For three of the 12 employers, the volume of graduate vacancies is set to increase alongside a growth in degree apprenticeships. For these employers, continuing recovery from the recent economic downturn coupled with an ageing workforce (“60% of our workforce is now over 50”) are combining to ensure they have a business need for increasing numbers of graduates alongside new degree apprentices. Even here, where the volume of graduate vacancies is maintained or increased, the relative proportion of degree apprentices to graduates is increasing.
Impact on placements and internships Work experience, in the form of placements and internships, plays a key role in enhancing graduate employability as highlighted in previous NCUB research. More and more universities are looking to offer assessed work experience opportunities to students as part of their undergraduate study. In this context, concern has been expressed about the advent of the Apprenticeship Levy and its potential to act as a disincentive to forms of talent development such as placements whose costs employers cannot recoup through the Levy. Through this research, we sought to establish how demand for placements and internships was holding up among employers using DAs. In contrast to the effect on graduate recruitment, there is as yet little evidence to suggest that increasing degree apprenticeships is leading to a reduction in other forms of work experience. None of the employers interviewed are planning to reduce the volume of placements or internships, even where the overall number of graduate vacancies may be falling. One employer, which offers over 300 undergraduate placements annually, has no plans to decrease these at present stating that these placements provide value in their own right.
“They are valued. It’s like a one-year interview. One of the challenges is supervisory capacity because the person gets good training. (…) In R&D we have 12-month industrial placements but we can’t go any shorter than that, because of the training it needs. By the time we have trained them over the summer when they are able to do something that has value to us, they have to go back to university.”
Another employer, which currently offers 15 summer internships and 15 year-long placements, also intends to maintain the volume of placements it offers despite reducing its graduate intake quite significantly:
“We have 3-month summer placements and 12-month internships. And if they are successful they are pipelined to our graduate programme. The numbers have roughly remained the same. There is always going to be a need for those people because we hope for them to go to our graduate programmes. Unless our graduate numbers were to dip very, very low.”
But as well as playing a valuable role in the talent pipeline, employers recognised that placements and internships can also be an effective way to enhance company brand and reputation within the sector:
“[It is] also about our brand and network – the [interns graduate and] go into industry and talk about their good experiences with us.”
Some employers even plan to offer more placements, prompted at least in part by the Levy. For one employer, which has a summer internship scheme but has not traditionally offered student placements, the introduction of
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