Why companies are still undervaluing apprenticeships

“The fact is that peo­ple with voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions are at a dis­ad­van­tage.” 

That’s the stark ver­dict of Helen John­son, head of appren­tice­ships at the Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Facil­i­ties Coun­cil, a gov­ern­ment agency that funds research in fields such as nuclear physics and astron­o­my. 

“Some employ­ers have lost touch with the way voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions have changed, espe­cial­ly old­er man­agers who still view them as they were in, say, the 1970s,” she argues. “They don’t under­stand the changes.”

Johnson’s assess­ment is sup­port­ed by the results of a 2021 Ofqual sur­vey of employ­ers, which found that only 43% felt they had at least a “quite good” under­stand­ing of voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions. A fifth of respon­dents, com­pris­ing most­ly small­er employ­ers, admit­ted to hav­ing no under­stand­ing at all. 

Preparing people for the workplace

It’s lit­tle won­der that, while most providers of voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions nat­u­ral­ly believe that these pre­pare learn­ers well for the work­place, a con­sid­er­ably small­er pro­por­tion of employ­ers (39%) agree.

“Moves to over­haul voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions in recent years have led to com­plex­i­ty that can be chal­leng­ing from an employer’s per­spec­tive,” says Jude Owens, inter­im glob­al peo­ple oper­a­tions direc­tor at dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing plat­form LoopMe. “There are lots of voca­tion­al schemes of dif­fer­ing qual­i­ty being offered by many providers. That can be a hin­drance if you want to hire good-qual­i­ty tal­ent quick­ly.” 

She con­tin­ues: “There’s also the prob­lem that peo­ple still recruit in their own image. Those with a tra­di­tion­al aca­d­e­m­ic back­ground per­ceive some­one with a voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tion as tak­ing longer than a uni­ver­si­ty grad­u­ate to get up to speed. The gov­ern­ment and edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions could do bet­ter in pro­mot­ing the val­ue of voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions, so that employ­ers don’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly favour can­di­dates with degrees.”

John­son agrees that “some busi­ness­es still have an ele­ment of stuffi­ness in their out­look on voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions”. As social com­men­ta­tor David Good­hart not­ed in his 2020 book Head, Hand, Heart: the strug­gle for dig­ni­ty and sta­tus in the 21st cen­tu­ry, dif­fer­ent cul­tures place dif­fer­ing val­ues on voca­tion­al train­ing, with some coun­tries – includ­ing the UK – main­tain­ing that it’s a poor rela­tion to aca­d­e­m­ic study. 

Research last year by the Social Mar­ket Foun­da­tion (SMF) think-tank found that high­er edu­ca­tion had received two times more men­tions than fur­ther edu­ca­tion had in the British media over the pre­ced­ing decade. By con­trast, a 2016 Euro­stat study indi­cat­ed that almost half of sec­ondary-school pupils in the EU were going on to take voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

In the US, states have broad­ly cut fund­ing to voca­tion­al train­ing pro­grammes over the past decade, part­ly because they’re seen as cost­ly to run. Nicholas Wyman, pres­i­dent of the Insti­tute of Work­place Skills Inno­va­tion Amer­i­ca, believes that “job snob­bery” applies wide­ly in his coun­try. This is the fal­la­cy that voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions exist to equip peo­ple for man­u­al work, rather than being rel­e­vant to many high­ly skilled pro­fes­sions.

“It’s born of the mis­con­cep­tion that a uni­ver­si­ty qual­i­fi­ca­tion is what you need to suc­ceed in life,” he says. “I don’t think employ­ers set out to dis­ad­van­tage any can­di­date with a voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tion, but many have sys­tems in place that mean they recruit in a cer­tain way that’s hard to change. The task of reassess­ing the val­ue of voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions typ­i­cal­ly requires a cham­pi­on at direc­tor lev­el.”

The European view of apprenticeships

William Clous­ton is the leader of the UK Social Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty, which is plan­ning to pub­lish an edu­ca­tion pol­i­cy this sum­mer that will encour­age the whole­sale rebal­anc­ing of aca­d­e­m­ic and voca­tion­al train­ing.

He agrees with Wyman that employ­ers’ gen­er­al “lack of respect for voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions is all about sta­tus in the end. Com­pared with say, Ger­man cul­ture, we don’t vil­i­fy peo­ple for being igno­rant in maths, yet we do if they haven’t read the right nov­els. In the UK there has been a mas­sive over-expan­sion of uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion, while an easy labour sup­ply has dis­in­cen­tivised train­ing and appren­tice­ships. We need a rebal­anc­ing, so that not hav­ing a degree doesn’t work against peo­ple.”

Offer­ing a Con­ti­nen­tal per­spec­tive from his base in Oslo, Even Bol­stad is pres­i­dent of the Euro­pean Asso­ci­a­tion for Peo­ple Man­age­ment, an umbrel­la organ­i­sa­tion cov­er­ing nation­al HR insti­tutes from 35 coun­tries. He observes that, in thriv­ing indus­tri­alised nations with high employ­ment in par­tic­u­lar, busi­ness­es gen­er­al­ly look down on voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions. 

