22 Aug 2023
It is a common misunderstanding about apprenticeships that they are often thought to only be for young school leavers with few formal qualifications who want to continue their education outside of a school environment. This view of apprenticeships is outdated and doesn’t bear much resemblance to the reality of the current situation. Apprenticeships offer new opportunities to people of all ages and are a significant part of re-skilling when deciding on a career change.
There is a huge range of apprenticeships on offer. They are broken down into their respective educational qualification levels and segmented by the type of occupation and job role they relate to.
Adult Apprenticeships
Many of the adults who are choosing to pursue apprenticeships are doing so in order to try to change careers and develop skills in areas that they hadn’t been able to in their previous working life. It is often the case that they have been prompted to go for an apprenticeship at the company that already employs them in order to retrain to learn a different job role and fill a skills gap at the company in question.
This can often be an acknowledgement that the employee in question has almost the right skills for promotion but maybe lacks a couple of vital skills to enable them to take on the new job role. Companies that are willing to invest in the training of their employees in this way tend to have a good level of loyalty returned to them, so this works well for both parties.
If you are in the process of changing careers, you are allowed to start an apprenticeship at the same level as your current qualifications or lower. This means that if you had an undergraduate degree already, which is level six, you would be able to do any apprenticeship that wasn’t Level 7. This would be reliant on the fact that the subject matter was considered to be sufficiently different.
Where someone has already undertaken an apprenticeship or other education that would be very similar in content, it makes sense that this would not be allowed. It would be an easy and comfortable apprenticeship, but the whole point is to challenge you and help you learn new skills, which is why it would be ruled out. The decision on this is made by the training provider when you apply for an apprenticeship.
School Leavers
It is a much simpler route into apprenticeships for people leaving school as they will not have done any previous apprenticeships and will, therefore, not be disqualified from starting a new one based on course similarity etc.
The Level 2 Intermediate Apprenticeships are the most popular for people in this age group, and there are disproportionately more opportunities at this level as a result. The reason for this popularity is that they require the least in terms of previous qualifications, so they are relatively easier to get into and begin the apprenticeship journey than some of the higher-level apprenticeships.
