Employing School Leavers and Graduates

Employing School Leavers and Graduates – The Ultimate Guide

When you are considering hiring new employees, you might be a bit hesitant to employ school leavers, or graduates due to their lack of experience, but there are many benefits of employing school leavers that you might not have considered.

Some of the key benefits include:

Receiving a government grant

When you hire an apprentice, the government will usually award you a £1,000 grant but a recent initiative provides an additional £3,000 on top of this, provided that you hire before 30 September.

Motivation to work hard

Most students are excited to start their career journey and the opportunity to earn money for the first time motivates them to do well. They are fresh out of an environment where they have been encouraged to work hard and to display good behaviours, so they should easily adjust to your working environment.

They often have good IT skills

The National Curriculum includes subjects including iMedia and Computer Science, meaning that the majority of students are digitally literate, especially in comparison to employees who did not benefit from modern IT-specific education. The Curriculum is constantly adapted to include essential skills that suit the current job market and digital skills are an area of major focus.

Current students tend to be proficient in using social media platforms, creating videos, and lots of other skills that are ideal for working in creative media roles. Many of them will also have a passion for doing this, rather than seeing it as a job.

They won’t have picked up bad habits from other companies

If this is their first employed role, they will not have had negative experiences at other companies. Sometimes when you recruit new employees, they bring working methods or attitudes into your company that might be detrimental.

Steps to hire an apprentice

Advertise

There are a few options for hiring an apprentice, you can advertise for an apprentice yourself. If you have a recruitment team, they will take care of this like they would with advertising for any other type of role.

Alternatively, you might have links with local schools where you can co-ordinate apprenticeships. Some apprenticeship training providers will be able to find apprentices for you. You need to try and make the job as appealing as possible for school leavers or graduates to ensure that you get a lot of interest from high-quality applicants.

Find a good training provider

Once you have found an apprentice or a group of apprentices, you will need to find the right apprenticeship training provider. Blue Lion Training Academy is renowned for training high calibre apprentices, to ensure that they have the skills and motivation to progress with their employer.

Unlike many other training providers, we train apprentices using their most effective learning style, which means that they can develop faster than using ‘one size fits all’ training.

As well as being a cost-effective way of employing new staff, when you hire an apprentice, it could be the start of a long and successful career at your company, where they grow and develop into a key member of staff.

With university fees so high, many of the top academic school leavers are looking at applying for attractive apprenticeship opportunities instead, so they could be a massive asset to your business.