Three Steps to Maximising Your Degree Apprenticeship Offer

Emsi How to Guides

Contents

3 ...... Foreword

4 ...... Step Maximise Your Current Offer

5 ...... Step Evaluate Your Best Opportunities

6 ...... Step Let the Market Lead3

2

1

WE ARE WORKING WITH:

2 | Three Steps to Maximising Your Degree Apprenticeship Offer How to Guides

Foreword

The huge role that higher education plays in providing the skills needed by industry is widely acknowledged. For instance, the Government’s recent White Paper – Industrial Strategy: Building a Britain fit for the future – had this to say:

However, it is also generally acknowledged that many of the problems that have plagued the UK economy in recent years, such as low productivity and poor growth, are at least partly down to the fact that very often the skills learned in both universities and colleges are not well aligned with what employers actually need. This has led to increasing calls for education providers to get much better at ensuring their provision is supplying the skills that industry is calling for.

Degree Apprenticeships are one very important way of addressing this misalignment. Unlike traditional degrees, which do not necessarily need to be directly aligned to the labour market, Degree Apprenticeships must align as there are employers involved. Whether your university is already offering Degree Apprenticeships and is looking at the potential of expanding them, or whether you don’t currently offer them, but you are exploring various possibilities, the key to success is the same: better understanding of how they relate to employer needs.

The purpose of this short three-step guide is to show you how this can be done using detailed Labour Market Insight (LMI).

Step 1 – Looks at how you can maximise the impact of the Degree Apprenticeships you already offer, by identifying other employers who need them.

Step 2 – Shows you how you can look at which areas in your existing course portfolio could be converted into Degree Apprenticeships.

Step 3 – The third stage is for the really ambitious university, where instead of letting your existing offer drive what you do, you let the demands of industry drive your programme.

We hope you find the information and the ideas in this guide useful, and that it will open up new pathways for your institution to maximise its Degree Apprenticeship potential.

How to Guides Three Steps to Maximising Your Degree Apprenticeship Offer | 3

Higher education plays a significant role in bringing benefits for the UK economy, particularly in the provision of higher-level skills that

are needed by employers both nationally and within local areas.

What this means is that by using detailed LMI, you can achieve two crucial aims:

● You can identify whether there is sufficient demand for expanding your existing Degree Apprenticeships● You can very quickly establish which industries and therefore which employers you should be talking to

about potential expansion of your existing offer.

Maximise Your Current Offer

Most Degree Apprenticeships are developed because of existing relationships the university has with regional companies. This is quite natural, and yet it does raise the question of whether there are opportunities to seek out other employers who have similar needs.

Let’s begin by imagining a university in the East of England with good links to a couple of big accountancy firms. In response to their ongoing needs, the university has developed a Degree Apprenticeship in Finance and accountancy, and this is currently offered to 20 people. As the university thinks about possible expansion of the programme, the first question that arises is this: Is there likely to be much demand for accountants in the region over the next few years?

We can answer this by using our detailed Labour Market Insight (LMI). According to our data, there are currently around 20,122 people employed as Chartered and certified accountants in the East of England, and our projections show that this is set to grow to around 21,210 by 2022 – a rise of over 1,000. In addition, when you add job churn into the mix – due to things like retirement – what we actually find is that there are projected openings of around 1,100 per annum throughout the region. This would tend to suggest that there is the demand for potential expansion, but given that this so, it leads to a second question: which industries can this demand be found within?

This might sound like an odd question. Surely if the university is looking to expand its Degree Apprenticeships in Finance and accountancy, then the most obvious place to start would be to go online and look up all the other accountancy firms in the region? This would be a perfectly valid and logical place to start. However, it is actually a very limited approach, because the fact is that accountants are employed by many other businesses beyond the obvious accountancy firms.

This can be seen clearly in the table below, which shows the Top 10 industries in the East of England that employ Chartered and certified accountants. Although the vast majority are employed in the Accounting, bookkeeping and auditing activities; tax consultancy sector, there are a number of other industries that also employ this occupation. In other words, the market for Chartered and certified accountants is actually much bigger and broader than simply accountancy firms.

