Dwayne Webb, Mercuri’s Apprenticeship Consultant discusses regulations and attracting the best talent.
The apprenticeships rules and regulations are confusing for businesses. An employer engagement event held in November 2018 reported that Institute for Apprenticeships (IfA) COO Robert Nitsch’s presentation showed that the IfA was predicting an apprenticeship levy overspend of £500m in 2019 rising to £1.5b in 2021.
The slides from the presentation were initially withheld and only released in January 2019. Sir Gerry Berragan, CEO, Institute for Apprenticeships is quoted as saying:
“It (the presentation slide) was there to make two points. One is that the levy isn’t massively under-spent – it’s being used. And secondly that it’s a finite resource and therefore when people say why are you being tight about funding and funding bands you’ve got to see it in the context that there’s a finite resource and therefore, we need to make sure we get every bit of value for money out of every apprenticeship.”
A freedom of information request sent to the Department of Education showed that by November 2018 only 14% of the apprenticeship levy had actually been spent. People Management recently conducted a survey illustrating that 50% of respondents will not have spent all their levy by the cut off in April 2019. Surprisingly nearly 40% will have spent all their levy by April 2019 with the remaining 10% not utilising a single penny.
One thing is for sure is that the sooner you start spending your levy the sooner you will start to see a return on investment.
- Yes, the cost of the training has already been taxed and in essence could be considered as “free”.
- There are other associated costs such as managers time and resource, initial planning and the “20% off the job”.
If I was running a business, I would be more worried about my competitors gaining an advantage by attracting the best talent with defined training programmes resulting in more capable and happy staff. Ultimately, the levy was introduced to help address a skills and productivity gap, but the success relies on businesses to adopt to this change. Don’t let your business get left behind.
Dwayne Webb, Apprenticeship Consultant, Mercuri International UK
Training the next generation of sales professionals
As more and more standards are approved by the IfA, businesses will have more choice and opportunity to spend their levy. The recent release of the Level 4 Sales Executive Apprenticeship has given Mercuri International UK an opportunity to help businesses train the next generation of sales professionals. With our outstanding reputation in sales consultancy and sales training get in touch if you would like to be one step ahead of your competitors.
