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Modern Apprenticeship Passport
British Manufacturing is facing a mini time bomb. As many experienced operatives who completed an old style apprenticeship near retirement, the loss of experience and (perhaps more importantly) the loss of tacit knowledge from the company will have a big impact.
So who is going to back fill those positions? If you've successfully hired experienced technical people recently, you've perhaps had luck on your side. From talking to companies in the area, recruiting this experience can be difficult, time-consuming and expensive (both in terms of the recruitment campaign and package offered). Maybe this time it worked out for you, though probably leaving your new employee's previous company with the headache. It happens – and your time will come to suffer the same headache. But is driving up the cost of labour in this way really the long-term solution? Surely that solution lies in increasing the pool of technical talent available?
The Scottish Government sees the migration of 'ready-made' skilled labour to the UK as one way of solving the problem. But Governments come and go, as does the commitment to previously stated immigration policy. Apart from which, there's nothing to stop workers from other parts of the EU returning home once their own economies start to benefit from EU investment. Maybe an alternative way of increasing the talent pool is to look closer to home and try to increase the number of young people who see engineering and other technical disciplines as a gateway to a rewarding career.
For both political and economic reasons, apprenticeships went out of fashion for a long while. This created a generation gap, where for many years the number of young people 'graduating' from apprentice training programmes dropped significantly. Little surprise that there's not too many experienced technical people available to back fill the positions from which experienced operatives retire. Our collective challenge then is to encourage more young people into technical careers by promoting engineering in all its forms as a discipline that needn't mean greasy overalls and oil under the fingernails – rather as a rewarding, fulfilling career which offers many potential development paths. CeeD's Modern Apprenticeship Passport aspires to this lofty ambition and has more than thirty young people taking part in the scheme currently. Working with academia, training partners and member companies, we've created a unique model which allows companies which perhaps don't have the necessary in-house expertise in some required disciplines to send their apprentices to other members companies which do, in order to complete the apprentice training.
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