Over the last 10 years, National Apprenticeship Week has become a time to celebrate the positive impact apprenticeships and traineeships have on individuals, businesses and the economy.
However, in that time, there have been many debates about the pros and cons of such opportunities in the media industry. Here, full-service marketing, advertising and digital agency, The Works talk about their experiences of apprenticeships and training programmes and why they believe they can only have a positive impact on those involved.
Apprenticeships and training programmes like these have been around for a long time, but in recent years they’ve become a hot topic of conversation. People have debated whether the media industry is the right environment for such training schemes, whether apprentices or interns should be paid for their work and if training programmes should ever be considered a viable route into the industry like their degree counterparts.
As a business that has grown and developed its team over the past decade, we’ve seen the positive impact an apprentice or intern programme can have on all parties involved. In the past three years, we’ve worked with our partners at Gateshead College and the University of Sunderland to bring three interns and an apprentice into our business, three of whom are now permanent, full-time members of our team and one who has just recently joined us. In doing this, not only have we found four team members who are the perfect fit for our business in terms of their personality, but we’ve also seen these young people develop their knowledge and skills-sets to become integral parts of our account management and studio teams, bringing different ideas, skills and ways of thinking to the teams and client projects they work on.
Studying for a degree has long been seen as the next step after leaving school and something that is required to be considered for a role in our industry. However, in our opinion, just like the way we work with our clients, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to education or to getting your first step on the career ladder- everybody deserves an opportunity, no matter what their educational background is. Whether that opportunity is paid or not comes down to how long the placement lasts- but you can’t expect people to stay loyal and motivated in their role if they’re not being rewarded in some way.
In our experience, training schemes like apprenticeships or internships are ideal. As well as giving an employer a chance to see how an individual fits within their organisation, they give the trainee an opportunity to develop their current skills, learn new ones and gain some real, industry experience- it really is a win, win situation.
The Government has pledged to increase the quality and quantity of apprenticeships by 2020 to ensure they’re seen as a high quality, prestigious route to a career, and the introduction of the hotly anticipated apprenticeship levy in April is the first step in doing that. As an industry at the forefront of a lot of things, it’s about time we recognised the benefit of apprenticeships and training programmes just as the Government are doing and gave more young people opportunities- after all, they are the ones who will be taking our industry to the next level in the future.
