Bridging the Construction Skills Gap with Degree Apprenticeships
A wise person once observed ‘all problems are soluble with money’ and to-date that certainly seems to be how the problem, presented by a shortage of well-trained Surveyors in the construction industry, has been dealt with. This has driven an increasingly competitive marketplace for the recruitment and retention of Chartered Surveyors and driven increased costs for employers to hire and keep hold of appropriate staff.
However, this might be about to start changing, thanks to the introduction of Degree Apprenticeships and in particular the Chartered Surveyor Degree Apprenticeship available at Anglia Ruskin University. Based on their perennially popular part-time degree course this Degree Apprenticeship enables firms to train both Building and Quantity Surveyors in-house, with a programme that not only gives successful apprentices a BSc honours degree but also sees them go through the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Assessment of Professional Competence, enabling them to become a members of the RICS (something that many folk spend an additional 2 years after their degree to achieve).
The course can be accessed by both small and large firms as support is available for both those who pay the Apprenticeship Levy (i.e. those with a wage bill in excess of £3m per year) and also smaller firms, who are eligible for generous government funding in the form of ‘Co-investment’, this means that they only have to pay 10% of the cost of the course with the government footing the bill for the other 90%.
Marc Rothera, from Anglia Ruskin University’s Degrees at Work team told the ESB:
“We’ve already had an amazing take up of this opportunity by firms across Essex and beyond. As well as the course itself, we provide them with assistance to recruit suitable candidates for an apprenticeship and support and guide them through the process of engaging with Degree Apprenticeships more generally. Although it’s hard to recruit graduate surveyors there is a buoyant market for folk who wish to train through a Degree Apprenticeship and many vacancies that I’ve helped list for local employers have had to be closed early due to the volume of responses they delivered!
That said I’m still conscious that there are a number of employers out there who may not yet have heard about this opportunity or realised what a great value it represents, so we’re using this National Apprenticeship Week as a chance to try and spread the word even further.
In the construction sector, as well as the Chartered Surveyor programme we also have Civil Engineering Degree Apprenticeship which takes candidates through to their degree as well as Incorporated Engineer status (IEng) with the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE).”
If you’d like to know more about these courses, or the other dozen or so Degree Apprenticeship programmes that Anglia Ruskin have up and running (spanning Surveying to Bioinformatics) you can contact degreesatwork@anglia.ac.uk and Marc will be able to share all the necessary information with you and help you set up a high quality programme that will help ensure that you have the right staff, with the right skills at the right time.
Useful Links:
www.anglia.ac.uk/degreeapprenticeships
https://www.instituteforapprenticeships.org/apprenticeship-standards/chartered-surveyor-degree/
(Article contributed by Anglia Ruskin Univeristy)