“That’s prob­lem­at­ic, because where they’ll prob­a­bly lack labour in years to come is in jobs requir­ing the very skills that peo­ple learn when tak­ing these qual­i­fi­ca­tions,” he says. “Employ­ers not open­ing them­selves up to voca­tion­al train­ing are, in the longer term, real­ly dig­ging their own graves.”

The gov­ern­ment of Aus­tralia, for instance, has cal­cu­lat­ed that its econ­o­my will need one mil­lion extra work­ers with voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions by as soon as next year. 

“Ger­many is always giv­en as the excep­tion – the go-to exam­ple of a coun­try that has got it so right in find­ing a flex­i­ble approach to both voca­tion­al and aca­d­e­m­ic edu­ca­tion,” Bol­stad adds. “But it seems that strong busi­ness cul­tures are gen­er­al­ly the most chal­lenged when it comes to chang­ing atti­tudes.”

Yet there are some pos­i­tive signs that things may be chang­ing in the UK, at least. While British employ­ers’ appre­ci­a­tion for voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tions is demon­stra­bly shaky, would-be stu­dents and their par­ents are start­ing to think dif­fer­ent­ly. Among this group, the sta­tus of fur­ther edu­ca­tion has grown rel­a­tive to that of high­er edu­ca­tion, accord­ing to the SMF research. Just under half (48%) of UK par­ents said that they would pre­fer their child to gain a voca­tion­al qual­i­fi­ca­tion over an aca­d­e­m­ic one. Even those respon­dents who described them­selves as mid­dle class – the tra­di­tion­al well­spring of uni­ver­si­ty grad­u­ates – ranked the two options equal­ly on aver­age. 

Does that leave employ­ers behind the curve?

John­son believes that the eco­nom­ic and com­mer­cial uncer­tain­ties that lie ahead are prompt­ing firms to see voca­tion­al train­ing in a more favourable light. “Con­sid­er­ing the future is forc­ing employ­ers to catch up. They want core skills of adapt­abil­i­ty, the abil­i­ty to learn and so on, pre­cise­ly because they don’t know what work will look like in the com­ing years,” she says. 

Bol­stad notes that argu­ments about the respec­tive mer­its of fur­ther and high­er edu­ca­tion may soon prove moot in any case, giv­en how quick­ly the world of work is evolv­ing, with the advance of tech such as robot­ics, big-data ana­lyt­ics and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence like­ly to bring pro­found dis­rup­tion.

“Learn­ing will be democ­ra­tised. It will be short­er, screen-based and ongo­ing, deliv­ered on a just-in-time basis,” he pre­dicts. “Such is the pace of change that the debate among employ­ers pit­ting aca­d­e­m­ic qual­i­fi­ca­tions against voca­tion­al ones is set to become dra­mat­i­cal­ly less rel­e­vant.”

Lights, camera, traction! Apprenticeships in the arts

The cre­ative indus­tries may be one of the UK’s eco­nom­ic suc­cess sto­ries, but they cer­tain­ly aren’t known for their acces­si­bil­i­ty. For poten­tial entrants, get­ting on the first rung here has long been a ques­tion of know­ing the right peo­ple and hav­ing enough finan­cial back­ing to enable them to work as interns on lit­tle or no pay. Might appren­tice­ship schemes – as well as the pro­posed T‑levels, due to start from Sep­tem­ber 2023 – enable these indus­tries to access a whole new pool of tal­ent and shed their elit­ist rep­u­ta­tion?

Such ini­tia­tives have had a trou­bled his­to­ry – par­tic­i­pa­tion in cre­ative appren­tice­ships fell by one-third over the three years to 2018, for instance. But there are grounds for opti­mism. For instance, a 2021 review by the Insti­tute for Appren­tice­ships and Tech­ni­cal Edu­ca­tion (IATE) not­ed that, in a win for social mobil­i­ty, the the­atre sector’s adop­tion of appren­tice­ship schemes in recent years had encour­aged more peo­ple who might not see it as a poten­tial employ­er to con­sid­er the oppor­tu­ni­ty.

And the IATE – a non-depart­men­tal exec­u­tive body spon­sored by the Depart­ment for Edu­ca­tion – is upping the ante. It has added five cre­ative occu­pa­tions to the list of jobs that are acces­si­ble through tech­ni­cal edu­ca­tion and pro­posed that a fur­ther 10 – from milliner to wig mak­er – be con­sid­ered.

It has also sought to address long-term fac­tors mil­i­tat­ing against appren­tice­ship schemes in the cre­ative indus­tries. One of these is that 80% of employ­ers in the sec­tor tend to be very small busi­ness­es with work­forces of no more than two peo­ple, which would find it hard to take on a full-time appren­tice. Con­se­quent­ly, a more flex­i­ble cre­ative appren­tice­ship mod­el, which would enable appren­tices to move from project to project and employ­er to employ­er, is under con­sid­er­a­tion. There is £7m of gov­ern­ment fund­ing attached to the scheme.

Indus­try-led skills body Screen­Skills is pilot­ing just such a mod­el. But it has not­ed that the sys­tem remains “so com­plex” that it is still deter­ring com­pa­nies in the cre­ative indus­tries from tak­ing on appren­tices.