1

How to Guides4 | Three Steps to Maximising Your Degree Apprenticeship Offer

IndustryProjected Change

(2017 – 2022)% of Occupation

in Industry

Accounting, bookkeeping and auditing activities; tax consultancy 732 45.4%

Public administration and defence; compulsory social security 81 4.3%

Activities of head offices 64 3.0%

Business and other management consultancy activities 23 2.9%

Activities auxiliary to financial services and insurance activities -6 2.5%

Temporary employment agency activities 31 2.0%

Sale of cars and light motor vehicles 10 1.3%

Financial service activities, except insurance and pension funding -25 1.3%

Other research & experimental development on natural sciences & engineering 29 1.1%

Combined facilities support activities 26 1.1%

Evaluate Your Best Opportunities

In addition to identifying new industries and employers for your existing Degree Apprenticeships, as shown in Step 1, it is almost certainly the case that your existing course portfolio contains a good many courses which could potentially be converted into Degree Apprenticeships. The purpose of this step is to show you how LMI can be used to identify these.

In considering the Degree Apprenticeship potential that might exist in your current course portfolio, there are three big challenges that need addressing:

● Firstly, you need to understand how current apprenticeship standards relate to occupation demand● Secondly, you then need to be able to establish which of these occupations are degree-level● Thirdly, you then need to be able to identify the demand in your region for these occupations, and

which industries are employing them.

The good news is that we have already dealt with all these challenges. Firstly, we have mapped all current apprenticeship standards to their related occupations. Secondly, we have developed a methodology which enables us to identify the educational levels of each occupation, as a proportion of the total number of people working in it. This means that by looking at those occupations with a high proportion of employees at the higher education levels, we can identify which standards could be converted to Degree Apprenticeships. And then thirdly, as we have already demonstrated in Step 1, our insight allows us to identify both occupation demand in a region, and also the industries which employ those jobs.

For instance, let’s once again imagine a university in the East of England with a course portfolio that is strong in the areas of digital and finance/business. The table below shows a couple of current apprenticeship standards in these sectors – Cyber intrusion analyst and Relationship manager (banking). As you can see, these standards have been mapped to related occupations, followed by the percentage of these six occupations which are Level 4 and above, and therefore have Degree Apprenticeship potential. And finally, we have also showed the demand for each of these occupations in the East of England, expressed in terms of annual openings.

What is clear from the table, is that there is a good amount of demand for these occupations. In turn, this suggests that there may well be a viable opportunity for the university to convert some of their existing related courses into Degree Apprenticeships. At the very least, the potential is worth investigating.

2

How to Guides Three Steps to Maximising Your Degree Apprenticeship Offer | 5

Apprenticeship standard

Occupations to which thestandard relates

% of occupation which is Level 4+

AnnualOpenings

Cyber intrusion analyst

Information technology and telecommunications professionals 72.1% 646

Programmers and software development professionals 80.5% 946

Web design and development professionals 78.4% 200

Relationship Manager (banking)

Finance and investment analysts and advisers 66.2% 467

Financial accounts managers 53.1% 520

Sales accounts and business development managers 59.1% 2,017

Let the Market Lead3Implementing Step 1 will give you the opportunity to expand your existing Degree Apprenticeships, whilst Step 2 takes this further and enables you to look at the potential for converting current courses to Degree Apprenticeships. But what is crucial to note about these steps is that because they are supply led – that is, they are driven by what your university currently offers – they can’t unlock your full Degree Apprenticeship potential. To achieve this, and to really be at the cutting edge of Degree Apprenticeships, you need to start with labour market demand.

Again, we can use the example of the East of England, but this time instead of starting with an existing Degree Apprenticeship, or an existing apprenticeship standard, we can start with scanning the labour market in the area to identify demand.

