Blog: Celebrating engineering apprentices and their employers

National Apprenticeship Week takes place this week (10 to 16 February) is the perfect time to celebrate apprentices and their employers and educators and the positive impact apprenticeships make to individuals, businesses and the wider economy. It’s also a chance to highlight what needs to be done to enable more young people to access this training pathway.

With a severe labour and skills shortage facing the sector driven by net zero targets of 2045 in Scotland and 2050 in the rest of the UK, as well as the needs of wider infrastructure and economic growth, we need more businesses offering engineering and technology apprenticeships to young people and more young people taking them up. Last year 872,000 16–24-year-olds were not in employment, education or training in the UK – wouldn’t it be fantastic to shrink this number through the better provision and uptake of apprenticeships?

Our apprenticeship report, Fit for the Future, published in October 2023 examined the concerning decline in engineering and technology apprenticeships in England, especially amongst younger people, and made a series of recommendations to address the situation. Since then, the annual data on apprenticeship starts in England, published in November each year, shows that engineering and technology-related apprenticeship starts have stopped declining, indeed, there has been a small increase of 1.6% since 2022/23 to reach 97,120 starts in 2023/24.

Whilst the overall increase is positive, we are far from where we need to be. First, the scale of increase is insufficient to meet our needs. Second, the increase was in information and communication technology (ICT), whereas the need is spread more widely across engineering. Finally, the increase is focused on higher level apprenticeships taken by older apprentices, continuing a worrying long term trend. For instance, the 2022/23 to 2023/24 growth in engineering and technology related starts is highest in Level 6s and 7s which are up by 14% - in contrast, Level 2s actually fell by 8.7%. Similarly, starts by under 19-year-olds increased by just 1.1%, starts for 19–24-year-olds have actually declined by 4.7% and the greatest growth of 9% was seen in those aged 25 and over. We must put more effort into bringing in young people and apprentices at lower levels to grow the workforce. We are more encouraged by the increase in women starting an engineering or technology apprenticeship over the last year, with them now making up 17% rather than 15.7% of starts, but again this is focused in ICT.

In light of all this, we have welcomed the Government’s recent announcements on apprenticeships and will be engaging on plans for foundation apprenticeships and to reform the growth and skills levy. Apprenticeships are a devolved matter and one of the difficulties facing businesses is navigating the different systems. We hope that policy makers across the UK will seek ways to better coordinate and align their systems.

Apprenticeships run in partnership with businesses and government has highlighted the decline in business investment in skills since 2011, urging employers to invest more in training. We know some great examples of businesses that are not just doing this but taking innovative approaches to expand the pool and diversity of their apprentices. For instance, Babcock is increasing its apprenticeship enrolment to 500 next year and has also developed a new pre-apprenticeship scheme to increase accessibility to those who may not have the qualifications or background to typically enrol. Siemens has overhauled their recruitment approach, now using a game-based assessment to assess the potential of early careers professional candidates rather than the qualifications represented in a traditional cv – they’ve found that this has really improved the diversity of their intake with improved application numbers. Please do get in touch if you use innovative approaches that you think we could learn from.

We know that apprenticeships can make a real difference to young people, as well as the businesses taking them on such as Tess Brock who started at the Met Office as a Level 2 Engineering Apprentice before moving on to a Level 3 programme and then gaining a permanent position as a technician within the observations team where she completed her apprenticeship.

Please join with us in National Apprenticeship Week, and indeed, every week, to celebrate apprentices and think about how to we can give more young people the opportunity to become one.