ResPublica’s Dion Watts and Patricia Kaszynska call for new ways to encourage SME apprenticeships
“The web is what you make of it,” proclaims the Google
advertisement documenting Jamal Edwards’ meteoric rise to entrepreneurship
after being given a digital camcorder for Christmas. Now Jamal employs over a
dozen people, and his company SB.TV is one of nine
case studies published on the StartUp Britain website as part of the
government’s ‘Business
in You’ campaign launched this week.
For Jamal, the internet provided both the platform for him
to showcase his video content and the skills to produce it. In his interview on
the StartUp Britain site, Jamal describes how he studied video tutorials online
in order to learn how to create the different visual effects he wanted with his
camera and editing equipment. It's highly unlikely that Jamal learned all his
skills from the same source – indeed it would be a significant undertaking for
one person to upload so much content to the web – he would have extracted what
he needed from a variety of sources within a wide social network. There are
lessons here for the Government’s flagship apprenticeships scheme.
The SME sector is still lagging dramatically behind the
big employers in creation of apprenticeships. In 2009, 8% of all employers in
the SME sector offered apprenticeships (though only 4% had staff currently
undertaking an apprenticeship) – compared to 30% of large employers with 500
staff offering apprenticeships and 22% employing at least one apprentice. It is
also worth pointing out that, of small businesses with 2-4 employees, only 2%
were employing apprentices and only 5% were offering apprenticeships.
The Government announced in the Budget that funding
for 10,000 extra places over the rest of the Parliament would be targeted
at increasing the number of SMEs that offer advanced and higher level
apprenticeships; and further committed to invest £75 million in a programme of
training and ‘other targeted support focused specifically on small and
medium-sized businesses to help them access advanced and higher level
apprenticeships’ through the Growth
and Innovation Fund (GIF). The 2011 Autumn Statement heralded an additional
20,000 incentive payments through the Youth Contract to encourage firms
with up to 50 employees who are considering taking on their first apprentice.
However, the reason most often cited by employers in the
SME sector for not offering training schemes is that there is ‘no need’;
‘expense of training’ is offered as the second most important reason. So, while
funding is important and incentive payments would no doubt help to encourage
SMEs to take on more apprenticeships, the situation is more complicated. Many
small scale businesses would no doubt benefit from some extra help, but they
feel that they do not have the infrastructural backing to accommodate the educational
needs of apprentices, or utilise them effectively for 5 days a week. The Government
has so far failed to register this problem.
The same principle by which Jamal Edwards learned the
techniques that made him an internet entrepreneur can be applied to
apprenticeships in the new economy, where shared knowledge is the key to
success. Many small businesses do not have the capacity or the will to train up
new staff from scratch, but business clusters could hold the answer. Clusters
are real world social networks of like-minded entrepreneurs who could share
fragments of their knowledge with those who seek it. The trick is to put SMEs
in a ‘pro-active learning’ mind set. For this to happen, they need to be
provided with infrastructural solutions pulling resources and experiences
together for the sake of collective benefit. The Government’s pledge this week
to make empty and under-used government offices available to small businesses
so that they can start up and grow is a step in this direction.
Groups of similar businesses in the same area could
operate shared apprenticeship schemes of the type piloted by the ConstructionSkills, the Sector Skills
Council and Industry Training Board for the construction industry. Sharing
apprentices could result in richer and more rewarding experiences for trainees,
as well as more affordable training provision for the businesses involved. Moreover,
the availability of mutual support structures is likely to make apprenticeships
more appealing both to SMEs and aspiring trainees. An SME apprenticeships cloud,
connecting businesses with future talent, is the key to unlocking the potential
of the SME apprenticeship market.