Pleased To Meet You – Part Four: How It Works

Here at Creative Alliance, our office team includes a former apprentice who has just started a fulltime job with us as recruitment administrator and our current digital marketing apprentice who we hope will follow the same route into full time employment with us. I always employ apprentices because I can hardly ask other employers to have faith in a programme that I don’t use myself.

However, that’s not the only reason. We approach ALL our apprenticeships with a view to starting them on their career, not simply getting them a qualification. It’s a good way for me to grow my business because I’m training young people to do things our way, to our standards and within our values. All this while enabling them to get a nationally recognised qualification and invaluable work experience.

Our funding comes through a contract with the Skills Funding Agency. We only get paid if we deliver results. There are other sources of apprenticeship funding we get to support the other work we do, such as our Creative Careers education platform ‘Compass’, which puts young people into conversation with creative professionals.

We are legally obliged to track all the apprentices who finish their apprenticeship and find out what they’re doing. This is something our current apprentice is keeping on top of using social media and texts – young people are remarkably reluctant to answer the phone to anyone not in their immediate friendship circle!

80% of young people who complete their apprenticeship move into full time employment (usually with their sponsoring employer) and 15% move onto university. We’re very proud of this statistic, as well as the results from this year’s Ofsted Survey with employers and learners. 100% of employers we work with would recommend us to another employer, as would 90% of young people.

We’re proud of it because at the core of our approach is hard work. It’s hard work because young people don’t come to us to complete their qualification and then go back to their employer to do their work experience. They do their qualification in the workplace. They are gaining exactly the same qualifications, such as BTECs, as they would in a college. The difference is that they are doing them whilst learning to become a young creative professional.

We’ve currently got 100 young people following all sorts of apprenticeships with us with all sorts of companies. Just take a look at our current vacancies to see the variety that’s on offer!