Fresh talent, real impact: why apprenticeships work in HR
The Human Resources (HR) team at Newbury College, headed by Maria Wall, made a deliberate decision to recruit an apprentice, both to bring in new talent and to strengthen team capacity.
“The reason for that was that we want to bring in fresh talent to the team. Bringing in someone through an apprenticeship is a really good way of doing that. It also gave us the opportunity to have more resources within the team, that adds to the roles the team do.”
Maria highlights how quickly an apprentice can develop through structured training, translating into real responsibility at work, and as they took on tasks independently, it freed up time for the rest of the HR team to focus on specialist work.
“[The apprentice] was able to develop their knowledge and skills quite quickly through the apprenticeship. That meant that we were able to give them work responsibilities quite quickly. Where we could give some additional responsibilities to [the apprentice] to run independently with, it freed up a lot of time across the rest of the team. That allowed us to do some of our more specialist duties.”
Maria also emphasises the value of a new perspective, particularly around digital ways of working.
“[The apprentice] has brought in a completely fresh approach with the way that they look at things. [They have] come from a new generation of the workforce, and that fresh outlook… has meant that we’ve been able to re-look at how we approach some of our processes.”
Maria is clear that bringing an apprentice into HR is positive, but it requires mindful support, especially around confidentiality and wellbeing-related issues.
“We have had to be mindful of quite a few things. For example, the confidential information that they’re seeing. It might be the first time in a young person’s life where they’ve had the responsibility of seeing, and being responsible for, quite confidential information. The types of things that come up are often to do with someone’s health or their wellbeing. It’s upskilling someone to be able to handle that sensitively and appropriately, when they have probably never dealt with things like that in a professional capacity before.”
Maria values the structured support and communication that sits around the apprenticeship, particularly the relationship with the Development Coach.
“Working with the apprenticeship team, we’ve had a really good opportunity to understand how [the apprentice is] doing. We’ve had a lot of feedback and a lot of communication. There’s been quite a lot of pieces of work that [the apprentice] has done that I have had to read through and verify. That’s been really lovely, to see the things that [they’re] learning and that [they’re] able to apply to the apprenticeship itself.”
For Maria, one of the biggest benefits is how taking on an apprentice encourages the whole team to reflect and improve.
“Bringing an apprentice in can sometimes be a completely new concept, a new world, and [the Apprenticeship team at] Newbury College have really helped guide us through that. It’s brought such a fresh approach and a new way of looking at things. It’s encouraged us as a team to really review how we do things and why we do things. When you’re teaching someone it for the first time, it gets you to look at it in a different way. We’ve really benefited from improving the ways that we work in the team.”