Microsoft issues channel call to arms on apprenticeships

Microsoft says it needs its partners' help if it is to fulfil its goal of delivering 30,000 new Microsoft apprentices by 2020, with more mature staff eyeing a sideways move a prime target

Staff at Microsoft partners eyeing an upwards or sideways move in their careers are a prime target of the vendor's latest apprenticeship drive.

As part of a UK digital skills push announced last week, Microsoft said it hopes its apprenticeships programme will have 30,000 more alumni by 2020, a trebling of the current runrate.

Talking to CRN, Hugh Milward, head of corporate and legal affairs at Microsoft, said 8,000 of Microsoft's UK partners had been involved with the scheme since it first launched in 2010, but that he hoped this number would rise.

Existing staff at partners who want to "take a step up, or sideways" are a new emphasis for the scheme, he said.

Only a small number of Microsoft apprentices have or will be employed by Microsoft itself, with the vast majority working at partners, Milward said, adding that Microsoft's role is to bring together the training, the certification, the job and the candidate themselves.

Indeed, Microsoft has been accused of trying to grab the headlines in its skills announcement last week by describing itself as a "creator" of the roles, when it is not Microsoft itself the apprentices will work for in most cases.

"Effectively we bring everything together and the apprentice is an employee of the partner themselves," Milward clarified. "It blows most of the industry stats out of the water - around 95-97 per cent of those apprentices continue full-time with the partner when they have completed their apprenticeship, so the transfer rate is astonishingly high."

Over 11,000 apprentices have come through the scheme so far, but Milward predicted a recent refresh of the programme to focus on technologies where there are skills shortages - such as cloud and cyber-security - will bolster its appeal.

"There are two skills sets the industry is looking for, and that's cyber-security skills and cloud developer/cloud architects skills," he said. "If we look at how we're refreshing the programme now, based on past experience we think we can treble the number, but only with that incredibly strong partnership we have with those Microsoft partners."

Sideways move

School-leaving apprentices are keen to get on in their careers and haven't been moulded by old technologies, making them a natural fit for Microsoft partners, Milward said.

But one new area of focus for the scheme will be on staff already employed by partners, he explained.

"Until now, we've been focusing on level three and four apprentices, so they are already at a higher level," he said. "But the idea is to not just look at the traditional idea of an apprentice as a school leaver, but to actually look at apprentices that have maybe had another career, or are maybe working for the partner already. They may be taking an apprenticeship in a different role to take a step up, or sideways, in their career to deliver a different service and more advanced skills. So there is an opportunity there to build out a programme even with partners who are already taking on apprentices."

Milward stressed that the Microsoft apprenticeships programme encompasses various different apprenticeship frameworks, adding that Microsoft is one a handful of companies working with the government on the new Trailblazer apprenticeship.

The idea behind the Trailblazer is to ensure the material covered in tech apprenticeships is up-to-date in as fast-paced a space as technology, Milward explained.

"The government is taking a fresh look at apprenticeships," he said. "Part of the challenge is you go through the process of getting the skills and qualifications agency and various different bits of government to work on what an apprenticeship in a particular type of technology looks like. Then it gets reviewed and assessed and approved by the funding people, and turned into training materials. By the time you've done that, the technology you are building on is already out of date, so they are looking at ways of being much more nimble."

The Trailblazer scheme will allow Microsoft to deliver a number of new skill partners will find valuable, including a distance learning apprenticeship, Milward asserted.

Milward highlighted Risual and Black Marble as among the Microsoft partners to have embraced an apprenticeship model.

"What we find is our Partners of the Year are generally leading edge on investing in their own people," he said.

Boosting staff retention

Risual now takes on a cohort of about 20 apprentices each year, and also acts as a training provider for Microsoft on behalf of other partners.

Tina Jones, director of education at Risual, said the Stafford-based Microsoft consultancy turned to the model because it was struggling to find skilled staff.

"As an IT company we were struggling to recruit skilled workers," she said. "We were growing at such a pace that we had fantastic opportunities available, but the only way we could fill them was by swapping skilled workers across the sector, which wasn't sustainable. We recruited graduates, and we still do, but we found that while they can be academically clever it is still difficult to put them straight into a consultancy role because of the amount of skills you need to do with them around Microsoft capabilities."