For instance, the following graphic shows the Top 10 Level 4 and above occupations in the region according to the number of annual openings projected over the next five years. What is more, using the mapping of the standards that we have already done, we have colour coded these occupations to show which ones relate to one apprenticeship standard, which ones relate to two, and which ones relate to three or more standards:

How to Guides6 | Three Steps to Maximising Your Degree Apprenticeship Offer

TOP 10 LEVEL 4+ ANNUAL OPENINGS IN EAST OF ENGLAND AND THEIR DEGREE APPRENTICESHIP POTENTIAL

1 2 3+Number of apprenticeship standards to which the occupation relates

Nurses

Production managers and directors in manufacturing

Sales accounts and business development managers

Programmers and software development professionals

Primary and nursery education teaching professionals

Financial managers and directors

Secondary education teaching professionals

Medical practitioners

Chartered and certified accountants

Human resources and industrial relations officers

0 500 1,000 1,500 2,000 2,500

2,661 Openings

2,017 Openings

1,735 Openings

1,691 Openings

1,132 Openings

967 Openings

946 Openings

915 Openings

915 Openings

872 Openings

Identifying industries

Having identified the Top 10 Level 4+ occupations in the East of England and having established that each of them relates to at least one existing apprenticeship standard and therefore could potentially be offered as a Degree Apprenticeship, what we can now do – as mentioned in Step 1 – is to identify the industries to which these occupations relate.

For example, if we take Production managers and directors in manufacturing, which has around 967 openings per year in the East of England, we can identify the industries which employ this occupation. The graphic below shows this, looking at the Top 5 industries that employ this occupation in the region, in terms of projected growth over the next few years:

How to Guides Three Steps to Maximising Your Degree Apprenticeship Offer | 7

This is of course just one among many examples that could be used. What it does demonstrate, though, is that by beginning with demand for higher level occupations in a regional labour market, understanding which of them relate to existing apprenticeship standards, and then identifying the industries which employ those occupations, a university can begin to get a far broader sense of the real Degree Apprenticeship potential that exists in their area. In addition, our data can then be used to identify employers in each of these industries, giving the institution not only a general sense of the occupations and industries that might be good to target, but also the actual employers themselves.

In Summary

What we have described throughout this short guide is a pathway that a university can take for expanding its existing Degree Apprenticeship offer, exploring opportunities within its current course portfolio and – for the really ambitious university – starting with the labour market to really open up a whole new range of possibilities. Following any of these pathways will not only help you to maximise your Degree Apprenticeship offer, but will in turn enable you to address the skills misalignment mentioned in the Foreword, and to know that you really are addressing social mobility and taking your place as a key driver of regional growth.

Construction of residential and non-residential buildings

s 57n 243

Plumbing, heat and air-conditioning

installation

s 67n 473

Wholesale of other machinery and equipment

s 40n 666

Other specialised

construction activities n.e.c.

s 38n 209

Manufacture of medical and

dental instruments and supplies

s 38n 198

TOP 5 INDUSTRIES EMPLOYING PRODUCTION MANAGERS AND DIRECTORS IN MANUFACTURING IN THE EAST OF ENGLAND

Key

s Growth of Production managers and directors in manufacturing in each industry (2017-2022)n Number of Production managers and directors in manufacturing in each industry in 2017

The Challenge of Degree Apprenticeships

Successfully unlocking your Degree Apprenticeship potential requires a good understanding of employer demand and the ability

to map it to current and potential provision.

Our aim is to give you the insight to help you identify which Degree Apprenticeships and employers you should prioritise

in your planning and engagement.

Let’s Talk

We’d love to hear about how you are attempting to maximise your Degree Apprenticeship potential and whether our insight might

be able to help. Contact us and we will:

Listen

We’ll listen to the specific challenges you are facing around the Degree Apprenticeship agenda

Discuss

We’ll talk you through a solution and show how it can help you understand which are your best opportunities.

Deliver

We’ll deliver a soution and provide ongoing support as you seek to use our solution to maximise your offer.

b E

Contact us now

Andy Durman, Managing Director, Emsi UKa andyd@economicmodelling.co.uk

07720 641 651B www.economicmodelling.co.uk