PSA: THE BIGGER PICTURE
AN APPRENTICESHIP FOR THE NEXT GENERATION OF TECHS Apprenticeships; genuine jobs with accompanying assessment and skills development programmes, a way for individuals to earn while they learn, gaining valuable skills and knowledge in a specific job role. This is all gained through a mix of learning in the workplace, formal offthe-job training and, crucially, the opportunity to practice new skills in a real work environment. Apprenticeships benefit employers and individuals, with big picture benefits of a skilled workforce improving economic productivity.
Apprenticeships are also a productive and effective way for any business to grow talent and develop a motivated, skilled and qualified workforce; at least that’s what the leaflet states. The statistics paint a similarly rosy picture; employers who have an established apprenticeship programme reported that productivity in their workplace had improved by 76% whilst 75% reported that apprenticeships improved the quality of their product or service. Add to that a reduction in staff turnover and recruitment costs, a lower minimum wage requirement for apprentices, no employer National Insurance contributions for salaries up to the higher rate tax bracket and some extra cash inducements for certain groups and you have a neat package of benefits. The thing is, up until now, apprenticeships haven’t featured too heavily in the recruitment and development plans of rental houses, with most relying on in-house training programmes that had little or no external training element and attracted none of the funding associated with apprenticeships. It seems that this was due to a lack of real understanding on the part of colleges and training providers about the needs of employers. Basically, any sector that could put together a group of 10 or more employers could express an interest in developing an Apprenticeship Standard. At that time we contacted a bunch of employers, suggesting that we might want to get together and look at possibilities, the response
was overwhelmingly positive. What seems like a lifetime ago, a dozen or so people sat round a table at PRG Longbridge, introduced themselves to each other and described how they dealt with new trainees. The methods were very similar; take a new person, give them a trip through all the departments and get department heads to sign off when they’ve reached a suitable level, eventually turning out people with the skills, knowledge and behaviours for a life of work with live event technology. With so many similarities, it was little surprise when everyone agreed to develop a standard. Around 3 years ago, Government overhauled the apprenticeship system, switching to an employer-led method of development, we thought it looked interesting. approach, a Live Event Technician Apprenticeship. To cut a long story medium (there’s a word count to achieve here), there was swift agreement on how to describe the job and the knowledge, skills and behaviours (KSBs) required of a practitioner in our field. That was the easy bit, taking the KSBs delivered and developed in existing traineeships and putting them, along with a job description, on two sides of A4 paper. That journey through the departments was placed at the root of the apprenticeship, it’s stood many in good stead for a career in our industry. What followed was a tortuously drawn out process to develop methods of assessing against those KSBs, fitting our agreed requirements into an ever-changing template. One of the most attractive elements of the new
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