claim to have acquired a lifetime of experience before they started GCSE...and have an unrealistic expectation of being taken seriously.

 

By all means reintroduce apprenticeships but it does seem rather pointless if these apprentices then have nowhere to work. Now we read that the retirement age is being increased...

[Sully]

We've just lost a junior general IT post as a colleague has left which we've had to try and replace with two lower paid apprentice posts today actually.

 

There is a small amount of money in it (I think my boss said in the region of £5k per post) but not megabucks and we're in the somewhat odd position of being his employer as well as his educator (he'll work for us a number of days a week and attend as a student on 1 day plus training from others in the team).

 

We weren't able to scrape together many candidates together for interview and only felt able to appoint one from those few in the end which surprised us somewhat as a junior computing role is the sort of job where if you shine you could compete against more qualified candidates when you leave us to go on to a full-paid job.

 

It does have a slight smell of "cheap labour" in some cases but we think our apprentice should find it beneficial.

 

David.

[ramdram]

I should sincerely hope your apprentice does find it beneficial...that's why he's your apprentice!

 

I admire your optimism when you say the apprentice goes onto a full-paid job. It may be that he does find a job. But there are a lot of nippers who won't, yet they will have worked in the expectation of getting a job and getting all the benefits of having a steady reliable income.

[bigclive]

A proper trade apprenticeship is a valuable way to learn in that it gives you real hands-on experience instead of just second hand theory passed from lecturer to lecturer. You also get paid while you learn, and if it's a REAL trade you learn like electrician, lift engineer, mechanic etc, then you'll have a LOT more options in later life than if you'd paid for a course that gave you nothing more than a half baked theory of a job.

[kerry davies]

Thought that today was an appropriate one to resurrect this thread.

 

The heads of both apprentice scheme organisations have "coincidentally" decided to "spend more time with the family" and have unexpectedly quit. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16616570

 

45 colleges and "training provides" are being examined to ascertain the quality of training, the select committee and the minister are carrying out reviews and one of those "retiring" wrote to the minister in May last year and; "warned that the misuse of public funds was "likely to increase in the context of funding challenges and greater levels of sub-contracting."

 

So for the younger BR member, take great care before signing up to one of these schemes, research the providers and be aware that there have been a lot of broken promises associated with what are currently known as apprenticeships. There are really good schemes out there, just choose one of those and not a 12 week scams schemes.

[musht]

not ready for adult responsibility at 16 or 18, neurological fact.

 

Gentleman used to have workshop across from me, started his apprenticeship at 14 in 1944, by the time he was 17 he was foreman in the machineshop , just after the war when skilled workers were in very short supply. There are some very mature teenagers just as some people make it long onto adult life still being childish.

[kerry davies]

A modern neurological quote "The prefrontal cortex sits just behind the forehead....controlling planning, working memory, organization, and modulating mood. As the prefrontal cortex matures, teenagers can reason better, develop more control over impulses and make judgments better. In fact, this part of the brain has been dubbed "the area of sober second thought."

"A young man does not reach full maturity, in terms of brain development, until nearly 30 years of age." At 15 the modern western male is only half-way to having the tools for the job.

 

Yes there are exceptions and this is an average view, however less developed societies see earlier development as in our forefathers case and the gentleman you speak of worked in a time of acute labour shortage at a time when kids grew up fast.

My dad was down the pit at 14 and had his fireman's ticket at 16 in 1942. They really had to get it together much quicker back then as do primitive societies still.