IT channel needs louder voice on apprenticeships
The government's ambitious target of three million apprenticeships is unrealistic if SMEs are not given greater role in shaping the system, argues CompTIA's Graham Hunter
Last month, the government outlined how it aims to achieve its ambitious goal of creating three million apprenticeships by 2020 and putting vocational qualifications on a par with university degrees. It is welcome news at a time when 44 per cent of UK IT companies say the digital skills gap is affecting staff productivity.
Currently businesses can apply for a £1,500 apprenticeship grant if they have fewer than 50 employees and are taking on an apprentice aged between 16 and 24. As part of a raft of government incentives to boost the number of apprenticeships, the March 2015 Budget included plans to give employers funding control through a Digital Apprenticeship Voucher by 2017.
The government is currently trialling this simplified funding model (report section 2.3) whereby it contributes £2 for every £1 employers spend on training and offers additional cash payments to employers if they recruit 16-to-18-year-old apprentices, have fewer than 50 employees, and when their apprentices successfully complete the apprenticeships. It has also already ploughed £18m into Tech Partnership, a network of major companies collaborating to boost digital skills, partly by boosting digital apprenticeships.
Yet the IT industry remains unconvinced.
At our recent UK Channel Community meeting of about 100 British IT firms, representatives of the government's Tech Partnership and National Apprenticeship Service discussed the new apprenticeship drive with business delegates. The overwhelming feedback from SMEs was that cash incentives alone will not work because the IT channel lacks confidence in the quality of many apprentices and apprenticeship training providers. Many delegates said they feel there is no standardised benchmark of quality to enable them to find the best apprenticeship training providers.
IT firms cannot take on the number of apprentices needed to meet the government's target, or give apprenticeships the same status as degrees, until they can trust the quality of training providers as much as they trust universities. After hearing this directly from our members, CompTIA is creating a directory of authorised training providers and an apprenticeships guide, to help SMEs identify the best places to find apprentices with a broad foundation of skills and qualifications in their area.
We also joined forces with other industry associations and apprenticeship providers for the Tech London 500 initiative. This gives SMEs incentives to recruit apprentices by providing a pool of 500 pre-screened candidates and a free matching service to ensure they are a good fit for businesses, as well as training and support.
However, there also needs to be an agreed industry-wide standard by which to assess the quality of IT apprenticeships.
Efforts are under way to develop trusted benchmarks of quality; the government recently published a set of digital industries Apprenticeship Standards and Tech Partnership has developed a Tech Industry Gold accreditation criteria for training providers.
Yet the problem is that the most input for these standards so far has been from a small group of large companies with very little input from SMEs or the broader IT channel. To take just one example, the apprenticeship standard for training network engineers was developed by just 18 organisations, almost all multinational companies and public sector giants.
Similarly, Tech Partnership is perceived to be dominated by multinational giants with costly joining fees putting off smaller firms, which often have very different requirements. They now include 550 organisations, but it has taken too long to reach this stage.
If the government is to meet its apprenticeship target, it needs help from SMEs, which account for 99.3 per cent of Britain's private sector businesses and 47.8 per cent of all our private sector employment.
SMEs need to be given a much greater voice in shaping and continuously updating the accreditation criteria for IT training providers, qualifications and apprenticeship standards. Our members, which are largely SMEs in the IT space, do not feel as if their voice has been heard enough to date.
By listening to businesses big and small, we can develop standards that draw on the expertise and insights of the wider industry to align vocational training with our needs.
This is the only way to create 'quality tests' for apprenticeship training that are trusted by the wider IT channel and give Britain's small IT businesses the confidence to take on more apprentices.
Graham Hunter is vice president of skills certifications at trade association CompTIA