Apprenticeships key to financial services skills vision.
“The opportunities and learning provided to you as an apprentice are amazing… It’s been life-changing for me, and I really couldn’t recommend it enough.”
One of the key strategic themes of our financial services strategy – published in May last year – is the development of skills & inclusion, and over the past year we have been working with our members to examine what we can collectively do to attract and support people across all backgrounds into a successful and fulfilling career in our industry.
Questions we are asking include:
Do we have a consistent understanding of the skills critical to our industry’s continued success in Scotland, and to what extent do current opportunities address these needs?
What can we do as an industry to simplify and join up the landscape, ensuring that the pathways into our sector meet the skills needs in an accessible and inclusive way? And
What opportunities can we collaborate on to promote our industry, with organisations across the industry as well as educators and other learning providers?
We believe that apprenticeships are a key pathway into financial services because they can be utilised by people at different points in their career. Young people are able to follow a practical route into the industry and an alternative to further/higher education, and the existing workforce can benefit from the programme by using it as a resource to upskill. Currently 5 generations of the Scottish population are either in work or actively seeking employment, so it’s vital that we reflect the demographic of the workforce in the pathways we offer.
Flexibility is and should continue to be at the core of the apprenticeships programme. Individuals can choose from foundation, modern, or graduate apprenticeships, so there’s something for everyone – work-based learning for senior school pupils, training programmes for new and existing employees, and full-time jobs that let people earn a wage and gain an industry-recognised qualification simultaneously.
Our members offer apprenticeships across a variety of our industry’s sub-sectors – from Wealth Management to Banking, to Professional Services, and Public Bodies.
The success of apprenticeships in Scotland has varied across the different offerings. Skills Development Scotland recently completed research in partnership with Ekosgen and found that:
Foundation apprenticeships in financial services have increased more than eight-fold since 2016, with 669 students signing up to the programme between 2020 and 2022. Importantly, these courses included those related to digital frameworks which correlates with the increase in demand for these skills in the industry.
Similarly, the uptake on financial services (including digital)-related graduate apprenticeships has increased by over 300% since 2017/18.
Conversely, the popularity of modern apprenticeships has declined significantly in the past 5 years - The level of uptake fells by almost 70% between 2017/18 and 2020/21. This is a combination of both a fall in popularity and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as many employers were unable to support students working from home.
As you can see, whilst it’s clear that some frameworks are succeeding, there is still more we can do as industry to promote pathways like apprenticeships to tackle our skills needs now and into the future.
Back in September 2021 we held a dinner focused on the journey to net zero, which allowed us a space, as leaders, to discuss this theme openly and honestly. We want to establish the same shared momentum with our skills & inclusion agenda and so will be holding a dinner next week (kindly sponsored by NatWest) with representatives from across financial services and education bodies in Scotland.
Our ambition for the evening will include debating and visualising how we can utilise existing opportunities in the industry to tackle skills needs at both sectoral & regional levels.
Our dinner will be followed by a series of collaborative workshops with our members to ensure our proposed actions reflect the collective needs and views of the industry.
We can and should be bold and courageous in our efforts to address the opportunity gaps we currently face in Scotland – the financial services sector is innovative and inspiring and is always in need of diverse talent to help it achieve its aspirations and adapt to the ever-changing economic landscape. We believe apprenticeships can help us achieve that vision.
This year, SFE are proud to be offering a 1-year Digital Marketing Apprenticeship as we move into what I’m sure will be a busy rest of 2022, not just for us but for the whole industry. We’re also pleased to be playing our part in working with partners such as SDS and DYW to encourage even more people from different backgrounds to choose apprenticeship pathways into our sector. This week’s stories showcase the huge variety of rewarding career routes available, so make sure you check them out!
Find out more about Scottish Apprenticeship Week here, and find out about new Providing Financial Services Apprenticeship here.
