Under the Trailblazers programme, apprenticeships are back on the national agenda. However, to help improve on the traditional apprenticeships you will be familiar with we need your help.

We’re acting on a really tight timescale as a submission by Feb 12th, should it be approved, will most like carry funding post-election.  Stated funding levels for each apprentice are up to £18K for a large company or up to £28K for an SME.
 
This is a model that won’t be for everyone but if we don’t get a better response, we will not get the opportunity to take this forward.
 
I am therefore asking each of you to please help:

  1. Please review the standard and complete the questionnaire on our website by 12:00 on Monday.
  2. If you believe you could use this route for the acquisition and development of new engineering talent could you please provide a letter of support – standard template can be found on our website
  3. As part of this commitment we need letters of assignation of all materials to the Crown – standard template can be found on our website

We will take your comments on board and intend to update the standard next week before final submission; this is your chance to comment!

Survey open Feb 2nd – Feb 9th

Propositions under the Trailblaser programme are set to attract and enable more suitably qualified young people enter into our industry and hit the ground running. Publicly funded, but restricted to England-only, the Government will contribute £2 for every £1 invested by industry on training and educating these young people.

The programme has the potential to revolutionise the skills provision in our industry – something which we desperately need having seen a sharp decline in registrations for Electronic Engineering degree courses and hearing from our members that finding people with the desired skillsets in the UK has become increasingly difficult.

The qualifying condition to these exciting new apprenticeships is that only ‘standards’ developed in conjunction with industry will be eligible for support and that is why we need your help.  Our first applications cover “Embedded Systems Development Engineer” and a “Production Technical Operator”.  Please visit our website and take a look at the proposed draft standards and complete the associated online survey – it will be time well spent; investing in our industry’s future.