Why did you decide to take on apprentices?

This Tuesday, we conclude our discussion with Beever and Struthers about their fantastic apprenticeship scheme. If you are considering a career in accountancy, check out the opportunities Beever and Struthers offer. It might just be for you…

Partnership - Beever and Struthers
Why did you decide to take on apprentices?
The ATT, which is now the AAT, the accounting technician’s course, just teaches people the basics and at times we just need people at the lower level who will be in the office for a large part of the time to do the more mundane aspects of some of the jobs. This is largely what induced us to start with and because it worked so well, we just took on more and more of them.

Coupled with the increase in the university fees, that made a lot of people question what they wanted to do after high school, and what other options were available to them rather than having to go to uni and get all that debt, so I think we were gearing up to offer that group of people something different.

If you got them young enough, it was government funded at the time, so we didn’t have such high training costs.

How do you think apprenticeships benefit the people who do them?
It is an opportunity to benefit people who aren’t academically inclined and would not be able to continue into uni. It opens up some of the professions for a wider variety of people. It does not have to be just for graduates any more. If you have the ambition, apply yourself and are ready to put in the hard work, why should you not have the same chance as someone who has been to uni? That is one of the biggest pluses with the apprenticeship scheme. We were recently interviewing for a marketing trainee.

A few candidates were on apprenticeships already in other businesses, but they already knew that when they finished that apprenticeship there was no job for them. We don’t operate like that. And that is the downside to apprenticeships in some industries and firms. It really does seem like cheap labour with them.
But we want to offer long term career development.