Risual's apprentices attend a further education college once a week. Within the first year, they become a Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) and complete a Level 3 apprenticeship that Risual embeds Microsoft units within, Jones explained.

"It does tend to improve your retention of staff," she said. "We intend to train them through to graduate level and by doing that you get the loyalty of someone for three or four years. We are starting to see our first apprentices now from three years ago feed into our consultancy team."

In last week's announcement, Microsoft said it is also aiming to ensure a higher proportion of women and minority groups are supported with its Apprenticeship schemes.

Jones echoed this, saying attracting female apprentices is "hugely important" to Risual, which she said no longer insists its apprentices have a GCSE in IT, in recognition that fewer girls select IT as an option than boys.

"It's something we have just started doing our own internal campaign on," she said. "It's about trying to make it more accessible to females. We personally think we have to target that at education level, so we are trying to offer work experience opportunities to groups of females here at Risual and work with various different consultancy teams. The hope is we capture them at 13, 14, 15 to open their minds to a career in IT."

An 'apprenticeship nation'

Microsoft's apprenticeship drive was announced just as Apprenticeship and Skills Minister Robert Halfon declared that the UK is "well on its way" to becoming an "apprenticeships nation" after figures showed that 780,000 apprenticeships had been started since May 2015.

According to official data published last week, there were over 155,000 apprenticeship starts in the first quarter of the 2016/17 academic year. About 84,000 were level 2 apprenticeships, and 63,000 at level 3. Level 4, 5 and 6 apprenticeships made up about 9,000 of that total.

The government is aiming to create three million apprenticeships over the course of this parliament.

Microsoft set out its apprenticeship ambitions as part of a wider national skills programme announced last week.

Flanked by chancellor Philip Hammond, the software giant also committed to training 30,000 UK public servants in the delivery of digital services to citizens and to train 500,000 people in the UK to be cloud technology experts through its Cloud Skills Initiative.

But Lawrence Jones, CEO of UK hosting firm UKFast, said he felt the language employed in the announcement - specifically Microsoft's claim that it is "creating" 30,000 digital apprenticeships - was "misleading".

"Microsoft has created a curriculum - that's it," he said.

"They're not hiring any of those kids or giving them full-time jobs, so it's misleading to come out with a line claiming to have created 11,000 apprenticeships. They haven't done that. It's really unfair to make a sweeping statement like that when there are other companies out there that really do care and are taking kids on a journey out of school and employing them; that's a totally different role than someone who is creating an academic curriculum - and actually, the academic curriculum they have created is of huge financial benefit to them."

The number of internal apprentices Microsoft takes on is "relatively low", Milward said, but he added that plans are afoot to change this.

"Microsoft has 5,000 staff based in the UK and a lot of that is third line of response, with our partners at the first line of response, so demand is considerably less," he said. "But having said that, we are fully committed and we're in the process now of mainstreaming it across the whole business, not just engineering. We are looking at, for instance, how we take apprentices in the marketing department and legal department."

Microsoft also sent us the following statement in response to UKFast's Jones' comments:

In addition to hiring our own apprentices at Microsoft, the Microsoft Partner Apprenticeship programme has been focused since its launch in 2010 on catalysing the 25,000 Microsoft Partner companies in the UK to provide recognised and valuable apprenticeships. Many of these companies are small businesses and do not have the resources to develop their own apprenticeship programmes.

"As well as creating and running the programme, Microsoft works to understand the skills and talent needs of our partners and builds the programme to meet those needs. We then work with carefully-selected training providers to develop rigorous training and certification offerings, ensuring that the qualifications achieved have a real-world value. Microsoft offers many of these resources at a significant discount.

"We also invest in industry efforts to develop the necessary government- approved frameworks and standards for apprenticeships. Together with industry and government, Microsoft also publicly promotes the benefits of these apprenticeships - to recruit employers and potential apprentices to the scheme. The Microsoft Partner Apprenticeship Programme is a great way for technology employers to bring new talent into the workforce and address the serious skills shortage in the UK. This is why we have committed to create, with our partners, 30,000 new apprenticeships in the UK by 2020.