Are you making the most out of your apprenticeship levy?

The Apprenticeship levy is here to stay, but with so much of the funding still untouched, how can organisations utilise the remaining funds to ensure that they are fully investing in their employees?

£3 billion of Apprenticeship funding still remains unspent, and UK businesses are at risk of missing out on an invaluable opportunity to upskill their workforce.
Once the domain of early years careers teams, Apprenticeships now offer development opportunities for your
entire organisation.

The Apprenticeship Levy, in conjunction with the move from Apprenticeship frameworks to industry led standards, introduces new opportunities to access learning with a wider variety of programmes. Masters Level degrees and professional development qualifications can now be included, and Business Improvement, Digital Marketing, IT, Cyber Security, and Software Development programmes have been created.

With cross party support in Westminster, the Apprenticeship Levy is here to stay. For large organisations, the Levy is a significant amount of money, but many have found that traditional off-the-shelf programmes are not suitable for their employees. As a result, some have chosen to ignore the opportunity, meaning a significant part of the levy will soon start to return to the public pot.

We can now design dynamic curriculums to meet the Apprenticeship standard that not only align with your organisational objectives, but also contains tertiary qualifications, have contextualised content, and form part of your wider workforce learning strategy.

However, whilst the levy is ring-fenced to your organisation for 24 months, it’s crucial to remember that it’s public money - there are rules that have to be respected, and a quality assurance framework to operate within.

At GP Strategies, we help businesses navigate through these rules. Our Managed Apprenticeship service delivers insightful learning analytics and management information that facilitates organisations to create campaigns to enthuse and inspire your employees.

We believe that it is crucial to build rich, engaging learner experiences that create positive outcomes and career progression paths. As such, we have outlined a series of recommendations which will help organisations develop an effective Apprenticeship Levy strategy:

Treat the Levy Like an Investment Opportunity
Whilst L&D budgets are often cut, this money won’t be taken away; use it to make a positive impact whilst you can.

Get Senior Stakeholder Buy-In and Support
There’s nothing more powerful than the leaders in your business backing programmes as a way to climb the promotion ladder, so senior stakeholder buy-in and support is key.

Do Something Brilliant
Focus on specific areas of your business and target volumes of employees. The combined funding and a cohort approach gives you the opportunity to push the boundaries, and create content and learning technologies.

Recognise What Already Works Well For You
Use learning and engagement approaches that you have already tried with your employees, and that you know will work. This continuity of approach helps you build sustainable programmes that underpin your wider workforce strategy.Create a Brand and an Employee Engagement Campaign

You don’t have to call your provision an Apprenticeship programme. You can design an inspiring aspirational brand, then build an engaging marketing campaign across multiple channels to promote it.

Design Progression Paths
Give your leaners sight of where they can go next. They should be aware of what they are working towards and how they can progress through your organisation.

Recognise How We Learn
We learn from YouTube, peers, Google, etc. in our own lives, so try to recreate this with short videos, search tools, and social media platforms.

Curate Relevant, Appropriate Content
Many online industry publications contextualise subjects with engaging blogs, reporting and discussion. Implement the same approach with your Apprenticeship programmes.

Celebrate Success
The best way to ensure that you receive interest in your Apprenticeship programmes is to publicise the success of your learners, be it through companywide blogs or graduation ceremonies.

As businesses transform, they ae look for smarter ways to upskill employees. GP Strategies supports this through our new Apprenticeship programme design approach that not only places learning activities within our client’s workflows, but also has an engaging learner experience that meets modern learner expectations.

That’s why we call them NextGen Apprenticeships - it’s about doing things in a way that is in tune with how organisational learning is delivered, as well as ensuring that it aligns with the way that learners already access learning in the workplace.