Pleased To Meet You – Part Five: With Freedom Comes Responsibility

When talking to other young people, this is how our former apprentice and now full time member of staff describes one of our apprenticeships:

“You work within the creative industries which enables you to develop your life skills a lot better than classroom based learning. It’s a different, but definitely better environment. You are an adult so we’ll treat you like one; you’ll be given a lot of freedom.”

However, with that freedom comes responsibility. Apprentices have to adjust their mind-set from being a student to being an employee. We, and their employers, expect apprentices to take responsibility for their time keeping, behaviour, deadlines, quality of work and attitude to learning. That can be hard, and sadly, some young people just are not ready for work in a professional environment.

In the minority of cases that this happens, we end the apprenticeship and support the young person back into school or college. 70% of our apprentices pass all their qualification, and another 10% pass everything but Maths (yes they have to do Maths, English and IT if they do not have Grade C or above). Unfortunately, 20% discover that work based learning in our sector isn’t for them, and they are asked to leave before the end of their apprenticeship.

We have to be tough because we know how hard it is to get paid work in the creative & cultural sector. There are lots of very talented young people looking to get their foot in the door. For some of our apprenticeship vacancies, we can get over 100 young people applying. Of course, at this stage you’re more likely that we are to know if your child or student has what it takes. If you think they will relish and then rise to the challenge and their ready for work, we’d love to meet them. Encourage them to apply for our vacancies!

In future blog posts I’ll share what we’ve learnt about both employing young people and tips about getting into and then getting the most out of an apprenticeship. For now, if there are remaining questions about who we are or concerns about the quality of what we do, please get in touch with me: noel@creativealliance.org.uk