Using Apprenticeships To Improve Recruitment To IS Posts

Hi All,

At the last IS operation group meeting quite a few units mentioned recruitment of IT staff, specifically those in software development, had been difficult so I thought I would share wider what we have been doing to address this.

Since 2017 the government has applied an apprenticeship levy to organisations with a paybill of over £3m per year. Essentially organisations of this size have to put aside %0.5 of this money for running apprenticeships and if they don’t spend it the government reclaim this money as an incentive to spend it.

We have been able to use this to run 3 apprenticeship posts so far that have taken existing staff with no development experience and turned them into very competent software developers. The programs are usually 12 -18 months during which time the staff member has to attend a series of courses, produce coursework and undertake exams to achieve recognized qualifications.

Our host organisation, the University of Leeds, has partnered with an external training provider to deliver these. At the moment the program we use is made up of the following modules:

Induction and C# Fundamentals

Intermediate C#

SQL and Data Modelling

Web Fundamentals

ASP.Net

Systems Development Basics

How much does it cost?

There is no direct cost to our CTU for running these. The courses are fully funded from the levy paid by your host organisation. It does mean that the staff member will be away from the office for training courses and take days away to complete course work during which time they can’t contribute to delivering regular CTU work.

Wont staff just leave once they have the qualification?

Potentially. One staff member left part way through the program to take up a higher paid job in the private sector. I currently view this as a pipeline exercise with the expectation that we will recruit staff to the scheme, get meaningful contributions from them during their development and then they may move on at which point we will recruit another staff member and start again. On balance I would rather have developers that may leave after 1-2 years instead of no developers at all.

Any issues?

There were issues with the quality of the training courses at first. These were addressed with the training provider and have been significantly improved since then.

What can the staff member contribute whilst they are learning?

During the period where the staff member is learning the skills required to be a software developer they undertake other work on in house systems. As well as bespoke development our grade 6 Developers also implement randomization services on our randomization platform. As this is bespoke to our CTU they are trained on this first and spend their time working on these and other in house configurable systems until they can take on more complex report writing and coding projects.

Kind Regards

Adam

IS Manager

CTRU Leeds

Infrastructure and Services Manager
CTRU Leeds

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