Apprenticeships are key to replenishing engineering skills

Apprenticeships enable you to take on new staff, tailoring their training to fit your company’s exact requirements in a cost-effective way.

Training staff in engineering disciplines can take a long time as the roles are often extremely technical and highly skilled, which is why you need to be thinking about your company’s future now.

By planning ahead, you can ensure that you are training the engineers of the future. As your older members of staff leave the workplace, they take with them their experience and knowledge, so you need to be introducing new engineers to the business who can learn from the existing staff as they train, enabling them to eventually take the reins with confidence.

Although hiring in ready-trained staff is an option and will undoubtedly happen from time to time if staff leave unexpectedly, selecting your own apprentice and training them from scratch on the intricacies of your business will offer many advantages.

They’ll be in tune with your business from the start and will receive the exact training that they need to do the job well. They’ll receive their training in the environment they’ll be working in and will get to know the team as they learn. In return you will get a member of staff who is confident and competent in their role, with loyalty to your business.

Why now’s the perfect time to take on an apprentice...

You’ll receive a bonus of up to £2,000

The government apprenticeship incentive, which is running until 31 March 2021, offers bonuses of up to £2,000 for each apprentice employed by that date. With just a month left to take advantage of this fantastic opportunity, make sure your business doesn't miss out.

Until 31 March 2021, any organisation that hires a new apprentice aged 16 to 24 will receive £2,000 for each apprentice they hire (this is in addition to the £1,000 incentive already in place for new 16 to 18 year-old apprentices), offering a potential £3,000 incentive per apprentice. Employers hiring new apprentices aged 25 and over will be paid £1,500 per apprentice.

The payment can be spent on anything to support your organisation’s costs such as uniforms, your apprentice’s travel or their salary and it does not need to be paid back. Although apprentices have to be signed up and to have commenced employment by 31 March 2021 to be eligible, you will have until 30 April 2021 to apply for the incentive.

Plug skills gaps created by COVID

If the pandemic has meant that your company has had to change and adapt to navigate the challenges that COVID has presented, now is the time to address those changes to ensure your business will thrive going forward.

It may mean that you’ve had to restructure your business or make redundancies in areas that are no longer needed due to the changing marketplace. Whilst this may have been necessary, it may also have left skills gaps as your business changed to fit the new mould.

You could plug a skills gap by taking on an apprentice. Perhaps you need to combine the skills two staff previously had into one role? You could employ someone new into an apprenticeship position to gain a fresh perspective, or possibly even rehire staff as apprentices, retraining them in a new role.

The training might not cost you a penny...

Thanks to the Apprenticeship Levy and Co-funded models for smaller businesses, 95% to 100% of the apprentice training costs will be government-funded. This means that training a new member of staff or upskilling an existing one could cost you nothing, or very little, which is a huge incentive.

The Apprenticeship Levy was introduced in 2017 to create national funding for apprenticeships and to enable businesses of all sizes to implement their own apprenticeship programmes. At PETA, we have a highly experienced team on hand to help you manage your apprenticeship funding to ensure you maximise your investment in apprenticeships - get in touch if you’d like to learn more about your options and how we can help.

Take advantage of our flexible training options

At PETA, we always offer flexible training options to suit the requirements of the employers we partner with and in the current climate, this is now more important than ever. As an essential service, we remain open at this time and can offer on-site training at our Portsmouth-based training centre, which is verified as COVID-secure. We have a range of safety and social distancing measures in place to ensure the wellbeing of our staff and learners/delegates.

We can also offer the majority of our training provision in an online capacity via live and pre-recorded videos. Our trainers, tutors and coaches are always on hand to offer assistance where needed and we’ve even been working with accrediting bodies to develop ways to undertake assessments remotely too.

Engineering is a practical discipline and much of the training will have to be done at your premises. This is something we can actively support too; we can provide advice on ensuring your site is COVID-secure if needed, and once confirmed, we can attend on-site to deliver any training or provide apprentice support as needed.

Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to discuss the training options in more detail.

Why partner with PETA?

If you choose us to be your apprenticeship training partner, we'll provide a comprehensive recruitment service, which includes:

  • Your own recruitment consultant from our experienced engagement team, offering support in candidate selection
  • Full job description and advertisements on national advertising boards, social media and the PETA website
  • Pre-interview selection and candidate screening
  • Interview support and follow-up for candidates and employers
  • Initial assessment of skills, including Maths and English

Find out more about recruiting an engineering apprentice and get in touch to find out more about starting this journey with us...

 

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